Get down, get down!
Simon Doonan wrote a moderately satirical piece on Slate today singing the praises of the Selfie. Which triggered that little facial twitch I get whenever I read an article about Instagram. It seems Instagram is everything to everyone, it’s a social network AND the savior of photography. (Which I am quite certain, did not need saving.) Still, Doonan‘s cause célèbre was the art form of the Selfie.
The term Selfie takes the long tradition of self portraiture and dumbs it down and twees it up in much the way Jefferson Starship did for Jefferson Airplane. In a sense, Selfies took this and transformed into this. Even the name itself “selfie” conjurers something innocuous and still slightly disgusting, like when a toddler has a doody drop out of his diaper; somehow cute and disgusting simultaneously.
Naturally the Selfie’s evolution stems from a deep desire to indulge our narcissistic impulses. It’s as base a reflex as shouting “Wooo!” while removing articles of clothing when astonishingly intoxicated. This is not necessarily a flaw, merely a human behavior. This further explains why the Selfie concentrates in the young, whose desperate desire for notice is only rivaled by the desperate desire to see one another naked and shouting “Wooo!”. The rest of us may indulge in the sporadic need to emblazon our faces on social media, we don’t seem to need to shout “LOOK AT ME!” on a regular basis. (The exception of the Hollywood/wanna be Hollywood types is given .)
But is it art? Well in the Velvet Elvis category, sure, the Selfie is art. There are people doing very clever things with Selfies out there, others are being even more clever in response to Selfies. (I think I am stealing this idea.) Do Selfies even NEED consideration as art? Could we not consider them the equivalent, of say Hummel figurines? Just place them in the category of cutesy little things people have/do for no particular reason.
Not everything we do with an image capture device needs to weighed on some artistic scale, with Dorthea Lange on one balance and Girl with Fake and Tan Making Duck Face on the other. Besides, who decides what’s art and what isn’t? These guys? These are the people telling us a crucifix immersed in piss is something worth placing in a museum.