The Kardashian Woman, Abstract Art, Dr Lisa Damour
Social Media
Jessica Barrett, writing
in The i, 2019, wants to know if someone called Kim Kardashian has had plastic
surgery on her nose. Apparently, the woman in question has said she has not.
Whether Kardashian has had a nose job or not, I suppose in the era of Instagram, you can understand why someone would want you to believe that they naturally look the way that they do. People are desperate to look like Kardashian and her sisters. The family’s billion dollar brand is built entirely on aspiration: people want to look like them (knock-offs of their designer outfit on fast fashion sites such a Pretty Little Things regularly sell out in minutes.)
If people want to look like Kim, then there is a high chance they will buy all of her beauty products, perfumes and clothes.
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| The Sleeping Beauty, Edward-Burne Jones (1833-1898) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] |
…This desire for perfection – perfect selfies, perfect eyebrows, perfect lips and noses – which is at the heart of the Kardashian brand puts a huge and unrealistic pressure on her fans to look a certain way.
It seems to me that
this Kardashian woman or, perhaps, the people behind her are very bright. Her
fans, however, must be very dim or very young or both. Please don’t tell me
that the majority of her fan base is over 18?
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Two Complementaries - Study, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham (1912-2004)
Photo Credit: Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust [CC BY-NC-ND]
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…Bowling is a relentless experimenter and, once he gets his teeth into it, it becomes a real joy to see his delight in trying new techniques. He spent much of the 1970s pouring paint on to his canvases from a height to enable a looser, more spontaneous structure, while still exploring the possibilities of colour. He began to embrace accidents and the element of chance (and still does – “When Frank gets a surprise, he just runs with it,” says his long-time assistant Spencer Richards), such as the imprint of a bucket left on a drying canvas. He also became excited by texture, adding chunks of acrylic foam to his canvases and letting them slide around until they adhered, manipulated by the weight and viscosity of the paint.
…He welcomes all interpretations and responses though they may have nothing to do with his own intentions, which are entirely formal. It is nice to know this because it frees the viewer to allow their imagination to run with what could otherwise be rather opaque images.
(Nancy Durrant, The Times, 2019)
Oh to be able to slip
one of a dog’s art works (Dagger DogVinci’s will do) into Bowling’s nine room
show at Tate Britain.
Going up a ladder and
pouring paint on a canvas might make pretty patterns. However, anyone can do
that. Not anyone can go to Monet’s garden at Giverny and paint exquisite water
lilies. Discuss.
*A solo exhibition valued at £200,000 in a Mayfair gallery is beyond the dreams of many artists – but not for abstract impressionist Congo, whose paintings are going on sale at Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, this December. The only difference is, he was a chimpanzee.
… In 2005, Congo made history for a non-human artist when three of his works sold for £14,000 at auction.
(The i, 2019)
Mental Health
It’s a rare
week for the school psychologist Dr Lisa Damour when a girl doesn’t knock on
her office door to tell her that that she is suffering from “anxiety issues”.
…The blame is often laid on social media, but Damour agrees with the latest research from the University of Oxford, which found that it was responsible for only a tiny fraction of teenagers’ unhappiness.
“Social media tends to amplify what is already happening in their lives,” she says. “Social media is not a distinct universe.”
So what is going on? Damour, a clinical psychologist and leading authority on teenage girls, argues in her new book, Under Pressure, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that a certain amount of stress and anxiety is normal, and can even be a good thing.
“When girls say to me, ‘I have anxiety,’ they say it as if it’s a grave and permanent congenital defect.”
She decided to write the book after realising that in the past ten years she barely had a conversation at her practice, the school or at international speaking events that didn’t revolve around stress and anxiety.
She thinks this has happened partly because our culture views any negative emotion as a bad thing, to be avoided, and prizes relaxation and calm above all else.
“We are the first generation to think that the answer to feeling stressed is to feel as peaceful as possible,” she says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. It’s not possible and aiming for it is going to lead to disappointment and stress.”
The growing use of quasi-medical diagnostic language doesn’t help either, she argues, because it can pathologise perfectly normal emotions. “Where we used to talk about nervousness we now talk about anxiety, and where we used to talk about sadness we talk about depression,” she points out. We even describe children as having “social anxiety” when they are shy in a culture that celebrates easy-going extroverts.
“Somewhere along the line we got the idea that emotional discomfort is always a bad thing.”
(Rachel Carlyle, The Times, 2019)
*A solo exhibition valued at £200,000 in a Mayfair gallery is beyond the dreams of many artists – but not for abstract impressionist Congo, whose paintings are going on sale at Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, this December. The only difference is, he was a chimpanzee.
… In 2005, Congo made history for a non-human artist when three of his works sold for £14,000 at auction.
(The i, 2019)
Mental Health
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A Girl of Trinidad, Edwin Long (1829-1891)
Photo Credit: Bury Art Museum [CC BY-NC-ND)
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…The blame is often laid on social media, but Damour agrees with the latest research from the University of Oxford, which found that it was responsible for only a tiny fraction of teenagers’ unhappiness.
“Social media tends to amplify what is already happening in their lives,” she says. “Social media is not a distinct universe.”
So what is going on? Damour, a clinical psychologist and leading authority on teenage girls, argues in her new book, Under Pressure, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that a certain amount of stress and anxiety is normal, and can even be a good thing.
“When girls say to me, ‘I have anxiety,’ they say it as if it’s a grave and permanent congenital defect.”
She decided to write the book after realising that in the past ten years she barely had a conversation at her practice, the school or at international speaking events that didn’t revolve around stress and anxiety.
She thinks this has happened partly because our culture views any negative emotion as a bad thing, to be avoided, and prizes relaxation and calm above all else.
“We are the first generation to think that the answer to feeling stressed is to feel as peaceful as possible,” she says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. It’s not possible and aiming for it is going to lead to disappointment and stress.”
The growing use of quasi-medical diagnostic language doesn’t help either, she argues, because it can pathologise perfectly normal emotions. “Where we used to talk about nervousness we now talk about anxiety, and where we used to talk about sadness we talk about depression,” she points out. We even describe children as having “social anxiety” when they are shy in a culture that celebrates easy-going extroverts.
“Somewhere along the line we got the idea that emotional discomfort is always a bad thing.”
(Rachel Carlyle, The Times, 2019)
Being, shy, nervous,
sad or unhappy are all perfectly normal emotional states, aren’t they? As the
doctor says, a certain amount of anxiety and stress are normal too.
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