If everyone sees your dickpic hanging in a gallery except you is it art?
October 30, 2014 1:18 AM Subscribe
In light of Dries Verhoeven's public art of his Grindr interactions (since cancelled), Arne Svenson's show, "The Neighbors" (previously) and Future Femme's piece, Show Me More: A collection of DickPix, and amid questions of legality and ethics, the Guardian examines art, consent and privacy.
The main link is the last one, right?
My first thought was the celebrity hack, and they mention it, because apparently some artist was going to exhibit those photos?!? Like their his art?
Generally speaking, I think "photography is not a crime" should always be our first principle. But it's a defeasible principle, and you shouldn't be able to do some things (outing gay men is art now?!?) without getting punched in the face sometimes.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:43 AM on October 30, 2014
My first thought was the celebrity hack, and they mention it, because apparently some artist was going to exhibit those photos?!? Like their his art?
Generally speaking, I think "photography is not a crime" should always be our first principle. But it's a defeasible principle, and you shouldn't be able to do some things (outing gay men is art now?!?) without getting punched in the face sometimes.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:43 AM on October 30, 2014
Person solicits explicit images under false pretenses? I would feel pretty damn violated by that. Kinda... sex-crimey.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:45 AM on October 30, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:45 AM on October 30, 2014 [4 favorites]
I'd say fuck that guy but I'm pretty sure everyone is going to have him blocked on Grindr now so.
But seriously though, fuck that guy. It's a starkly unethical and shitty thing to do. Like with this guy, the fact that you can throw together some wanky statement about "pushing boundaries" doesn't give you ehtical free rein to push other people's boundaries to whatever extent you want and in in such invasive, callous, arrogant ways. To justify something artistically is not the only way that you need to justify it.
In conclusion, fuck that guy.
posted by Drexen at 5:35 AM on October 30, 2014 [2 favorites]
But seriously though, fuck that guy. It's a starkly unethical and shitty thing to do. Like with this guy, the fact that you can throw together some wanky statement about "pushing boundaries" doesn't give you ehtical free rein to push other people's boundaries to whatever extent you want and in in such invasive, callous, arrogant ways. To justify something artistically is not the only way that you need to justify it.
In conclusion, fuck that guy.
posted by Drexen at 5:35 AM on October 30, 2014 [2 favorites]
That shit blew up in Berlin a couple of weeks back. I live here, am a grindr user and could have been exposed here against my will as well, and it made me furious.
If I found out that he was using my chat for his stupid project I would have torn this place up. Those lazy ass excuses to be an inconsiderate asshole in the pretense of 'art' have to go away. It's like the guys youtubing themselves insulting black people in a racist way and then trying to get away with it saying it was just a 'prank'.
You're not funny or thought provoking, you're just an ass.
posted by ts;dr at 6:57 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
If I found out that he was using my chat for his stupid project I would have torn this place up. Those lazy ass excuses to be an inconsiderate asshole in the pretense of 'art' have to go away. It's like the guys youtubing themselves insulting black people in a racist way and then trying to get away with it saying it was just a 'prank'.
You're not funny or thought provoking, you're just an ass.
posted by ts;dr at 6:57 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
I'm partially based in Berlin and sorta-kinda on Grindr, but ironically I was living in NL when this happened. Nonetheless, this blew up my social media feeds when it was first unfolding in Berlin. Also, I happen to do ethnographic research in nightlife scenes where sexuality is prominent and often queer, so the explanatory text for Verhoeven's project really struck a chord with me (in a negative way). Around the time that the debate was at its peak, this is what I wrote about it on one of many heated Facebook threads:
---------------
I think Ashkan Sepahvand put it best when he highlighted the artist's failure to *think* his project through before actually putting it into practice. It's poorly thought out at best and cynically exploitative at worst. Reading the initial artist statement is like reading a textbook example of narcissistic projection, where his own toxic relationship to Grindr is projected on to all of the other users, who are then made to pay for his dissatisfaction with the app. He perpetuates pathologizing and ultimately homophobic cultural tropes by focusing on the "tragic" homosexuals of Grindr, failing to take into consideration the wider ecology of social media apps (Facebook, Tindr, OK Cupid, etc.) where narcissistic self-fashioning and sexual masquerade are also at work. He fails to situate his project in a much longer history of cruising and public sex, and thus fails to see the historical resonances between his project and police/state/vigilante strategies of luring queer men to violent ends; he doesn't even have to look that far back in history, considering that the "honeypot" strategy is still in use today (e.g., the Russian neo-nazi videos of gay-bashing, humiliation, and torture). His notions of "public" and "private" are woefully simplistic for someone who claims to be a conceptual artist working on issues of sexuality—especially considering that Eve K. Sedgwick wrote "The Epistemology of the Closet" nearly 30 years ago. He also employs a simplistic "gay lib" notion of visibility politics, without considering the political stakes of invisibility as a strategy for survival under heteronormative regimes. Historically, a lot of gay sexual sociability has entailed risk because it has been forced to take place in the interstices between recognized private and public spaces, and so it's ethically questionable to be using that risk for personal ("artistic") gain.
He and some of his defenders have trotted out the argument that "well if they use Grindr they should've known what they were getting into," which has all sorts of moralizing and erotophobic "you deserve what you get" overtones. People use Grindr (and similar apps) for all sorts of reasons that are not reducible to a sort of game-theory "cost-benefit analysis" of sexual courtship under risk of exposure. Some of the snarkier responses also seem to assume that the people impacted by this project are privileged white-European gayboys who have little to lose but their pride, which ignores the diversity of life-circumstances and precarities of those who actually log into apps like Grindr in Berlin (or any city). The critics of Verhoven's critics that bemoan the "hysterical" "pearl-clutching" of those who oppose his project are resurrecting the Tone Argument (first identified in feminist debates, I think), where a claim of injustice is disregarded because the complaint was not articulated in a sufficiently polite/civil/docile way—which allows opponents to ignore the content of the complaint itself. When the debate shifts towards whether the person making the complaint is reliable, self-victimizing, over-reacting, over-emotional, rude, etc., the attention is pulled away from the problem at hand.
If we put aside all of these objections and even ignore the fact that it falls foul of German privacy laws in a variety of ways, the project is still profoundly unethical, and that is why many have called for it to end. The artist has accepted government grant funds and is supported by several artistic institutions, and yet his methodology violates ethical rules that apply to any project that makes use of human subjects. If an ethnographer, oral historian, sociologist, psychologist, etc. were to design a research project using these methods, their funding would be immediately withdrawn and they would likely be under investigation. Regardless of how "noble" or "brave" one may think their project is, that does not justify this sort of exploitation of unwitting (and unwilling) participants. It's also a fallacy that the unethical methods deployed here were somehow "necessary" to make this sort of critical intervention. There are lots of very politically-engaged queer artists out there who find ways to mount trenchant critiques of queer lives without harming/exploiting/humiliating their queer subjects in the process.
posted by LMGM at 7:56 AM on October 30, 2014 [8 favorites]
---------------
I think Ashkan Sepahvand put it best when he highlighted the artist's failure to *think* his project through before actually putting it into practice. It's poorly thought out at best and cynically exploitative at worst. Reading the initial artist statement is like reading a textbook example of narcissistic projection, where his own toxic relationship to Grindr is projected on to all of the other users, who are then made to pay for his dissatisfaction with the app. He perpetuates pathologizing and ultimately homophobic cultural tropes by focusing on the "tragic" homosexuals of Grindr, failing to take into consideration the wider ecology of social media apps (Facebook, Tindr, OK Cupid, etc.) where narcissistic self-fashioning and sexual masquerade are also at work. He fails to situate his project in a much longer history of cruising and public sex, and thus fails to see the historical resonances between his project and police/state/vigilante strategies of luring queer men to violent ends; he doesn't even have to look that far back in history, considering that the "honeypot" strategy is still in use today (e.g., the Russian neo-nazi videos of gay-bashing, humiliation, and torture). His notions of "public" and "private" are woefully simplistic for someone who claims to be a conceptual artist working on issues of sexuality—especially considering that Eve K. Sedgwick wrote "The Epistemology of the Closet" nearly 30 years ago. He also employs a simplistic "gay lib" notion of visibility politics, without considering the political stakes of invisibility as a strategy for survival under heteronormative regimes. Historically, a lot of gay sexual sociability has entailed risk because it has been forced to take place in the interstices between recognized private and public spaces, and so it's ethically questionable to be using that risk for personal ("artistic") gain.
He and some of his defenders have trotted out the argument that "well if they use Grindr they should've known what they were getting into," which has all sorts of moralizing and erotophobic "you deserve what you get" overtones. People use Grindr (and similar apps) for all sorts of reasons that are not reducible to a sort of game-theory "cost-benefit analysis" of sexual courtship under risk of exposure. Some of the snarkier responses also seem to assume that the people impacted by this project are privileged white-European gayboys who have little to lose but their pride, which ignores the diversity of life-circumstances and precarities of those who actually log into apps like Grindr in Berlin (or any city). The critics of Verhoven's critics that bemoan the "hysterical" "pearl-clutching" of those who oppose his project are resurrecting the Tone Argument (first identified in feminist debates, I think), where a claim of injustice is disregarded because the complaint was not articulated in a sufficiently polite/civil/docile way—which allows opponents to ignore the content of the complaint itself. When the debate shifts towards whether the person making the complaint is reliable, self-victimizing, over-reacting, over-emotional, rude, etc., the attention is pulled away from the problem at hand.
If we put aside all of these objections and even ignore the fact that it falls foul of German privacy laws in a variety of ways, the project is still profoundly unethical, and that is why many have called for it to end. The artist has accepted government grant funds and is supported by several artistic institutions, and yet his methodology violates ethical rules that apply to any project that makes use of human subjects. If an ethnographer, oral historian, sociologist, psychologist, etc. were to design a research project using these methods, their funding would be immediately withdrawn and they would likely be under investigation. Regardless of how "noble" or "brave" one may think their project is, that does not justify this sort of exploitation of unwitting (and unwilling) participants. It's also a fallacy that the unethical methods deployed here were somehow "necessary" to make this sort of critical intervention. There are lots of very politically-engaged queer artists out there who find ways to mount trenchant critiques of queer lives without harming/exploiting/humiliating their queer subjects in the process.
posted by LMGM at 7:56 AM on October 30, 2014 [8 favorites]
This reminds me of the reddit "creepshot" fiasco when people defending the subreddit were saying there's no problem because the women were in public so they have no expectation of privacy, and therefore it's totally cool to put up creepy pictures of their asses on the Internet for people to jerk off to without the women's consent.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:40 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Sangermaine at 8:40 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
This reminds me of the reddit "creepshot" fiasco when people defending the subreddit were saying there's no problem because the women were in public so they have no expectation of privacy, and therefore it's totally cool to put up creepy pictures of their asses on the Internet for people to jerk off to without the women's consent.
Well, yeah, the Future Femme version is explicitly meant as an inversion of this. Guess what - dudes got really mad when it was their pictures being exhibited!
posted by atoxyl at 12:23 PM on October 30, 2014
Well, yeah, the Future Femme version is explicitly meant as an inversion of this. Guess what - dudes got really mad when it was their pictures being exhibited!
posted by atoxyl at 12:23 PM on October 30, 2014
I don't see what the controversy is here: this is obviously wrong. Things don't become acceptable when they're art.
posted by koavf at 1:39 PM on October 30, 2014
posted by koavf at 1:39 PM on October 30, 2014
Beyond the privacy issue, isn't it copyright infringement?
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:07 PM on October 30, 2014
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:07 PM on October 30, 2014
Well, yeah, the Future Femme version is explicitly meant as an inversion of this. Guess what - dudes got really mad when it was their pictures being exhibited!
So... hooray?
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:02 AM on October 31, 2014
So... hooray?
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:02 AM on October 31, 2014
« Older Corpse pose | Age ain't nothing but a number Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
I notice that the second Guardian piece manages to illustrate itself with one picture of an naked and attractive young woman from the 1970s, and one picture of a beautiful celebrity, both of which are less related to the subject than other, less attractive, less sexy pictures they might have chosen. Is this journalism?
posted by alasdair at 2:36 AM on October 30, 2014 [1 favorite]