(no subject)
While browsing the "The most popular bookmarks on Delicious right now", I bumped into this. It's not that interesting, but I did have some off-the-cuff remarks that wouldn't have all fit into the bookmark's "notes" field.
1) About a zillion people have delicioused this. It bills itself as art, and people are tagging accordingly. All the stuff about what he's getting at (FAQ, artist's bio) is in German, so I can't read it. Why do I have the hunch that when translated into plainspeak, it would read, "uh, nothing"?
2) What exactly is the appeal here? I don't question it though, because it snuck up on me: At first I thought, "boooooring". Then I thought, "well, I've already looked at 15, might as well look at the rest." And then I was like, "I totally want to model for this."
3) Maybe the appeal is occasionally spotting a body and being all, "ooh! that one looks like me! we could share clothes". That was kinda fun.
4) The models are nothing special or unusual. Just like at every art school, they're mostly women and many have piercings and tattoos.
5) Unlike in art school, all these women shave exhaustively. Is that a European thing?
6) The body modification/model connection is fairly clear to me: people who feel comfortable with and in control of their bodies, have an aesthetic approach to them, blah blah blah.
7) On the other hand, the gender/model thing still puzzles me (and if I've discussed this with you before, apologies for redundancy). See, in school we were always desperately short on male models. I'd try to persuade my male friends to help out ("$15/hour and all you do is sit there! lots of breaks!") and always to no avail. The response was invariably, "Awesome, can I wear my boxers?" Are women just that much more used to being objectified? Or is there actually something to all the stories you hear these days about a new wave of men who have a poorer body image than women?
As I get older, I care about these things a lot less... or maybe it's just that I'm thinking about them a lot differently. Interesting diversion though, plus I'm way more confident blogging about this stuff than about data structures or whatever (even though that's the stuff that's mostly on my mind these days). Maybe I'll start a separate novice blog, far from the experts who like to fervently demonstrate heap-sort and wage heated battle over zero-indexing ;)