weekly selfie 2 - Yoselis De Jesus Minyety

Oliv 2024, Yoselis De Jesus Minyety, Jersey City.  

 Untitled Film Still #17, 1978, silver gelatin print. Cindy Sherman artworks courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

The Cindy Sherman Effect by Phoebe Hoban for ArtNews 

“Now we all take it for granted that a photograph can be Photoshopped. We live in the era of YouTube fame and reality-TV shows and makeovers, where you can be anything you want to be any minute of the day, and artists are responding to that. Cindy was one of the first to explore the idea of the malleability or fluidity of identity.”

“I think I was part of a movement, a generation, and maybe the most popular one of that movement at the time, but it probably would have happened without me,” says Sherman. “The art world was ready for something new, something beyond painting. A group of mostly women happened to be the ones to sort of take that on, partly because they felt excluded from the rest of the [male] art world, and thought, ‘Nobody is playing with photography. Let’s take that as our tool.’”

These two quotations emphasize two significant changes in culture: the empowerment of women in the arts and the fluidity of identity in the digital age. Women who felt left out of the male-dominated art scene took up photography as a medium to explore personal reinvention, as exemplified by artists such as Cindy Sherman, her work helped redefine art by challenging traditional norms of identity and artistic expression.

New York Times | The Ugly Beauty of Cindy Sherman

For 40 years, Cindy Sherman, the great chameleon of our time, has created more than 500 photographs and almost as many distinct characters. She has transformed herself into vamps and victims, biker chicks and slasher babes, lonely-hearts and killer clowns.

Despite loathing selfies (“so vulgar”), Sherman has recently taken to Instagram, where she has been producing a series of images utterly unlike anything she has created.

Cindy Sherman, in my opinion, has always been ahead of her time. Her 2017 Instagram selfies, which were included in the article, made me think about the images produced by artificial intelligence today and how we, as users, engage with them.