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The “Transgressive Art” Racket
Anti Trump billboard erected in Phoenix.
Artist Karen Fiorito is a hero, speaking truth to power. She spent 30 minutes in Photoshop creating a low-grade meme combining Trump, mushroom clouds, and dollar signs that looked like swastikas. She then conned a alternative art gallery to slap it on a billboard in Phoenix.
“So this happened today,” she said on Facebook. “Still awaiting the backlash, death threats and the like.” The media jumped on the amateur cut-and-paste job and made it go viral.
Passers-by praised Fiorito’s courage. “We just drove up coming to eat pizza and got out to look out at it,” Shawneece Durham told the local newspaper. “It’s kind of deep. It speaks volumes to what’s going on.”
Ruben Gonzalez added, “I think the message is, resist. It says ‘money-hungry world domination.'” That’s weird. To me it says, “I just downloaded the 30-day free trial of Photoshop Elements; lemme open Google Image Search.”
Of course, within days, Fiorina claimed martyrdom since people gave her the “backlash, death threats and the like” that she predicted.
Now I’m not offended by the subject of the art, but its banality. Open any social media app and you see uninspired memes of Trump as a Nazi. A few months ago, it was Obama and ISIS flags. They’re both tired and uninteresting. Slapping it on a billboard does not make it great art. But since Fiorito was being made a hero, I flipped the script in an op-ed for the Arizona Republic.
I’m a transgressive artist. I created a billboard with Obama’s glowering face in the middle, mushroom clouds on either side of it, and ISIS flags on the far ends. Really makes you think.
Sure, my art installation might not sound revolutionary, but check this out: I drew clown faces in the mushroom clouds and replaced the Arabic script of the flags with swastika-looking dollar signs. Because money is bad.
The design took less than 20 minutes to slap together in Photoshop, but the purpose of art isn’t to demonstrate skill. It’s to provoke a reaction…
For some reason, people missed my nuanced message of solidarity and hope. Mobs on social media are calling me a Nazi and a devil worshiper. I’ve stopped checking Facebook and Twitter because of all the death threats. Even the businesses under the billboards are receiving threats. Which is weird because social media is usually so reasonable and polite.
The backlash is sad, but it’s hardly new territory for a transgressive artist like myself. Some people just can’t handle thoughtful political critiques…
Obvious satire, but fans of the anti-Trump billboard were offended by my mythical design. From the news site’s comments section:
- “You’re straining awfully hard to paint yourself as a victim, Mr. Snowflake Edgelord.”
- “Your Obama poster way back in the ’90s generated what, angry letters to the paper? Perhaps a post on MySpace”
- “I remember when the John Birch Society ran menacing ads in the Dallas Morning News… in the days before John Kennedy was assassinated. Congratulations to Gabriel and the wicked AHs hate mongers like him and their exercise of free speech.”
Another great thing about Ricochet: You don’t need a blaring “this is satire” trigger warning before you post a story.
Published in General
People have way too much time on their hands – the rest of us have to work for a living. Hope she can pay her bills but she’s probably in her parent’s basement.
I’m just so, so, happy that a lot of people expressed their hatred of this crap.
Idk. Too subtle?
Mr. Gabriel, I respect your work as a great artist. It was a truly courageous act of social justice that you took upon yourself. We as artists must fight the powers that be in order to transform society into a tolerant and non-violent utopia where government funding will take care of our everyday needs. Now we must crush the #%&_!@+#! Conservative Racists and send them all to hell!
Regards,
Steven
The truth is never subtle.
Having a husband in the serious art business and seeing how much actual work is involved, having someone like this call herself an “artist” is downright offensive.
Here’s a book for you: The $12 million stuffed shark. It’s about the economics of the modern “art” world and is positively infuriating.
Edit: speaking of said husband, that’s him in comment 4! Writing at the same time from upstairs. Great minds….
You just know there are people who saw it and went home to open/google the “Weekend” section looking for show times.
You’ll no doubt be hearing from the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect. They’ll demand an apology just like they did when Tim Allen had the temerity to say the following: “you’ve got to be real careful around here or you’ll get beat up … If you don’t believe what everybody believes, this is like thirties Germany.”
Clearly out of line.
Well, that settles it! She’s destroyed Trump!
I love this:
“God knows I’m not going to use my own money. Because money is bad.”
You should add poop to your work. Then you might get a NEA grant.
But she had to have spent All Night on her stomach in an empty factory coloring that in with Sharpies! I’m impressed.
After discussing this thread with my beautiful wife ( see insightful comment #6), I am still pondering the question “Why is it that Liberals are way more likely to be supportive of transgressive art and just plain weird art in general than are Conservatives?” I have a working, but incomplete theory, that Liberals are more interested in sending a message than they are concerned about looking at beauty. Any thoughts out there?
Liberals wouldn’t know beauty if you intaglioed it on a baseball bat and had Roger Scruton beat them over the head with it.
I’ve seen a couple “RESIST” campaign billboards around my area. I considered taking a picture to show others. Also a billboard apparently showing something about conservatives being anti-science & highlighting environmentalism. But those were not nearly this over the top.
I like how she cribbed the clown mushroom cloud that was originally an ad for the video game, Twisted Metal.
I think that’s a big part of it. I also think they are generally joyless and want to spread their joylessness around.
A true Liberal isn’t happy until everybody is equally miserable.
“Transgressive”. Boy how I hate that term of self-congratulatory canned smugness in the art world. I encountered that word so often during a Contemporary Art class in grad school that, if I had concocted a drinking game based on downing a shot with each mention of that word, I would have had to withdraw from the class to enter rehab.
Amusingly, another favorite word was “appropriation”. It was a term proudly bandied about as postmodern artists explored the limits of what can be considered original or authentic. Sherry Levine famously took photos of photos as a statement about transgressive appropriation or . . . something.
So, congratulations to you, Karen Fiorito. Transgressive work. Appropriation too. Woo! And now all the cool kids will like you.
I was genuinely surprised to do a cursory Google image search and not easily find any similar dollar swastika images dated before this past week.
However, it is possible to find pictures of stylish “dollazi” merchandise that have been posted in the past five days. T-shirts. Leggings. Device cases… What I’m wondering right now is, who’d buy this stuff? Even to wear ironically.
And it’s being sold with a buncha other swastika-covered merchandise whose intent is (I think) anti-Nazi. But it’s confusing, since whether it should be interpreted as pro- or anti- would seem to depend on the parity of the irony level you’re willing to stop at.
Remember, all you good little lefty artists: transgressive art only works in one direction.
The whole point of leftism/progressivism is to destroy existing standards, which, at the lowest level, means sticking your thumb in the eye of any authority: religion, the rich, your parents, etc. Transgressivism is at the core of their whole outlook.
The problem for them occurs when they become the new authority and then don’t understand how to still be skeptical and subversive about their own worldview.
Hey Percival, what a great story in that link you posted! I was totally unaware of it even though both my mother and father went to the School of the Chicago Art Institute where they met back in the 1940’s. (It was a much different place back then)
That story was one of those Lefty vs. Lefty conflicts where their deeply self-contradictory values butt-up against one another. As a Conservative, I can only sit back and enjoy the entertainment!
I think you are on to something here. In a similar way, the Clintons, and especially Obama, had a difficult time transforming into “The Establishment” when they were so used to fighting “The Establishment” in their formative years. The Limbaugh Doctrine posits that Obama’s followers did not comprehend him as actually leading the country, but instead as fighting against “The Establishment,” even though he was the Grand Poohbah.
We only have to look 90 miles south of Florida to see what it looks like when Leftists topple the “Man” and themselves become the Establishment. Turns out – the Leftists are just as oppressive as the Man they topple.
Now that’s a piece of “performance art” that I’d even pay to see.
I think the good Comrade deserves one of these…
So what, they screwed it into your chest?
Commie’s love their medals.