Transcription
A picture of a man in a pool posing for a group photo with a number of women. The man holds a ball and wears water polo headgear. Some of the women also wear water polo headgear, others have only swimming caps.
The image has the caption:
Flavor Flav sponsors the women’s water polo team after learning some athletes have 2nd and 3rd jobs.
@femalequotient
In May, US polo team captain Maggie Steffens asked for financial help on Instagram. Flavor Flav – William Jonathan Drayton Jr – answered the call: “As a girl dad and supporter of all women’s sports, imma personally sponsor you, my girl, whatever you need. And imma sponsor the whole team.”
Flav signed a five-year sponsorship deal to “elevate the visibility and excitement surrounding water polo in the United States.” The sponsorship includes personal appearances and financial contributions to help with equipment, facilities, and anything else they need. This is how it’s done 👏
— The Female Quotient
Can’t imagine why she’d want the portrait removed.
First and foremost: that’s not the point. Maybe she doesn’t like it. Too bad. It’s an award-winning artist’s artwork. She shouldn’t be allowed to bully a gallery into not showing it, and she shouldn’t be making elite athletes weigh in on the matter in her favour. That just makes it clear her sponsorships are not really about giving back, they’re a political means to an ends. It’s sportswashing.
But also, that’s just the style of the Archibald Prize–winning artist who painted it. By whinging about how it’s a misrepresentation of her, and having her supporters say such nonsense as:
She is demonstrating a complete lack of respect for the artist and his work. Never mind that she absolutely would deserve the treatment if it were a targeted attack on her. She’s wilfully contributed to destroying the planet and making it easier for others to do the same, using her political weight to discourage action on climate change. And the irony that here she is trying to smother an Aboriginal artist’s artwork by using claims that she “has done nothing to deserve such treatment”, when she has been responsible for contaminating sacred Aboriginal sites.
No, I get the point you’re wanting to make. I’m saying from an absolute surface level, it’s atrocious and if I looked like that person did and someone (anyone) painted a portrait of me that looked like that, I’d be upset.
I’m sure they are all the terrible things you say. But it’s a really ugly portrait.
Edit: after clicking your source link, this paragraph caught my eye.
So not a good faith portrait.
This argument completely falls apart when you actually look at his portraits and consider them, rather than just blindly seeing art you don’t like and making assumptions.
It doesn’t even require that much effort. His portraits of Mabo, Lingiari, Cathy Freeman (a particularly relevant one, given the community we’re currently in!), and his grandfather Albert, and even his own self portrait (all of which are featured quite prominently in the article I linked) all feature exactly the same style.
Wry does not mean bad faith. It certainly does not justify a bad-faith attempt to have artists censured, or justify standing up in defence of those who do so, which itself comes across very much as bad faith.
Any art that could even vaguely fall into the “outsider” catagory will be treated like this. We’re so conditioned to apply the same “good or bad” metric to everything in the same way, even if that means you end up comparing apples to oranges. Critiquing Vincent Namatjira’s work by the standard of more “traditional” photorealistic portraits is a bad faith comparison. It’s boiling “art” down into just colors and shapes with no regard for context or meaning.
Taken to a not-too-illogical extreme, that same line of thinking would say that Dalí was a subpar artist who couldn’t even paint a normal clock.
The artist’s “style” is high school art class. Looking at all the portraits together really gives that nostalgic feel of walking down high-school hallways.