Residing doll … 1 of Freeny’s anatomical Barbie sculptures. Photograph: Jason Freeny
What is artwork, proper now? You get one particular reply from a museum this kind of as Tate Modern and an additional from hunting across the vast buzzing panorama of modern news media. Everybody agrees that artwork can, these days, be pretty much something. Yet even though the official art planet takes that to suggest, say, an set up of the lights going off, common culture is total of things from sand sculptures to portraits created of bacteria that get labelled as artwork. The most recent example of such globally celebrated instant culture is a assortment of anatomical models primarily based on Barbie dolls and other well-known toys.
New York-based mostly artist Jason Freeny tends to make sculptures of Barbie that have their insides exposed to reveal – so goes the hype – the anatomic impossibility of this wasp-waisted doll. With her inner organs crushed together, Barbie is proven to be a dangerously extremely hard position model.
There are two factors very wrong with this “artwork”. Initial, anatomical Barbie is not art in any interesting way but merely a glib, one particular-get gimmick. A prop, a toy, a joke, a stunt – any of individuals phrases would say more about it than the wildly inflated declare that it is “art”. But what’s the point in arguing? Today the word “artwork” is liberally applied to something and every little thing from violent video video games to selfies. Of program, you can phone something artwork, which includes anatomical Barbie, but the result is to rob this when-grand thought of all that means.
But even much more apparent, and unsightly, is the reality that far from becoming some sort of male feminist artwork, the evisceration of Barbie is blatantly a violent misogynist attack. It is unsettling to see such a grisly act of symbolic destruction on a representation of the female physique, nevertheless idealised, fictional and commodified we think Barbie is. Exhibiting Barbie inside out is like sticking pins in a voodoo doll or throwing darts at a portrait.
The health-related waxworks that anatomical Barbie resembles are nowadays rightly witnessed as shudder-inducing freakshow exhibits. The cold objectification of womens’ bodies by Victorian anatomy models looks to most men and women to belong to the world of Jack the Ripper. So why on earth give cultural room to anatomical Barbie?
The word “art” used to make individuals nervous. It implied one thing difficult to understand. Right now, it implies a groovy fast fix of post-aesthetic entertainment. As for the challenging things, that can conveniently be dismissed with the sorts of political criticism no a single thinks to apply to anatomical Barbie. Hence it is easy to dismiss Picasso’s complex partnership with ladies as “misogynist”. But when it comes to something as crass and reductive as an anatomically exposed plastic doll, the obviously vicious assault it inflicts on an – albeit imaginary – entire body goes unchallenged.
In today’s mass media, “art” is taken to imply any eye-catching nonsense, and when something will get that designation it is assumed to be awesome, clever and in some sense past criticism. Even when it is nothing at all more than a tacky piece of female-hating nonsense.
Anatomical Barbie is lady-hating nonsense not art
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