Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Ari Marcopoulos at Frank Elbaz


(link)


We started appending porn as a suffix to images that though chaste employed its visceral surface, white crystal light, even the more vile forms of pornography still bathe their slews in clean shadowless light. As style to its subject, “-porn” was to the candification of an thing, slathered in photographic glaze, like a plastic wrap protecting it from bleeding, the packaging of the product-subject, contained, a photograph for exchangeability. It was an advertorial strategy placed onto subjects that needed it not - food, ruins, “others” - allowing them the transactional ability of commodities, the advertorial token trading. “Ruinporn” was attacked when the spreading economic recession the photographs were then currently objectifying reached people who mattered enough to care as commodifying pain - like anyone had ever heard of Sontag - ruins been photographed for centuries labelled as sensationalist and “foodporn” as some part of FOMO commodification of our human experience, everyone doing it, increasingly in every aspect, as even the artworld relinquished to its ability for social advertising, “-porn” was the commodification of any such affective object in a way that amputated the subject from any means of communication beside genre as an offering. Of course all advertising had been “-porn” for decades, extracting youth, beauty, whatever loveliness it could get to give desire to its object, the difference was now people rather than ad agencies were seeking out its affective rush, the human experience encapsualted as drug, as deliverable pleasure.