Wildly beautiful: How Tumblr changed the notion of beauty

Previously, we were from the boards of Dazed, i-D or The Face, but in recent years all the most interesting things could be found not in the extravagant glossy shooting, but in Tumblr. We asked the journalist, film program curator and author of the blog Bizarre Bazaar Alisa Taiga to tell us what the strange pictures carry and how they explain the world around us.

My riot - and so many of my generation will say - happened in front of the monitor: I constantly read the signs of the visual revolution, copied and laid out in folders what I did not leave alone. At first, before coming into the digital world of tons of identical photos from photobanks, it was enough to come up with a funny query or just fly around the sites - the words wonderful and disturbing at the dawn of the JPEG Internet somehow led to the correct addresses. When novice photographers with Flickr flooded the world, the identification marks were communities with dirty names, something with the words blood and young, hearts, crosses and triangles. And at the same moment Tumblr was born, as we knew him, "no one's land" with a beautiful parallel world, where bodies are split into parts, gradients shimmer, antique finds coexist with girls who undress once or twice, and guys fuck with guys ( Oh my God, how many of them turned out!) in gigabytes of convincing pictures. Now, when these waves have subsided, the surprising habitats are empty, and I don’t want to spend a penny on magazines even with the best photo shoots. observation of the world. Why are we all jerking off on the pictures, in the end, without the slightest reason?

Anyone who has ever worked in the field of selling words or images knows how important it really is to find a picture or words to attract attention. How hard is it to put in the midst of banality and evidence a signal that is believed and understood, which will blow up and buy three seconds of your attention, delight or confusion. And how do you want to break these rules to attract attention even faster. You can fight with the standards of beauty, rules of marketing and media standards in images, but it is also easy to go to extremes and invent your own system - which happens pretty quickly. The radical visual communities of anorexics or those who are overweight will look surprisingly the same as those of healthy eating communities, and the catholic and satanic blogs can be easily confused, if not for the crosses and pentagrams. There are many such visual antonyms that are actually synonyms: the modern Dutch still life is incredibly similar to the pictures of chickens in a mayonnaise bikini, and the notorious girls from VKontakte on the carpet look like American Apparel models. And the deeper the immersion into this hunt for good or deliberately bad pictures, the more you catch the connection and the clear system in how, it seems, the new visuality copies the most glaring signs of our time. Aesthetics becomes the abode of the fetish: your erogenous zone is ready to be disturbed by tons of similar images, like a channel with pornography. The universal white wall and flash are replaced by symmetry and emptiness, flaky gold of old mansions and rich textures, coats and trousers selected by stylists, body in pieces and complex lighting, but all this is a conversation about the same thing: drug and planned beauty For the sake of which at least 5-10 people did not sleep, which they sat out and suffered for hours of photo processing and staging and which is located equally far from fantasy and truth.

Groys calls the last decades in the art of mass production of weak signs of low visibility. Of course, it is about both Nobrow and banal reproduction: if before no one knew about the nonsense that comes to your mind, now everyone admires dull sunsets, monotonous selfies and celebrity little faces that you feed to your regular readers. Artists in confusion, suffer, but also do without revolutions. If you look at Pinterest or Tumblr, then yes, here they are - various, enveloping, but barely distinguishable signs of the time, which enter the brain only in bulk. At the same time, aesthetics goes hand in hand with fashion: with insane intensity we buy pink coats and multiply Gosling, although there is no special meaning in this or the other. However, in this exchange of the beautiful, something is missing, and intuition does not fail us: there is a lack of unintentional, casual, simple, funny and stupid, which hints at life nearby and puts us in at least some kind of vulnerable position. To sit in a fashionable pink coat in a huge puddle, laugh, walk like that all day, and by the end of the evening stop thinking about it. Or see a photo where Heidi Klum walks with chips and a finger. Or find the touching and inappropriate scene of primitive hysteria where everyone behaves decently. Or look in your reflection and understand that funny is not only a cat sleeping in a pillow face, but also you, who are trying to stop time and look at yourself in stillness.

Accepting weak aesthetics, looking between the lines, imagining impossible situations, looking at random pictures - this is the role of the viewer, who begins to accept life around himself without a preset frame. Modernity is to completely abstract from time and watch the unintentional nearby. To be able to be inspired not by the Parisian streets, but by the Proletarskaya metro. Search for inspiration in lost things without authorship and freeze in museums not in line at Van Gogh, but in front of the mysterious canvases of an "unknown artist" in order to better understand the same semi-famous contemporary. Loving uneven and dimly expressed without likes and screams, but quietly, to himself. Spitting on celebrities and things of the season, inventing your own broadcast from what is thought out. Loving Fails more than triumphs, and not be afraid to waste time on the bad and stupid. Looking for good not by tags, but by lacunae, and knowing for sure that brands, names and trends are not at all a way to come across something unexpected. A safe environment with convenient navigation is pleasant and comfortable, but it is a hopeless past. Loss is dangerous only if you have forgotten how to look around.

After years of life, side by side with pictures, it turns out that the image is not only the literal thing that we see with our eyes, but everything that we can imagine and think out until it took us to the quick. Somehow I came up with the idea that a picture can be considered good, if it is easy and easy to come up with a funny poem about it. The Danish model on the cover of a thick American magazine advertising perfumes and watches does not cause questions or even comments, much less a rhyme. It hangs in a vacuum, devoid of risk and criticism, and explains nothing about the 7 billion whites, yellows and blacks, Muslims and pagans, scholars and the unemployed, who live in a world of incredible stories and difficult choices. In modern times, it is barren and useless, as are tons of flashy photo shoots, flashing gifs and screenshots that have split reality into a state of puree.

Narco, verified and thoughtful infinitely loses to the barely perceptible and miraculous, which you have been learning to see around you for many years, and then in yourself. Many cool things are said in a whisper, and it takes time to notice. Over the years in museums it doesn’t matter the signs and queues, and the sudden picture of an unknown artist in a foreign museum catches you for 15 minutes. And then a photo of Mike Tyson, who is catching up with the girl offended by him in Red Square, hasn’t been in your mind for months. You cease to rebel against the flow as soon as you understand how similarities interrupt differences, and synthesis defeats the desire to separate. At some point in the mirror, not some girl with your name is looking at you, but simply a person with interesting features, as if an outsider. It is then that it becomes clear that to be like everyone else and look like everyone else is a complicated story that should be learned much longer than to look for even cool things on ready-made stickers.