TWEE: Too much, too fast, too soon.

Street artist TWEE rose to prominence for a few weeks in early June, receiving coverage from blogs across DC (see HERE and HERE) and an exclusive interview with ReadySetDC. I saw many of TWEE's wheatpastes popping up all around my U Street neighborhood and so, as I have often done in the past, posted pictures of the pieces on Facebook asking if anyone knew the identity of this street artist who seemed to have taken the DC street art world by storm. I didn't recognize the work: colorful, saccharine sweetness combined with a violent, morbid twist. Like!

Turns out that TWEE had been created by artist Cory Oberndorfer for "By Request," an exhibition by Jeffry Cudlin at Flashpoint. For this exhibit, Jeffry asked seven DC art world folks (including me) to fill out a survey about their views on contemporary art and the art world. He then assigned each survey to an artist and asked the artist to create work based on the survey results. Jeffry's intent: that the artist would then create the perfect piece of art for the assigned person. In a stroke of brilliance, Jeffry assigned Cory to make art for me! I own works by Cory and have become very good friends with him in the years since I first met him when he was an MFA student at American U, so he knows me pretty well and really didn't need Jeffry's stinkin' survey to tell him how to make art that I would like. Watch the video for a little background on how Cory came up with the idea for TWEE.

Once the exhibit opened, it was revealed to the world by the very same blogs that had purportedly not known TWEE's identity (they were all in on the joke so to speak) that TWEE had been created by Cory. Also turns out, I love the art he created in theory especially for me. Cory had accomplished the mission Jeffry assigned to him!

However, problems arose in some journalistic circles. One person who writes about art in DC for a highly-trafficked blog but that was not involved in Cory's project was outraged that several fellow bloggers participated in perpetuating what she felt was a fraud on art writing. I asked her about her position and she said:

My problem here arose when an art writer deliberately lied to his readership about it.  The comments in reply to We Love DC post from Tuesday, where the writer outing himself that he was part of the project, are largely supportive, but all of those commenters are members of the art community, the same community that benefited from the free press and the drama that followed.  Of course they're thrilled. The people who are upset about this are fellow writers and editors, who believe that this boils down to a breach of ethics.  By deliberately lying to his readers, he's undermined the legitimacy of anything he writes in the future; furthermore, by doing it without the knowledge and permission of the WLDC editors, he made the website and its entire staff look foolish. 

I was really surprised at this reaction. I did not see what measurable benefits the artists gained from the "free press." Financial? It's unlikely that any of the artists will sell any of the work out of this show, particularly Cory's work, which is completely conceptual and consists of wheatpastes around the city that are deteriorating from the elements, and a mural painted on the wall at Flashpoint with a couple reproductions of the blog articles mounted on top of the murals. This kind of show does not lend itself to commercial success. (That's the beauty of non-profit spaces like Flashpoint - you can experiment with ideas that a commercial gallery would not touch.)

Promotional benefit? The show was receiving a ridiculous amount of press in the months leading up to the opening due in part to the unsettling images that were emerging of Jeffry dressed in raunchy drag (in poor imitation of me but that's another blog post!). The TWEE revelation seemed like a minor footnote compared to seeing Jeffry's pink thong peeking out from under the sparkly pink t-shirt he was calling a dress while dancing in art galleries around the city.

Fame? As soon as the show comes down this week, Jeffry will go back to quietly curating amazing shows at the Arlington Arts Center and no one will remember what exactly all the TWEE hullabahoo was all about. I remember when he made the "Ian and Jan" video a couple years ago in which he writhed around buck naked, and I'd venture to bet there are fewer than 100 people in the world, including his parents, who remember it. Maybe we're all choosing to squash those disturbing images from our minds.

Regardless, Jeffry created an exhibition that explores the ways in which relationships in the art market are intertwined, and the ways in which art market success depends so much on celebrity and self-promotion, where success hangs on who you know and how deft you are at navigating the social and economic circles around which the art market has evolved. (I don't think this is necessarily a new thing, but that is also for another blog post.) Seems to me that the bloggers' involvement in this project  illustrated those ideas nearly perfectly.

Was it a breach of ethics? Not so sure about that either. This episode certainly raises questions about whether there are ethical standards to which blogs ought to adhere. I think the answer is pretty murky. Did these sites hold themselves out as objective news sources? I don't read these blogs as news sources in the same way that I read The Washington Post or The New York Times. And the people who write on these blogs don't appear to be reporters or journalists by trade who are charged with reporting the news. They seem mostly like good, smart people with regular jobs that maybe they'd like to quit if they could, so instead they put a lot of time and effort into something they feel passionate about. Like writing about art. Hopefully they find some pleasure in it and to spoil it with these accusations seems a little bit of a stretch.