Cute is one of the most dangerous words...

September 25, 2016 4:00 PM

Is Amelia Ulman the first great Instagram artist?

The irony is that in using her appearance to reveal something about how we judge female strivers who too transparently use their looks to get ahead, Ulman shot her own career into overdrive.

From an interview at Interview magazine:

I was a librarian [at Central Saint Martins] and I always liked that way better than the internet. There's that chance [element]—you can just walk around and find something and it's not determined by your previous searches. That's why I sometimes find the internet very limiting. Everything starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller, whereas if you go to an analog place, like in a library, or if you travel somewhere, something will happen in front of you that will change your research, your direction. That's something I appreciate.

posted by hilaryjade (16 comments total)

In May, after Ulman and I said good-bye, I went to Café Gratitude, an upscale organic café where servers greet you by asking, "What are you grateful for today?"

hold me captain picard the cringe is too much
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:24 PM on September 25, 2016 [16 favorites]

Ulman appeared to shape-shift on social media from cute girly-girl to narcissistic sugar-baby

Is this the internet gif-ingenue equivalent of "I'm not gay because I only sleep with straight guys"?
posted by sammyo at 4:44 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

In addition to the greater themes, some of those images are really striking.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:54 PM on September 25, 2016

I'm totally naive when it comes to art, but that was a really interesting article, and she seems like a really interesting artist.
posted by teponaztli at 5:05 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

So like a new snake person cindy sherman? This looks awesome but the pictures dont load on my phone. Ironic!
posted by kittensofthenight at 5:09 PM on September 25, 2016

I especially liked the part where some guy told her to quit and "become his muse"

Silly girl, females don't get to have rich internal lives

Women exist only to enrich men's lives, didn't you realize

I'll be here, just washing my hands over and over and over
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:56 PM on September 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

It could be that the artist-bro was in on the joke? I read it that way, but I may have missed it!

This thing is a minefield, frankly, for an art museum visiting bro such as me, so it's one of those where you stand around and wait for someone to explain it all.

The bus thing though. Wasn't Frida Kahlo grievously injured in a public transport accident?
posted by notyou at 6:59 PM on September 25, 2016

Trolling is definitely an art.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:04 PM on September 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

i am so fucking old
posted by dersins at 7:53 PM on September 25, 2016 [6 favorites]

the metal pole Ulman uses to practice pole dancing, often to Bulgarian choral music

Le Mystère des Danseuses Bulgares
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:46 PM on September 25, 2016

Brilliant. I love it. It's like an online play with the audience encouraged to boo and hiss and cheer.

Women are encouraged to temper their personalities and create personas through behavior, fashion and hair/ grooming and (most importantly) the way they act in front of other people. Especially men. They are encouraged by family, by women's magazines, by religion and by the whole self help genre. Be more sexual! Be more assertive! Be more adult! Be more modest! Play hard to get! Embrace hook ups! I love that she cycled through some of the most obvious tropes so fast and everyone fell for it.
posted by fshgrl at 9:22 PM on September 25, 2016 [5 favorites]

Oh wow, this really struck me. I can't stop looking at her images. I'm not quite sure what to think but they are indeed unsettling in a really interesting way.

Her "Excellences & Perfections" series kind of reminds me of those Elana Ferrante novel covers. Both do this kind of vulgar performance of femininity that elicits reactions which display the sexism in the art and literary worlds.
posted by lunasol at 12:45 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

> I love that she cycled through some of the most obvious tropes so fast and everyone fell for it.

Viewing somebody's Tumblr or Instagram history usually means scrolling through updates with a sense of timelessness. The datestamps are often obfuscated when the layout makes them visible at all -- many Tumblr templates don't display them, Instagram only shows it if you click each image individually and look for the faint grey age-of-post timestamp in the upper right, that looks like "5h" or "12d". 100 updates over a week or over a year can look the same, and the viewer tends to impose their own sense of chronology over what they see when there's no evidence to contradict it. Liveblogging platforms like these (or Facebook, or Twitter) are, in some ways, designed to be as ahistorical as possible: Anything older than the most recent few posts are treated as too stale to be worth consideration, even including begrudging a visible note that helps fix the update in time.

I don't have much insight into what people who were watching these updates in real time thought. But maybe if Ulman is updating only every other day or so there's not enough activity for followers to develop a sense of continuity; updates look significant enough to solicit a sociable response but not necessarily enough for people to maintain a clear, sustained narrative of her progress in their heads.
posted by ardgedee at 4:39 AM on September 26, 2016

Yet Kaycee was a terrible horrible person ?

(I guess everyone is a dog on the internet, but if you do it right, where the definition of right is always shifting sand .. )
posted by k5.user at 8:34 AM on September 26, 2016

What dersins said. Deft manipulation of a medium I'm dimly aware of let alone understand. It unmoors me with this Gibsonian unease that gives me the impression every possible thing is accelerating pedal to the floor to an end I may not even notice when it shows up. I need to lie down.
posted by quite unimportant at 1:35 PM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I went to Café Gratitude, an upscale organic café where servers greet you by asking, "What are you grateful for today?"

This is a real thing. The rest is a substantial and praiseworthy (?) effort of trolling, but Cafe Gratitude servers will actually ask you this. And all their dish names are names are responses: 'I am fulfilled' (a salad), 'I am thriving' (quinoa porridge with fruit) etc. They also rip off their employees and force them to go to expensive training classes.

Their chocolate mousse is pretty good, though.

I feel Amelia's efforts here fill a much needed gap between genuine social commentary and a nihilistic worldview of audience as consumer to be pandered to.
posted by ananci at 1:49 PM on September 27, 2016