In April 2014 Instagram profile @amaliaulman began posting an endless succession of selfies along with pictures of breakfasts, snacks and exquisitely decorated desserts, clothing items, accessories and high-end cosmetics, all set in luxury apartments and five-star hotels and peppered with hashtags like #simple or #cutegasm and motivational slogans like “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” or “start each day with a grateful heart.” The profile was a prime example of lifestyle porn and after a few months it had reached more than one hundred thousand followers.
Five months later, Amalia Ulman revealed that she was an argentine artist based in Los Angeles and that her Instagram account was in fact a digital performance titled Excellences & Perfections in which she set out to criticize the social construction of identity and femininity that had been gestating through social media.
From The New Museum’s online catalog:
Through judicious use of sets, props, and locations, Excellences & Perfections evoked a consumerist fantasy lifestyle. Ulman’s Instagram account is a parade of carefully arranged flowers and expensive lingerie and highly groomed interiors and perfectly plated brunches. These images are excessive, but also believable—because they’re so familiar. For many privileged users, social media is a way of selling one’s lifestyle, of building one’s brand.1
In few words, Ulman uncovered the procedures and conventions through which an influencer becomes a branded object, a human commodity (2.10, 5.6, 5.7). This is how everyday life transforms into a carefully produced act—a site of cultural production such as a movie set (3.3)—which ends up swallowing the human and declaring him or her as a surface in a world of surfaces which harbor no interiority at all (2.16, 4.4, 5.1). This is the culmination of the trend which confuses reality and fiction (2.2, 2.7, 5.14 5.15): as life becomes a process to produce a media mirage, reality itself is absorbed by the media and becomes a mere fiction.
- “Amalia Ulman: Excellences & Perfections” The New Museum, 2014, https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/amalia-ulman-excellences-perfections ↩︎
Leave a Reply