The wisdom of hot men making shitty art
💪 A look at the heroes of a post Algorithmic art world
The studio is basked in the white glare of the neon lights, the walls and floor are covered in colourful paint splatters, hint of the many hours of feverish, almost carnal, throes of creativity. My attention is quickly drawn to the main character, the man, the artist. Enters six feet of chiseled, plump, glistening muscle adorned only by stained, ripped shorts bearing the mark of the repeated wiping of his paint-soaked, brawny hands against his firm and rounded backside. As in a trance, he lasciviously throws his brush at the canvas with a groan, letting serendipity (and the sheer strength of his shapely arm), be his Muse. The brush falls to the ground as the paint runs its way down the canvas like the droplet runs down his temple. For an instant, I manage to drag my gaze out of the spectacle of this Adonis and look at his oeuvre. As if I were thrown in the cold plunge he undoubtedly started his day with, in a split second I’m released from the spell and realize, I’ve seen this painting before, countless times. In a bin behind a kindergarten, sold on the sidewalk by the beach on a holiday, on the walls of a house sold in Selling Sunset, and many other similar pits of bad taste. What just happened? Where am I? What am I looking at? Is it art, is it content, is it porn? It’s a little bit of everything, and much more. It’s hot men making shitty art.
As Tik-Tok and Instagram have pushed video content front, right and center, drowning fixed images to the bottom of the algorithmic abyss, artists have attempted, willy-nilly, to embrace this new chapter of their online lives and show themselves. As a viewer, the data I generate for Instagram everyday betrayed two key aspects of myself, namely my appreciation for art and shirtless men, giving rise to a strange hybrid on my “for you page”, hot guys making bad art. An uncanny merging of the awkward illustrators showing their process and the gym bros telling me I need to consume 1000g of protein for breakfast. As a researcher interested in the entanglements between images and people, things and persons under capitalism, this discrete army of artsy hunks aroused… my interest. Could looking at shirtless men be visual culture research?
As often on the internet though, I was late to the discourse and found out about the page Hot Guys Bad Art, a compendium of the most notable examples of this movement. But the page doesn’t only catalogue the practice, as its name suggests, it creates an inverse correlation (maybe causality even) between the aesthetic value of an artwork and the hotness of its maker[1]. After laughing at a couple of videos, I remembered some of my own most liked images on the platform were of myself, when my illustrations barely got any views, let alone likes. Then it hit me. Was I too, a hot guy making bad art? Are we all, in some way or another, sooner or later, bound to become hot guys making bad art?
aesthetic labor
The joke of the Hot Guys Bad Art account is that there’s such a gap between the attractiveness of the men and their work, that it becomes clear that any success they might have, is derived from the former instead of the quality of the latter. As often with parody, this enables us to play out some ineffable anxieties of ours. In laughing at these extreme cases of disjuncture between art and who makes it, we reassert ourselves as tasteful consumers of culture able to separate the pure art and the crass consumerism, but more importantly, we establish that good art should stand on its own. Yet, we know that in life, and more so online, being hot helps with everything, and especially with making money or getting likes.
Sociologists Anne Witz, Chris Warhurst and Dennis Nickson have called this aesthetic labor, “the mobilization, development and commodification of embodied ‘dispositions’”. They initially crafted the concept to understand how companies in the service industry try to control not only their employees’ time and productivity, but also their very appearance. Anyone who has worked in service work knows that looking good is a crucial part of the job and staff’s appearance is often scrutinized and corrected.
This concept of the commodification of one’s appearance has since found a new life as a new class of workers have moved or created their business social media, where parasocial relationships based on desirability are rife. If in a restaurant being a hot waiter might not preclude you from actually waiting tables, on Instagram being a hot artist might be enough in itself. In her book Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex, Sophia Giovannitti points to why this twinning of art and lust makes us so uncomfortable: “Art and sex occupy similar positions under capitalism. The commodification of each, while rampant, is also rifle with anxiety and subject to questions of ethics, purity, and meaning.”
As I scroll down my feed, more and more artists are showing themselves, talking to the camera, and showing their studio. Does the cute ceramicist with a gorgeous smile and hot tattoos knows he’s tricked me into looking at his work through his embodied aesthetic labour? Does it matter? What the hot guys making bad art show us is that the separation between the work and the artist is a porous one, and that economic value circulate across both.
In fact, clients too have noticed how they can profit not only from the work of artists, but also from their person. As I look up to the top tier of the industry, I see a pattern. Assignment and commissions give way to “collaborations” —[Brand’s name] X [Artist’s name]— in which the work is only part of a constellation of promotional material, an interview, a photoshoot, maybe even a process video of the artist in their studio talking about their inspiration. Making an image and becoming an image might not be, in the end, very different things. What happens then, when making an image and becoming one align?
you look like your work
Aesthetic labor includes but is not limited to hotness. Remember I said one of the striking things with Hot Guys Bad Art is that the disjuncture between artist and artwork is so stark it becomes funny. This relies on the assumption that somehow, there should be an inherent resemblance, or at least equivalence between artists and their art. The trope of the artist who looks like their work is an important one based in age-old ideologies around what style is and can be understood as a form of aesthetic labor. One of my favourite analyses of the origins of what she calls “self-styling” comes from anthropologist Lily Chumley’s work on Chinese art education. In her book, she describes the way student learn to talk about their work in crit classes (which will undoubtedly echo many people’s experiences in art school):
They are told to look for “self” in their memories, their traumas, their hearts, and their bodies; but they must also find a way to discursively embed this self in particular, recognizable, stylistic elements of their artworks, and at the same time to use these stylistic elements to link themselves to other artists and designers. Simultaneously they must develop a form of self- presentation that can serve as an appropriate cotext (or para-text) for their work, a personal style that can mediate between their interior self and their externalized work.
The self. The work. The body. same-same. All images. All potential source of income in the attention economy. I sound cynical but I’m not. I do think it’s an interesting resource for artists online to draw from when wondering how to get their work out there. The brand collaborations I mentioned love that subset of aesthetic labor as it embraces the idea of an artist not only making, but living their art. Artists like Goeff McFetridge, Olimpia Zagnoli or Malika Favre have all successfully mobilized this narrative of authenticity by crafting a continuum between their artworks’ style and their own. As I’ve written before, artists and artworks have been construed in our society as two sides of the same coin, it’s not surprising that what one does affect the other.
Yet, there is one more insight about art, self and labor that shirtless men throwing paint at canvases might have to offer. As their bare and tanned bodies unfurl in erratic thrusts and pigments splash against fabric and walls alike, the bodies of the hot guys remind us of something seminal about art, its humanity.
ok… but can AI do this?
You may have heard, AI is here, and it can do everything humans do. Well, just the fun things humans wanted to keep doing like singing or drawing. Soon enough the only thing that might separate an AI generated image from a human created one could be its relationship to labor. As the quality of models’ output becomes more satisfying and people’s visual literacy and expectation adjust to the new reality of an AI generated visual environment, the representation of artists next to their work takes on a new meaning.
During a round table organized by Data&Society, rapper and scholar Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo mentioned how AI systems has incentivized her to document the making of her latest album, and to release alongside it voice memos, notes, recordings, etc. “seeing the process helps me to recognize it as labour” she explains, “[…] we often receive these commodities and think about them as finished things[…] but thinking about our work as being more alive than that is something I'm invested in trying to have people think through”. As the work itself increasingly runs the risk of getting drowned in the dark forest of the internet filled with AI generated doppelgängers, expanding what counts as relevant aspects to show might be crucial to artists’ survival. Showing the labor behind the work, as showing the artists behind the art, rather than being simply superficial tactics that distract form the work, could be seen as strategic reminders of the humanity behind the visual culture we routinely take for granted.
Maybe, just maybe, the hot guys making bad art are the radical luddite heroes we were all hoping for.
Despite having partaken in their public shaming, I’m indebted to hot men making shitty art.
The metaphysical questions they pose about the relationship between personhood and thinghood are also political ones. In painting shirtless for our pleasure, they invite us to undress as well and become more vulnerable. What parts of myself am I willing to entangle with my work? What parts of my work should represent me? Is being seen a mean or an end for artists?
I wonder how many people out there know that these images are made by people who often spend years perfecting their craft, countless questions and doubts, personal stories and stakes to create images that ultimately become invisible. I wonder what strategies could be used to show these layers of lives interwoven in our visual culture and whether showing the work, looking like the work, or simply looking hot are effective steps in that direction. As I craft my next Instagram post, I contemplate these questions and I slowly bring my hand to my shirt, open a button, a second, a third…
[1] While I won’t go into details about it here, I appreciate the gendered specificity of the practice, as the delusion of grandeur paired with actual mediocrity is often a masculine attribute.
This might be my favourite post of all time. I loved the tone, it made me laugh so much, whilst raising some pertinent issues. 'What parts of myself am I willing to entangle with my work?' is a struggle. I have always found the idea of harmony between life/self and work appealing, but when sharing online I feel the need to set boundaries lest my life should feel like a cheap performance, even (especially?) if authentic.
what a great read.