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Artist Kate Kretz was BANNED from Facebook for this piece. WARNING
The MAGA hat crowd are in denial about the racist front that they project.
Thankful that a Facebook friend saved the art and the artist's statement before it disappeared.
A Cautionary Tale on Art, Censorship & Social Media
by Kate Kretz - May 20
I’m one of those artists who’s been plugging away in the studio for the past thirty years. Part of the Art World’s middle tier, I am perpetually hovering on the edge of my “big break”, but I no longer hold my breath in wait for it. I have work in a few important collections, and a 25-page CV. I’ve won Arts Council grants in all the states I’ve lived in, I have a few nice exhibition catalogs, and have been in museum shows across the country and abroad. I hope to move up a few more rungs on the art world ladder before I die, but that’s far less important to me than consistently making work I am proud of.
Presently, all but the top 1% of artists are struggling. Several artist grants have dried up, and sales have declined, leaving creatives to expend more energy simply trying to make ends meet. So many middle-tier galleries have closed that a large number of artists like myself are managing our own careers full-time while making art. Social media has been a tremendous help in this area: I can create a new work, post it, get instant feedback, and often, within a few weeks or months, get offers to exhibit it. While a few hundred to a few thousand people might see my art “in real life” during the course of an exhibition, a strong, well-photographed image placed on social media can reach ten times as many eyes through multiple “shares”.
As artists look for new paradigms to cultivate audiences for our work, we gravitate towards platforms like Facebook. Many artists are introverts, or suffer from social anxiety. For them, social media is a godsend, because they can share what they make without awkward personal interactions and dreaded small talk. (Someone like Van Gogh, for example, would have loved it.) I’m an artist living outside of NYC, with a teaching job, a compulsive studio practice, and a child, so I rarely have time to socialize. I post on Instagram, despite the fact that I find the calculated branding, slickness and “following” games off putting, but most of my social media time is spent on Facebook. I like the longer conversational format, the ability to post multiple images / albums, and the opportunity to trade pictures and links back and forth in extended conversations. It’s become my primary source of social interaction with my peers, and my art career “distribution center”.
When it comes to my studio practice, I have always believed that art is supposed to tell the truth about things people don’t want to talk about. Within that realm, eight years ago my focus shifted from the personal to the political. I was thinking about the world my newborn daughter would grow up in. I was overwhelmed by the daily news and was starting to pick up on cultural rumblings all around me that were quite unsettling: that drove me to research and creation at an unprecedented, feverish pitch that continues to this day. My practice is now devoted to calling out injustices against disparate parts of our community, investigating overlaps to suggest that, although the victims may change, the perpetrators are often the same. I have named the ongoing series “#bullyculture”, because I believe that the U.S. cultivates aggression and entitlement in a myriad of ways, both overt and subtle. Much of the work in this series foreshadowed both the 2016 election and the #metoo movement by several years.
The series is difficult and provocative: it requires warning signs when exhibited. Early work on the fetishization of guns resulted in threats to me and my family. Some have said or implied that I am “asking for” whatever happens to me as a result of making this series. In response, I maintain that 1.) I have never heard anyone tell a male artist that he was “asking for it” (that term is, after all, the language of abuse), and, 2.) none of the art I have produced is more disturbing than the things happening in real life that inspired me to make the work. I am simply embroidering, burning wood, drawing or painting… not hurting humans, animals, or the earth, like the perpetrators featured in my work. Get outraged at the injustice, not the art calling it to light.
Within the larger “#bullyculture” context, there are sub-series: the one that currently engages me is called “The MAGA Hat Collection.” I have been ordering MAGA hats (all knockoffs, with the exception of one), ripping them apart, and then sewing them back together into traditional symbols of hatred. The works are meant to both call out wearers who claim the hats to be innocuous, and to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself.
by Kate Kretz - May 20
I’m one of those artists who’s been plugging away in the studio for the past thirty years. Part of the Art World’s middle tier, I am perpetually hovering on the edge of my “big break”, but I no longer hold my breath in wait for it. I have work in a few important collections, and a 25-page CV. I’ve won Arts Council grants in all the states I’ve lived in, I have a few nice exhibition catalogs, and have been in museum shows across the country and abroad. I hope to move up a few more rungs on the art world ladder before I die, but that’s far less important to me than consistently making work I am proud of.
Presently, all but the top 1% of artists are struggling. Several artist grants have dried up, and sales have declined, leaving creatives to expend more energy simply trying to make ends meet. So many middle-tier galleries have closed that a large number of artists like myself are managing our own careers full-time while making art. Social media has been a tremendous help in this area: I can create a new work, post it, get instant feedback, and often, within a few weeks or months, get offers to exhibit it. While a few hundred to a few thousand people might see my art “in real life” during the course of an exhibition, a strong, well-photographed image placed on social media can reach ten times as many eyes through multiple “shares”.
As artists look for new paradigms to cultivate audiences for our work, we gravitate towards platforms like Facebook. Many artists are introverts, or suffer from social anxiety. For them, social media is a godsend, because they can share what they make without awkward personal interactions and dreaded small talk. (Someone like Van Gogh, for example, would have loved it.) I’m an artist living outside of NYC, with a teaching job, a compulsive studio practice, and a child, so I rarely have time to socialize. I post on Instagram, despite the fact that I find the calculated branding, slickness and “following” games off putting, but most of my social media time is spent on Facebook. I like the longer conversational format, the ability to post multiple images / albums, and the opportunity to trade pictures and links back and forth in extended conversations. It’s become my primary source of social interaction with my peers, and my art career “distribution center”.
When it comes to my studio practice, I have always believed that art is supposed to tell the truth about things people don’t want to talk about. Within that realm, eight years ago my focus shifted from the personal to the political. I was thinking about the world my newborn daughter would grow up in. I was overwhelmed by the daily news and was starting to pick up on cultural rumblings all around me that were quite unsettling: that drove me to research and creation at an unprecedented, feverish pitch that continues to this day. My practice is now devoted to calling out injustices against disparate parts of our community, investigating overlaps to suggest that, although the victims may change, the perpetrators are often the same. I have named the ongoing series “#bullyculture”, because I believe that the U.S. cultivates aggression and entitlement in a myriad of ways, both overt and subtle. Much of the work in this series foreshadowed both the 2016 election and the #metoo movement by several years.
The series is difficult and provocative: it requires warning signs when exhibited. Early work on the fetishization of guns resulted in threats to me and my family. Some have said or implied that I am “asking for” whatever happens to me as a result of making this series. In response, I maintain that 1.) I have never heard anyone tell a male artist that he was “asking for it” (that term is, after all, the language of abuse), and, 2.) none of the art I have produced is more disturbing than the things happening in real life that inspired me to make the work. I am simply embroidering, burning wood, drawing or painting… not hurting humans, animals, or the earth, like the perpetrators featured in my work. Get outraged at the injustice, not the art calling it to light.
Within the larger “#bullyculture” context, there are sub-series: the one that currently engages me is called “The MAGA Hat Collection.” I have been ordering MAGA hats (all knockoffs, with the exception of one), ripping them apart, and then sewing them back together into traditional symbols of hatred. The works are meant to both call out wearers who claim the hats to be innocuous, and to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself.
45 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I mean, of all the possible people that should be banned... 
York College art exhibit features men licking their guns
Mike Argento, margento@ydr.com Published 1:08 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2018 | Updated 1:09 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2018
Kate Kretz started thinking about it years ago, long before Harvey Weinstein and his peculiar ways sparked a national movement.
She was thinking about how all of this stuff was connected, how all of it crawled from the same fetid primordial pool.
She and her husband had a young daughter, and like many others, she would lay awake at night wondering about the state of the world and what kind of place her daughter would inherit. And she started thinking that the things that worried her all had a common denominator, a wellspring of terrible ideas and horrible behavior that permeated and poisoned our culture.
Mostly, she said, she "thought about how all of those things are connected in terms of how we treat anyone who's different than us," from gun culture to rape culture to misogyny to racism to, well, everything.
More:
https://www.ydr.com/story/opinion/columnists/mike-argento/2018/02/27/york-college-art-exhibit-features-men-licking-their-guns/376207002/
So glad that you you posted it!
