A couple years ago I was a little obsessed with Fiverr, a site where people offer a range of services for only $5. Recently, I realized I still had $5 credit so I scrolled through a range of options. I found an illustrator, Alastair Laird, from South Africa who did a four-frame cartoon about a woman checking out and commenting on her butt so I asked him to place her in a museum/gallery setting. This is the result:
Museums and galleries are interesting places to watch people. There is always the couple where the guy who is clueless about the art is there merely to comply or, if he is a bit more ambitious, he will engage in the situation as a kind of foreplay. And now, with the ubiquity of smartphones, these places are more about being backdrops for selfies.
When Kim Kardashian's butt graced the cover of the Winter 2014 issue of Paper magazine, and "broke the Internet," the Metropolitan Museum of Art joined in the public conversation. Their it's-nothing-we-have-not-seen-before twitter response was accompanied by a 6,500+ year-old bootylicious fertility statue.
So I like Alastair's cartoon here, catered for my request, because he plays with that updated meaning of self-reflection, and also pulls in the hapless fellow.
Related articles:
Freedom from Want: Kim Kardashian's Buttocks
The Jeff Koons Retrospective At The Whitney: Shiny Reflections But No Self-Reflection
Interestingly, as a cartoonist myself, I have never really done cartoons about art except for my posters for Freak Show and Freak Show II. It is a new thing for me - to pay for someone else's creativity and work. As an artist that is always from within.