art empire manifesto
In May 2020, during the height of the lockdowns, I began rephotographing instagram posts by pretty women and making double exposures with my own photographs, mostly of flowers. Many of us developed somewhat furtive crafting projects at the time! My sourdough started failed to thrive, so...
Sharing the results with the subjects of the original photos often met with enthusiastic appreciation, and these women are the social media users most practiced in the art of ignoring or deflecting enthusiastically horny dm slides. Not to say they're not truly appreciative of good natured support, they're just so genuinely hot and awesome there aren't enough hours in the day to manage it all individually.
Over time, by developing my technique and nurturing a network of supportive, amazing, and creative models amenable to my remixes of their already first-rate images, I began to pursue ways to create this work with active collaborators. As soon as I started talking about booking my own shoots, however, I realized it wouldn't feel like an appropriate elaboration of the project.
After three years of spending a decent chunk of my time looking at and thinking about pictures of ladies in little-to-no clothes, it's become clear to me that the women who disrobe and expose their softnesses to what is mostly a very cold and sharp world possess and display tremendous strength and courage. I believe this is generally under- or un-appreciated by society.
(please see "A Footnote on Nudity," below)
I like very much to think that part of the reason my work is so often noticed and well received by amazing women who get far more unwanted attention than they can or should have to handle is that this motivation can be felt through the work I've been sharing by those who recognize it.
The next step for this project is to put out an open call for interested collaborators to work jointly on my remixes of their own self-portraits. It's far more socially meaningful and artistically impactful to systematically respond to women using their own art to express their own individuality by by trying to give every one of them their flowers than it would be for me to ask a series of pretty models in front of black backdrops to make an o-face because that's probably what you'd look like too if you suddenly found yourself magically emerging from a giant flower (or are you a tiny person now?) into a mythical world of supernatural wonderment.
It is maybe a bit scandalous and invasive to seek to build a career on, basically, asking every hot women in the world to dm me nudes. (Again, please see "A Footnote on Nudity," below!) Many will be leery of such a request, and even the most open minded and brave invitees who've managed to read this far and who like my work a lot are very busy being awesome. What's in it for any of them besides some pretty flower pictures in their dms?
the business end
Seriously, though, isn't asking, like, everyone for sexy selfies for an "art project" just some horndog thing? No! It is not JUST some horndog thing. Admittedly, and brace yourself here, I like looking at pictures of really pretty girls and their boobs. Kinda a lot! You know who else does, though? Pretty much everyfuckingbody! I'm just trying to be the best there's ever been at getting them in my dms. This is America. We're an ambitious and optimistic people. Aim for the stars, land on the moon. 🍑 What's the most common career advice in the world? "Do what you love." I love beautiful women and their boobs. Ok, fine, but how do I make a career in the contemporary art world and get all those spicy dms for material in the first place though?
Here's how
We're going to bring back the sexy postcard. In 2023. From about as soon as photographs became easily and inexpensively reproducible until the rise of the glossy porno magazines, photography postcards were the dominant method of distribution and enjoyment of erotic art. With its lifelike, precise rendering of the body, nude photography revolutionized erotica in a manner comparable to the internet. People loved their spicy postcards. They can love them again!
This might seem ridiculous, the march of technology having obliterated the market for magazines and adult theaters as well as spicy postcards. There's no getting that toothpaste back in the tube. Physical media is dead. Our lives are entirely digital now. No one would start a card collection in 2023, right? Tell that to the millions of pokemon fans spending years hoping for a shiny squirtle card. (That's how pokemon cards work, right? I'm too old to know.) Tell it to the wild-eyed Magic the Gathering freaks paying hundreds of dollars for cardboard spells on ebay. Tell it to the millions of former 8 year old sports card collectors still kicking themselves for not hanging onto that Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card.
The human urge to collect and enjoy nice things that drove the spicy postcard era hasn't gone anywhere. We can use this in our favor. Horny browsing accounts for no small part of global internet traffic. The women who produce content that caters to it can attract devoted fanbases. The percentage of fans willing to spend money to look at jpgs online on onlyfans, patreon, etc, though, is a small proportion. I believe that if a model is super-excited about the artistic collaboration she's involved with and enthusiastically pitching her $25 postcard set to her audience, people who'd never consider spending money to look at sexy photos in 2023 will be interested in collecting the art. Once they're active collectors, their interest in the development and success of the project will be just as real as ours, as they root for the value of the work of ours in their collections to increase just like us.
Cooperative Ownership
The second sentence in that last paragraph starts with "we" for an important reason. This plan/these mixes are MY Art Project, but if I'm working with self-portraits from the models in my work, they own the original art that produced the piece. I can't do anything commercial with the resulting remix without explicit permission. The models, then, are official co-owners of the work once I'm done with it. My hope is this results in a genuine motivation to build attention and excitement for the project from every participant. All the models are trying to make a little money selling art they're excited about creating. It's like hiring an army of influencers to advertise my art career but better, they aren't employees or contractors but part of the ownership group. Every new participant brings a new audience to the project, benefitting all the others involved.
The goal here is to nurture in collaborators the excitement and urgency of a multi-level marketing scheme, but there is only one level and the system doesn't depend on exploiting late-adopters or schilling cheap and shoddy merchandise. The historical pattern of MLMs capturing the attention of massive groups of people shows that this crazy postcard scheme has the potential for significant success. We can address something important that's missing from contemporary society. Everyone knows MLMs are scams, but people, women especially, are drawn to the (bullshit) promises of mutual support, community, empowerment and enrichment they offer. I want this project to offer all that, but for real!
Every new person joining the project brings more attention, every development in every participant's work makes the art better, beautifying this garden we're growing together. The project has the potential to grow exponentially (business guys call this scalability.)
Not only is every participant materially invested in promoting the product, they're materially invested in recruiting more participants. Each member of their audience is a potential collector of the art we're selling together. Every improvement in everyone's art benefits everyone. Hopefully our community members will put individual skills to use for the benefit of the group, and part of my role will be identifying potential opportunities for this. I'd love to have successful photographers leading lighting and tech workshops, art therapists leading group sessions on using self-portraiture as a form of personal healing, styling tutorials, wellness seminars, etc. My goal is to cultivate a strong, healthy, welcoming and encouraging community of passionate art-makers.
This is a conceptual art project
The transforming of social media followers into art collectors is, for me, the specific material goal of this project. Art critic Jerry Saltz has popularly said that it's very hard to establish yourself in the fine art world, but it's also very simple. All you need to do is find three or four loyal collectors, two or three critics who'll publicly champion your work, and one gallery owner with the resources and willingness to present it in a significant capacity. I believe this project, executed with intention and enthusiasm, has the potential to attract hundreds, if not thousands of devoted collectors -- both people both familiar with the fine art world and complete outsiders to it. I also believe that more than a handful of art critics would notice such a phenomenon and find it quite interesting indeed. Gallery representation wouldn't be difficult to find at that point.
That's my intention with this project, not to make a billion dollars selling racy postcards (and tshirts! posters!) My collaborators will receive the vast majority of any profits from their work. In order to make participation as appealing as possible, my portion of the profits should be smaller than that of patreon, onlyfans or other current and future corporate platforms for monetizing photography. Like those companies' plans, this idea is absolutely scalable.
Angel Investors
The next step for this project is to act exactly like one of those tech startups, with something much like an initial round of venture capital investments.In Silicone Valley, aspiring rich assholes write business plans to present to already-rich assholes in the hopes that the latter will gamble invest significant sums that the startup will use as operating expenses until they reach a point where they can turn a profit with their product, increasing the value in the shares of the company owned by the "angel investors." I need my own Angel Investors! I don't need anyone else's money, though, just your selfies!
The potential payoff is massive, but it will take time to get this off the ground. Initial forays into postcard releases are likely to leave us with big piles of unsold merch as we work on building attention and support for the project. When it does take off, though, these early, rare releases will transform into packets of hundreds of tightly-wrapped diamonds. This is not a pyramid scheme, everyone who collaborates on a project will get the same, generous share of their own contribution to the whole, and the project depends on attracting wave after wave of new participants, but the early work of the first handful of collaborators work will be the most valuable on the market and the artists will possess as many copies as they are willing to keep around.
Conceptual artists from Warhol to Jeff Koons have employed armies of collaborators, toiling in relative obscurity, to help manufacture the standardized art they've used to achieve great renown. This project is somewhat akin to those (Warhol's repetitive, idiosyncratic printing technique of appropriated images is a particular artistic influence on this project) but the cooperative ownership of the work and an ever-expanding garden of active collaborators are essential elements of the project. Artists like Koons and Richard Prince others have achieved great success employing similar methods, but the influence ironic detatchment and capitalist consumptive excesses that drive their projects have furthered the commidification and despiritualization of the art world. Our goal is to provide a powerful and coherent response that makes a significant impact with art projecting myth, spirit, mystery, beauty and community. This art-making process is actually an experiment in radical political organizing, and we will create a softcore porn empire within the contemporary art market. The world needs for us to do this, we can make a ton of money, and it will be really funny.
My DMs are open.
*A Footnote on Nudity:
This is critically important for this project:
I wrote about nudity and boobs above, but many of my favorite remixes are of fully-clothed models. "None" is just one of a range of costume choices for self-portraiture, albeit a rather popular one to engage in and enjoy. There's a particular bravery shown by women who enjoy posing without clothes, but it isn't unlike that shown by any woman who posts exclusively fully-clothed images of herself to an internet full of hatred, harassment, degradation and threatened violence. I very much want this project to be a tribute to that bravery in all its varying forms.
In this light, nudity is welcomed from collaborators, but it is by no means required. It isn't requested, or even particularly encouraged. Otherwise I'd be undermining everything I've written about this project up to this point and, morally, I feel like I'd be a creepy scumbag and I don't want that for myself. Finally, also, it's important for this project to have universal appeal for business reasons.
We can't go viral unless tons of people get on board. Not everyone is gonna dm me pictures of their boobs. That's totally cool! Bodysuits are fine! Yoga pants and sports bras? Great! Floor length dresses? Kinda perfect actually if they're solid colors!
My goal in selecting collaborators and choosing images must focus on technical necessities of the method I've chosen and authentic expression and artistic achievement, not than the degree of nudity or my own ideas about hotness. This must always remain the case in order for the project to succeed.