World's most popular painter sent his followers after me because of my review
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
This is completely false. I might even say that it is wishful thinking. Some kind of "long arc of history bends towards justice" make-believe.
The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue. It transforms an inactive/passive audience into an active participant in a movement. I would bet many of the people attacking this art critic wrote their first comment in defense of this artist. He subtly said "I need your help" and his audience reacted.
The art critic noted the manufactured TikTok videos, obviously planned by a media savvy PR team. Perhaps he isn't cynical enough to believe it, but this sustained and coordinated attack against him may well have been planned and orchestrated.
And that could hurt his bottom line. People there for the drama may not be paying customers. They may essentially be internet trolls.
> In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all.
edit: oops I see in your other comment you quoted that part!
What's more amazing to me is that the artist doesn't even seem to understand what a critic _does_ - like what is the critic doing? He's not "gatekeeping" (what gate? the artist is famous, getting rich, and has a gallery show!) and not jealous or a 'hater'.
Like I understand that artists traditionally dislike critics, for obvious reasons, but usually they know the purpose of criticism. As the author says he is trying to both put the art in context of other art and to consider how social media figures into the art.
That's the magic of the "attention economy" - the people that get emotionally invested in the dramas surrounding you are better than "paying customers", because they check their brains out and switch to ingroup/outgroup mode - at which point you can sell them absolutely anything whatsoever. In contrast, paying customers are just annoying - they have opinions, and aren't going to give your person the time and sustained attention - the kind of following that both you and the platform you're on can effectively monetize through friction (i.e. continued ad exposure).
Right now this seems to be the generic recipe for printing money on social media:
1. Become an influencer and work at it until existing influencers treat you as one of their own;
2. Start engaging in the semi-regular, petty, totally not scripted fights with your fellow influencers;
3. Sign a deal for putting your name on some random bullshit commodity product, like idk. eyeliners or perfumes or makeup kits, and watch money roll in.
4. Optional: bonus points if you can turn that deal info a story of two influencers having a falling out over who gets paid for the bullshit product from point 3. You can milk that kind of thing for years, all the while selling your audience the same or different flavor of bullshit with your name on it.
I concur. Anecdotally, I see lots of content from TikTok creators replying to negative comments. At first I wondered why they seemed to be only amplifying negative responses instead of their fans, and then it hit me - those were the videos that did well (i.e. those videos got the most likes, views, shares). Showcasing a "hater comment" turns on the video viewers' tribal instinct. We want to side with the creator, to show the hater their place.
Much more likely is that after a few cycles those still involved have made it part of their identity.
That is not so. Donald Trump followers are not a static set. DT does lose and gain followers.
What might be true that some persona, no matter how disagreeable, will always have some followers.
Convicted criminals get love letters from strange women and all that.
If this artist continues in that way, most of his followers will come to consist only of people who are attracted by his obnoxious personality, without any connection to the works he creates. In the eyes of the world at large, he will just be that kitch-producing wanker with the idiot followers.
It's either that he's very ignorant to how the internet works, or he has to say this for his own PR reason.
> The contrary is almost certainly true
You seem to be contradicting yourself.
I find it fascinating that you can look at the long arc of the moral universe and see it any other way. The only reason I can think of is that you’re staring at just the last few decades trying to discern a pattern, or even looking for the bend itself in the present. But if you take a step back and look at all of human history (and what we know about pre-history), how can you see it any other way?
However, it is another thing to apply a supposed multi-generational trend, one that requires us to "step back" as you say, to the tactics of an individual playing the social media game. It's like the difference between the tide and an individual wave in the middle of the ocean.
World history just tends to be a bit more complicated than that and looking at history as a combination of "overcoming monarchy", "increased technical complexity" and "line goes up" might leave you with a limited view feeding into your pre-existing biases.
I didn't know who the artist in question was before today, but now I've at least heard of them, so it appears to be working.
I do believe that sometimes these kind of antagonistic partnerships could arise spontaneously. For example, the art critic may find his own tribe standing up for him. That may goad him into looking for a similar reaction from other art influencers in an attempt to forward his own career. However, that doesn't require coordination between them or conspiracy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel_(professional_wrestling)
HN is (very deliberately) my only social media other than what my friends send me.
I am not saying anything you don't already know by saying that parasocial relationships are so evil because they get the time that formerly would have gone into your real human relationships but don't give you anywhere near the payoff.
In many ways the genie is out of the bottle/Pandora's box is open but the attention economy might just be the most insidious technology ever invented.
How empty are these people attacking the author?
I do not know whether TV show plots belong in this list, but they might.
Just imagine you could take your SO to lunch or dinner for free*!
* requires 1000 2 minute ad breaks
I’ve seen Mastodon and Tumblr users post, “I’m sick of people saying I should spend time with my neighbors. They’re probably TERFs/MAGA/whatever.” (There may be analogues mutatis mutanda on other sites, I don’t know firsthand.) You’ll have a hard time convincing people that social walling-off is a bad thing when they have elevated it to a virtue.
This isn't entirely wrong-headed though, I think it's just a symptom of a society that's become too divided. If you want a healthy community of people living together in one place, they need to all share a common culture and ethical framework. In America these days, that just isn't the case, and you can't expect people to be buddies with people who happen to live close by, but have diametrically-opposed viewpoints and even view them as evil (for instance, the neighbor is a MAGA person and the person in question is homosexual).
Once you take on a person or idea as part of your core, any attack upon that person or idea becomes a VERY personal attack upon you, and the response is visceral and irrational (I suspect that it actually suppresses the higher functions of the brain). I've watched so many people come apart at the seams when one of their sacred cows were attacked, even becoming violent in some cases.
The only difference nowadays is the speed with which people can reach this level of reveredness.
Good point. Religion is the ultimate parasocia relationship.
edit: spelling
There is one other difference too: there's now an entire economy built around getting people to "this level of reveredness" for someone - doesn't matter who or why, the specific person or idea are not the point - and then pitting those someones against each other in dramas that are totally genuine and not at all unscripted. The point is to trigger and maintain this "visceral and irrational" response, because while in this state, the followers will happily buy pretty much any kind of high-margin, low-value garbage their favored online persona endorses, and they'll even feel good about it. It's a money printed machine.
I mean, it's one thing when people got angry over someone insulting the Pope, or the prophet Muhammad. It's different when you imagine Pope and prophet Muhammad were two besties, pitting their followers against each other, so they can sell them merch, raking in amounts of money they could've never get on their own. The latter is what's happening today, at scale.
> "What if he was your son??"
I mean ... what of it? It's the strange idea that the critic is 'attacking' the artist and making him feel bad for no reason. So this random stranger is trying to make the critic emphasise with the poor smol bean artist. It's very odd.
why is that "payoff", whatever that is, something to seek out and prioritize?
does it have to be about having "something to get"?
It’s also the case that the popular mainstream has become conservative to the point of fascism where it comes to critique. Positivity denying its opposite. The responses from the artist were also strange and overlooked their own contradiction, as in “you’re just one person with one opinion” (but my followers are also single people with single opinions, all of which must be positive at all times).
The article here and the earlier article that triggered the social media kickback both assert that "the art" includes both the images and the staging and presentation on social media.
Much like <insert other famous artist> who made themselves an essential intertwined part of the <other famous artist> art show.
Yeah, the painting is boring, safe, well trodden material (and he's not good at hands!) but the phenomenon is social media. The hype machine. The parasocial relationships.
Seems like Rodriguez is more of a performance artist.
Of course there's plenty of counterexamples where the art alone was enough for fame. Esther and Van Gogh come to mind.
Remember, these are middle schoolers, at least mentally.
"You're one of today's lucky 10,000":
:)
See also the Theory of Chinese (Indian) Indifference: No matter how famous you are, not matter how notable your accomplishments, a billion Chinese (Indians) have never heard of you and couldn't care less.
Is there anyone else (alive?) today whose art is being enjoyed regularly by more people than this fellow?
That { individual | art collective } get the eyeballs but not the name recognition.
Think "Studio Ghibli" if you don't know who I mean. And if you don't know that, watch some of his movies.
There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art.
But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.
In fact bad taste in art is equally common in the upper class. Just have a look at how Silvio Berlusconi's heirs are struggling to sell the stuff he considered art for example.
Being known doesn't mean you are exemplary of what you are doing. If you have a famous youtube tutorial channel for javascript, you might be one of the most widely known javascript programmers — but that doesn't automatically mean you are the "best" (or even a half-way decent) programmer. It still might mean that you are a stellar teacher and an exceptional communicator, which worth a lot, but if you confuse yourself for something that you are not this is where the problems start.
To the general public that guy might be what they think a good Javascript-Dev looks like, but ultimatly he isn't. I had to think of Bob Ross: A legendary communicator, a good ambassador for the arts and a good human being, but I wouldn't buy his art if I found it at a thrift store. But Bob Ross knew that his skill was being a communicator for the arts and didn't confuse himself with the painters who managed to get their works into the big art instutions.
Soldering SMD is something I can teach a non-electronic person in a few hours, for example. The hard part is knowing what to solder and when. Similarily learning to do the pure technical act of drawing or painting photorealistically can be learned. To paint motifs that are worth doing so and result in a "good picture" are something different entirely.
Maybe you have to take my word for it, as someone who in his life went through hundreds of art school applications, but there will be a difference between some abstract thing a person with true skill and talent did, and something your five year old neice did (nothing against her, maybe she has talent, who knows). Something being (seemingly, to the layperson) easy to copy does not mean that it is. Very often there will be much more behind the work than it seems on first glance. A lot of the very abstract stuff you will find in the museums for example was done in a time where nearly nobody dared to do this. So if your neice wanted to copy that, she needed to go back in time, grow up there and do it back when nobody did it. So yeah she could maybe do it. But she didn't.
When comparing abstract and concrete painting there is a lot to be discussed, but trust me when I say that people in the art scene probably look at art just in a different way that most people. Many people have misconceptions about art a la "what does the artist want to tell us" and then there is just a bunch of splashes on the canvas. The artist can sometimes be a trickster and the art understood from the context in which it was created. Sometimes art also just is and in a world where everything has to be about money, efficiency, entertainment, etc it can serve as a room of reflection with something that is beyond simple answers. I am not going to give a grand defense of abstract art here, I am not a painter and if I were it would probably not be purely abstract. Now historically painters went into the abstraction when photography came around, which could create the photorealistic image very easily. Nowadays photorealistic painters often just take a photograph and (like your neice), copy it to the pixel. That is of course a lot of work, and maybe there is even a bit of art or rebellion in that amount of work itself, but I find it more interesting when people pull out things from seemingly nowhere in their very own and unique ways.
But I am a musician and I work a lot with harsh noises many people hate to hear. I don't think there is any need for me to even attempt to defend what I like to do and so shouldn't painters.
I know people say this all the time, but I've yet to see anybody actually try. Pick some "famous pieces" and have your 5-year old niece try to reproduce them. I'm sure you (and she) will find there is a lot more to them than superficially meets the eye.
To non-software people the syntax is what seems impossibly hard and in their view writing a software that works, reliably is what should be easy. The truth is just the opposite. So to non-software people, someone writing Hello World in brainfuck would seem crazier than someone writing a good piece of software that solves a hard problem.
So judging the craft can be hard if you are not doing the craft yourself. A painter like Picasso could draw completely realistic at age 19 and spent the following decades doing more abstract things. Not because the realistic stuff was hard and he was lazy, but quite the other way around. Writing a complicated program with obscure syntax and many million lines is possible, but it takes a true master to do the same thing in a very readable, maintainable way, while making it shorter. Art can, at times, be very similar.
I enjoyed the Picasso museum in Barcelona and it was indeed eye opening to see his conventional but excellent architectural drawings ;-)
Ultimately this isn't that important, my point was rather about technicality. Technicality alone doesn't make a great master, just like syntax knowledge alone doesn't make you a great software engineer. But in coding the goal is typically to write good software and the criteria for good software are pretty clear — compared to what makes good art at least. Now as an artist you can totally suck at many things but be good at one specific thing that you did in a very specific and novel way and this alone can make the difference.
One could say with our subway painter that the special thing about him are not the paintings but how he medializes their creation. But just painting realistically is something many people can do, and many also can do better.
Indeed. Without wanting to disappear down a philosophical rabbit hole, I think you hit the nail on the head there.
It's all fake, but people are captivated by the story and suspend their disbelief.
Plenty of creators like him and I think his career will be a short one, but for now he gets to be the world's most famous bullshit storyteller.
It's accidentally a profound statement on how visual arts are seen by the general public.
I do question calling those art. Monochromes were absolutely not new when Klein does a blue one. That's already quite mediocre. But then he makes more of the same painting. How is that art?
A guy that paints walls for his job, isn't doing art, just because he holds a brush and paints a wall. But just because it is his job and it serves a function doesn't mean he couldn't create art when he paints a wall. In the end it is a lot about the mindset of the artist and how they are willing to involve others with that mindset.
I did not say anything about his role in society and whether it is okay to like him or not. It is. It was also great for Bob Ross for example to do what he did in communicating art: His paintings are not stellar examples of landscape painting, but he managed to inspire many people to go for the journey and that is worth a lot.
Subjectively, to me as someone who has a closer background to arts than most I find it lacks something — and that something might make all the difference between lasting love or forgetting him in a few years time. Other people might have differing opinions.
Think of any field you know something of. E.g. if you are in tech there might be some celebrity non-tech people see as a tech genius. But you know they are mediocre at best. That doesn't takw away from their ability to reach people, but it is not the same as being stellar in their field.
The art world as participating artists see it isn't the art world the rest of the world sees. These Tiktok people are to art what televised wrestling is to martial arts: very skilled people performing impressive feats designed for entertainment more than anything.
And I think that in this case,the critic was kind of a dick in his critic. In a very knowledgeable and eloquent manner he implies that if (from his perspective) the painter is not very good nor the art he produces, then the only explanation is that all the people who enjoys his art are gullible simpletons who don't know art. He has every right to have this opinion, of course, but he shouldn't be surprised if the gullible simpletons in question loudly disagree.
A well-known language learning blogger posted a review of a learning site (created by another blogger, with whom he had several disagreements). The review was generally positive, but the other blogger took undue offense to some of the criticisms in the review (which were laid out politely and accurately). He not only posted a snarky "review" of blog from whence the review sprang but his followers jumped in, castigating the reviewer in various online forums.
While I never expected corners of the internet to be a revival of Enlightenment-era salons, I'd hoped that they wouldn't be virtual pile ons. I'm naive ...
It's also good to tone down your criticism and pick the right words. Directness does not work well in every situation.
Just the whole situation spurred that thought about feedback and criticism, and how you never know how people will react - so I thought I'd share it.
That seems to be at odds with the purpose of an art critic.
It's sometimes called the "shit sandwich". (1) Say something nice about the person's work, (2) then shit all over it, (3) then say something else nice about it.
Like this? (sorry, I am an art noob)
> the white balance is so poorly executed on this everyone looks like they're suffering from a severe case of jaundice. It's all I can focus on and it's not helping your film
It's a bit much right? There is a way to give strong negative feedback without sounding affected. You could have communicated the same thing with the slightly toned down: "The white balance is really poorly executed unfortunately. It's all I can focus on and it's not helping your film."
I liked the original article by the author as an example of giving negative feedback.
It can include an installation where a performer demonstrates all the threats on a Ben Davis effigy. “And here we have the performer shooting a flamethrower at a small model of Davis’ house as per hate message received on $date from ShadyFan23 on Facebook”.
The author posted a review of me on his blog. Not a review of my review. Of me and everything he could find out about me on the public Internet.
while an “unredeemable moron” might leave one star, that may not meet the bar for a response. while fighting with idiots on the internet is a past time, it is typically one entertained by… idiots.
a three star review, on the other hand. no, this takes thought. a thinker left that harsh judgement. a foolish thinker, but a thinker. thoughtful, but wrong, incorrect. flawed. no mere idiot, so it must be an asshole. and we can’t have that. justice must be preserved.
with a counter-review.
Also - mostly thanks to discord - it's trivial to summon an army of kids who are under the age of criminal responsibility who will do almost anything (online) if you kick them a few robux.
Shit, I’d put that on my resume probably.
But perhaps similar interplay of the triangle of artist-fans-critic was already there a century or two ago, just on a smaller scale ?
Joking aside, the review doesn't feel over the top or unfair and given that any review is an opinion piece, it's the reaction that was way over the top.
Isn't Banksy the most well known artist these days?
yes, banksy is the most easily recognized, commercially successful modern art commodity object producer.
That's so 2010s. semi-/s
Elvis and the Beatles used to be some of the most well-known musical artists, yet how many people born more recently would be familiar with them.
"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." — Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble"
I'm not saying it's impossible to make good drawings on the subway. But the line qualities of his drawings indicate multi-hour techniques that are popular among amateurs.
I can't deny his success, but he's a grifter more than a draughtsman.
Edit: An example of a person who could have actually done this 'for real' was Kim Jung Gi. Until I get back, go take a look at his work, the line-only pen drawings in particular (or one-color brush pen stuff) and compare it to how Rodriguez's stuff looks. KJG has a 'decisiveness' of line[0] that comes from clarity of 'drawing thought'. Rodriguez has mark-making[0] that is consistent with a novice painstakingly copying a photo.
[0] 'mark making' is an umbrella term for the quality of the marks that make up a drawing/painting, separate from whatever they depict.
Sorry for the delay, turned out busier than I expected!
Apologies if this is a bit meandering. The main point I'm making here is that Rodriguez claims to 'draw from life' i.e. directly observing his subjects, and I believe he actually works from photographs. The dead giveaway is that there's a certain look that "talented-amateur" drawings from photographs have that drawings from life do not. This 'look' can be overcome[0] by people with lots of life-drawing experience, but I digress. The thing about photographs is that the image mapping from 3d space to 2d space, as well as the recording of light/dark relationships has all been done already by the camera. When you draw from life, you have to make lots of decisions and carefully organize all of the visual information yourself. When you copy a photograph, you only worry about how dark each x-y position is. There's a bit more to it, but the short of it is that there's a distinct 'look' that you can easily recognize if you have a lot of experience drawing from life (or you've looked at a lot of old paintings made prior to cameras[1]).
To help you better see this 'look', google "hyperrealism drawings". It's a bunch of artists all drawing the same thing: high contrast, high detail (often somewhat wonky) photograph copies. There's very little of the individual artists' 'identities' coming through because they're not making any decisions, they're just copying the information recorded by the camera. The wonkiness happens because the way the camera recorded the organization of lights & darks is different than what a human would actually percieve.
Another giveaway is the lighting on Devon's drawings. People who are drawing from life basically never have a light source pointed at the subject directly from their point of observation. However, in lots of drawings from photographs, that's exactly the way the subject is lit because the main light source was the flash from the camera.
If you scroll down his page a bit, there's a woman with red hair holding a painting of herself. Throughtout the entire video as he is "painting", you can see that they are lit from her left. However, in the final painting that you can see in the thumbnail, the strongest light is from her right, with a fill light on the other side. It's obviously some sort of studio lighting. The painting clearly does not match the light of the scene he is allegedly painting from. It does seem like he's actually making the painting on location, but the space between them seems concealed. I would wager there's a photo there that he's copying (I admit I did not watch the whole video to confirm).
Detail #??? is that the overall look of the drawings gives away that they were made with pencil hatching from a photo, because they look just like the drawings that I made, hatching with a pencil, from photos. Here someone could argue "No, what if Rodriguez really is that incredible? What if he can actually just draw those drawings on a bumpy subway ride, from a moving subject, in 30-40 minutes[2]?" If that were the case, and he had that level of talent, I'd ask why his drawings otherwise look so... bad. Check out this portrait of Matt Damon (pause right at the beginning): https://www.instagram.com/p/Cxgh-yYvlEL/. It's a horrible likeness. Without knowing the context that it was a drawing of Matt Damon, would you be confident of the subject's identity?
If Rodriguez really was so incredible, why do his drawings look like every other amateur graphite photo copy and not more attractive drawings-from-photos like these:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzHBzZ5Oc0v/?img_index=1
https://www.instagram.com/p/CRJhfVpAXuj/
Just for good measure, let me also give some examples of people who make drawings/paintings from life:
https://www.instagram.com/noelle_gunsay.art/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/kidpaints/?hl=en
https://www.instagram.com/p/CYCOI13LEOG/?hl=en
Maybe you can see some of the difference concerning that difference in 'look' between life drawing and photo-copying[3]. There's more solidity, facial features seem more 'locked in' to the head, there's a more careful arrangement of the brightest lights and darkest darks to focus your attention. Whereas in Rodriguez's drawings the lights and darks are all over the place (as they also are in the 'hyperrealist' drawings).
Admittedly, the first two are students at GCA where most of the paintings are notably very long poses, 20+ hours. However, the last link is to a Sargent, and iirc his charcoal portraits were 2-4 hour affairs. Sargent was among the ~100 most talented (debatable, but again I digress) to have ever lived and he certainly outclasses Rodriguez. If he takes 4 hours to draw a portrait with charcoal, which is a dramatically faster medium than graphite pencil because you can use it like paint, there's no way Rodriguez is rendering full figures in graphite pencil in ~30-40 minutes (unless he's copying a photograph which isn't moving).
[0] This is an example: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPn2Rpls5DP/?hl=en&img_index=1. I watched one of his workshops and he explicitly said "I work from photos now, but I lean on my 10k hours of drawing from life".
[1] Someone will certainly read this and cite 'Tim's Vermeer' at me. I strongly disagree with the claims of the film that lenses were 'central' to artists' workflows. A. I have a camera lucida that collects dust because it only gets in the way. B. People like Alex Ramon Hurtado have done extensive research into how past artists painted and lenses were not much more than a novelty. C. David Hockney can barely paint, so when he says something is "impossible without the help of a camera lens" I would assert that he hasn't got a clue what is and isn't possible.
[2] I'm guessing an average NYC subway commute time here. But it raises another great point! Devon's videos show that he's 'surprising' these people with drawings, so clearly he hasn't asked them "how long are you going to be riding for?" What happens if the person just gets up after 10 minutes and he's only 20% through the drawing? Does he just get lucky every time?
[3] The drawings by Sajad Khaleghi IMO are another exception to the rule, that guy's work is really strong. Wish I could speak/read arabic (or whatever language that is). There are a couple places he slips though, like this one: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzHBzZ5Oc0v/?img_index=4. If you look at how the eyes are set into the skull and the overall shape of the head, there's some clear distortion from the camera.
[BONUS] There's a video where he is allegedly setup to paint Jared Leto directly from life. I don't think I've ever seen a video with less sincerity: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwg7r4ws9px/. Models don't ever sit for 5 straight hours, they take breaks every 40 minutes (at a maximum). A '5 hour pose' usually happens over the course of 8 hours. An experienced model might go longer, but I have sincere doubts Mr. Leto would be happy to give up an entire day for a portrait of the quality that Rodriguez gives him at the end. (compare the quality of that painting to even the 'sketchier' portraits from the GCA students).
ANYWAY, like I said this is a little scattered. There are a lot more clues and indications all over, but I kinda gotta go do stuff instead of writing a thesis on HN. Overall I actually agree a lot with the Artnet critic. Rodriguez should be commended for his success and expertise. However, that expertise is in social media and brand management, not drawing and painting.
Am I seeing this wrong, or did he paint the flash from his own phone camera?
"Some measures" being a key phrase here. As is always the case with counts of followers, subscribers, watchers, likers, commenters, views, etc. there's rarely if ever any mention of the relative value of a single unit of the above, and perhaps more importantly the cost of any single follow, subscription, watch, like, comment or view and its relative value.
The social media platforms where these things are posted are practically cost-free for a viewer, save for perhaps paying for a subscription to replace advertising, but without any real cost to view or follow it's impossible to determine the value that a viewer places in the thing-to-be-viewed.
I wonder what percentage of the millions of followers would pay $1 a month for ongoing access to view Rodriguez' work, and of those how many would keep that payment going.
This is nothing to say about the actual quality of Rodriguez' art of course, just musings on the value placed in things that are practically costless to a viewer.
If I had to pay a dollar a month to keep seeing Van Gogh paintings, or Andy Warhol, or any artist for that matter. I don't care about art and I doubt the vast majority of humanity would consider spending money on access to any particular artist's work, excluding bands and such.
The art world professional artists and art critics see isn't the art world most people see. Some look at a banana taped to a wall and see a strong message about the state of the art industry, or see the peanut butter floor as a daring exercise in discovering the boundaries of art, but I just see pretentious idiots scamming rich people into giving them money. There's a lot of value to art, but that value isn't necessarily based on what the art industry considers valuable.
Definitely feels like it based on that painters reaction.
TikTok is all about clout generation, if you're a content producer then you're used to positive feedback & I'm pretty sure TikTok's dark patterns will definitely involve promoting positive comments on your videos and burying negative ones.
They want you to have that Oxytocin feelgood rush again & again because...then you keep using their app!
They've already been found to do things like show Ukraine videos to Ukrainians but hide them from Russians, whereas Russians are shown cute cat videos and fake news about Ukraine. Pretty sure their dark patterns will include exactly that: find your demographic and push more of what you like, hide negativity and boost positivity within your bubble. Although most social media platforms are guilty of this; it's how they work.
What makes TikTok different? Well they've very clearly targeted a much younger demographic, I remember back in what 2017-2018 or so? Stickers with the TikTok logo but nothing else slapped onto utility poles, atms, etc in a guerrilla marketing move designed to capture a certain demographic. But it's also largely short form content - dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. But it makes me wonder if it trains users to react with no long term attachment. See this dude's video, send a hate/death threat message, pop back into TikTok and move on to the next funi feelgood video.
Does consumption of shortform content have an effect on attention span/apathy?
I assume it isn’t limited to Korea and happens all around the world :(
Also an interesting instance where marketing is why he is popular. I don't think the paintings and drawings stand on their own. I think most can achieve this level of skill with some dedication. Agree with the point about what sells is the whole package of reaction videos. Is it really art or just a new form of commercials to get followers.
Yeah they're trying pretty hard to discourage that
And, needless to say, he disgraced himself with his hissy fit and lashing out at a guy who didn't attack him at all.
The normalization of infantilism continues.
When your subject is as famous for their tough street narrative as they are for their work then you can’t be too surprised if they feel obliged to react all hood in public. It’s a missed opportunity for Rodriguez though when he could have played his “stay humble my dude” card while… being actually humble. Is he a thug or not? Pick a lane.
The problem with existence as performance art is that we will never know if Rodriguez’ lashing out was genuine, or just another part of his rags-to-riches outsider story. At this level, his posts could just as well be coming from his PR team as from him at which point the furore and performance is definitely taking over from anything this guy does with a pencil. Is Rodriguez’ level of naivety and lack of self reflection evidence of this being his genuine self, or of his PR team’s perfectly formed ideal of how the Rodriguez phenomenon ought to be projecting itself?
I actually clicked into it expecting to feel like "Why is this on the front page of HN?" and I don't feel that way at all.
In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis. That’s a relatively new kind of situation for an artist to be in, and worth analyzing.
In addition to this, he more or less makes the point that Rodriquez is so famous because he cultivates a personal relationship to his audience or a "faux personal" -- a parasocial one -- and his fans are more invested in that than in his art per se. This is the opposite of how it usually goes in traditional art circles. Usually, the art comes first and then people become interested in the artist.
It's interesting to me because I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to have a "relationship to the public" -- a constructive one, a professional one. Women on the internet tend to attract a lot of drama and I've spent a lot of time trying to sort things out in a way that makes sense to me so I can try to get that down to a dull roar and I have found it helpful to see male-coded behavior as being about being raised to have "a real career," which boils down to a professional relationship to the public, to people who are not family and friends, and female-coded behavior as about personal relationships.
How do you make that professional versus personal distinction that this article touches on? How do you get people interested in your work instead of interested in some faux "personal" relationship to a woman they really don't know well but want to imagine they do for reasons I have trouble grasping?
And so this piece parallels some of my observations about gender issues. I think women get raised to have personal relationships and don't get raised to have professional lives and when we go online, we talk and behave in a way that is very personal. Other people hunger for that, want more of it, actively encourage women to do more of that and no one tells us "Honey, that's unprofessional" and if they do we tend to feel like "You're just a sexist pig trying to gatekeep me out!" and not like "Oh. I didn't realize doing X was a problem."
So it's interesting to me to see this piece and I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. I really expected this to be another internet "he said/she said" kind of thing and I'm blown away that it's not that at all and we need more of this type of analysis of how and why things sometimes go sideways on the internet. It's our only hope of having fewer such incidents.
I think the interchangeable parts era of tech work is nearly over and we're heading into something that will look more like highly paid roles in other industries. This could do a lot for gender equality[0], or maybe destroy it[1].
[0] Discrimination can work its way into randomized panel type scenarios because biases tend to show up in averages of first impressions more than they do in long-term relationships. That's why they use an "implicit bias test" that involves flashing pictures at you, and why the "I have female friends," argument is not taken seriously by anybody. What psychologists are telling us is that discrimination is maximized in the snap judgement scenarios posed by modern hiring processes.
[1] A network of long-term professional relationships that can't be unseated by anyone that isn't taken on as an apprentice literally describes the patriarchy.
It's a mental model I've found more helpful than just screaming about "sexism!" but I have no expectation it will ever catch on.
So for me it's been hard to say "This is personal and that is professional." Like either I'm trustworthy or not. Duh.
So it's not been obvious to me where to draw that line or navigate such.
Rodriguez got defensive and spread FUD about the critic because he was worried about being exposed as a phony. (At least as far as the surprise setups and "where does my talent really lie" aspect). Pretty simple and straightforward.
Most of those adoring followers probably know it in the back of their minds too, so defending him helps defend the shared illusion.
And using anti-gatekeeping as the righteous rallying cry is especially brilliant & effective. A good internet mob needs that SJW aspect.
Me too, friend.
If he can toughen up (or shrug it off) and continue to develop as a human and an artist – and manage to hold on to his sizable audience while he's doing it – he could make his mark.
As for the critic’s role in all of it, it is clearly necessary. There is a misconception that to be a fan you need to be a rabid fan, but these are just the loudest ones. A normal person who is not an internet warrior and stumbles upon his work deserves to know his honesty is contested, so they can make their own assessment of his true skills.
On the other hand, I don't think the art world should take this new wave seriously...doodling for attention isn't art.
Sure it is. Maybe you don’t like it, but if the work (and the context it’s presented in) is compelling, it’s art.
Yeah, he's good but he's not great as the reviewer pointed out: he's just popular because his videos showing the reactions are uplifting. Just like Thomas Kinkade paintings were good, but not substantial, and he was so popular you could buy his paintings in the mall in the 90's.
Subway Portrait Guy siccing his fans on the reviewer is just thin-skinned.
Never heard of Devon before, his stuff looks good, but sounds like the artist and the fans need their ego checked.
Hardly news worthy
I think TikTok has human elements that are interesting to think about. The short form content/attention span/apathy problem. It took what Vine started and then mixed it with psychological techniques/dark patterns to create what they have now.
For example, misinformation has always been a human problem, technology just makes it easier to spread it. But like...but I think it's interesting to look at different forms of content and how digestible they make false information, or hate, or violence.
If I speak for 60 minutes on how "zoo animals escaped in Paris during the protests" then people will likely not believe me. If I create a 30s TikTok video with a dark soundtrack people will watch it and move on, then regurgitate the false info later.
It's also a clout addiction engine. Humans are social animals and we want to be LIKED. Like SO MUCH. Attention is a drug and TikTok delivers, that has created a storm of content that used to be a "skit" and is now presented as something that "actually happened".
And the responses vary from someone watching the short form content and then moving on, believing it happened. To people claiming "well it's obviously scripted, it's a joke, duh". My problem is that skits are generally made obvious that it's a skit - see channels/people who are musicians who "just happen" to constantly play a public piano and then have a "stranger from the public" join them for a duet. It's all clout/attention generation.
It's not inherently bad I suppose, but the "this actually happened" style of content makes it especially easy for young people (TikTok's userbase) to eagerly swallow the false information content in between stuff like this.
Vine max users: 200M. TikTok current: 1000M! Hmmm.
Idk, maybe I'm just getting older lmao. Get off my lawn!
compared with say picasso or michelangelo or van gogh? jesus, the generation of ignoramuses that we are producing.
"who is the most famous artist in the world alive today?"
i might come up with david hockney - but not this git.
> Devon Rodriguez is almost certainly the most famous artist in the world, at least on one level. Almost no one I know has ever heard of him.
It's clear that the author means that in _popular circles_, he's very famous, but in _critical circles_, he's unknown. The author isn't trying to draw a comparison with Van Gogh. He's trying to make a statement about the changing nature of what it means to be a popular artist.
"Many millions" is a lot when compared to my popularity, but insignificant when compared to actually popular artists.
Like, HN is not a forum where art critics would be overrepresented, and it would be somewhat reasonable reflection "popular circles" and even one that favors an artist which, according to the article, draws heavily on younger and more app-using population than the general one. If we'd have a poll right here about artists people can name, do you really think that he would come out on top? Or even be in top 10?
It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
Hockney, Hirst (even if he only moved into painting fairly recently), Kit Williams. But yeah I'm struggling to come up with a fourth.
> It's actually kind of interesting. There's tons of living actors, authors, directors, and musicians that are household names on a global scale. But architects, painters, poets or sculptors? Everyone I can think of is dead.
Architects I disagree with, but for the rest there's a lot more competition lately. Painting never really recovered its social standing after the rise of photography. There are a lot of alternatives to a poetry reading, many of them more enjoyable or at least more accessible.
Tracy Emin seems to be able to paint (she's better known for "installations"). But she's well-known, she's alive, and she's a painter.
That's perhaps a stretch; plenty of public figures have painted on occasion, maybe even sold a painting or two, but would not be considered painters.
I thought Picasso was all about revolutionizing art, until I visited the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and saw his juvenilia. Then I realized that he was an extremely skilled draughtsman, anatomist and figurative painter.
I'm not keen on Tracy Emin, but I was mistaken to underestimate her.
It's music too.
The largest concerts in history according to Wikipedia belong to Vasco Rossi, Bijelo Dugme, and Glay.
Ever heard of them?
I suspect we're simply unaware of the marketing bias we're all walking around with.
That said, I've never heard of this person, but I'm probably way out of touch with popular art. When I think of popular living artists, I think of Dale Chihuly, Takashi Murakami, and Banksy.
ironic, considering it demonstrates that you havent even bothered to read the article before issuing your opinion