7 ms·

Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry

69 points by Thevet 8y ago

fredley 8y ago
Anecdata: I was shopping for a birthday card recently, and Frida Kahlo is everywhere at the moment. Her image has been fully commoditised, so you'll find stylised pictures of it on almost anything. Her image is becoming as ubiquitous as Che Guevara's in the 90's, or it feels that way, and in becoming so I imagine 90% of the people who pick up a Frida tote probably have no idea who she was or why she's famous, other than she had thick eyebrows.
- ovao 8y ago
  Her face is also peppered liberally in murals and street art in Los Angeles. It's unusual, because no other artist in Los Angeles seems to be particularly celebrated in that way — it's Kahlo's image that seems to be important more so than her art. It would be interesting to chat with the people responsible for those pieces to get a sense of what they knew about Kahlo and what attributes about her they find interesting. I have a similar hunch that many of the people plastering her face around the city probably actually know fairly little about her.
  - kjeetgill 8y ago
    To be fair her face is also peppered liberally in her own art work. Page through the carousel at the bottom[0], I think I count 2 without her face in it. That said I suspect that, like many artists, she's iconic for being iconic. Her works have made their way into our cultural consciousness even if her ideas or her personal life haven't. I think that's okay. [0]: https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp
    - ovao 8y ago
      That’s something I hadn’t really considered. The link could very well be that simple.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    Maybe they could do the same to Salvador Dali.
  - eagletusk 8y ago
    Next up USA will bandwagon and put Frida on the 500 note like they did in Mexico in 2010.
- baursak 8y ago
  Yup: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/915543492977455104 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/915543492977455104
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I wonder what the correct ignorant assumption to make would be. Does this have some sort of meaningful... erm... meaning, or not? I mean, I think you could make a case for some sort of sign of the times...
  - curiousgal 8y ago
    We won't know until we draw a representative random sample.
  - jsmthrowaway 8y ago
    The meaning is that capitalist structure and incentives will necessarily lead to exploitation of culture. There is no moral dimension to this statement: it is merely a causal relationship based on how commerce works, how human psychology and purchasing behavior works, and what art and culture are widely accepted to mean. Commerce does not accommodate our ideas about cultural enjoyment very well due to the way it fundamentally functions. Them's just the breaks, and it's no more punitive to point it out than saying water is wet. That meaning you're touching on by asking, which is what commerce means in relationship with the arts, is graduate-level theory that you could doctorate in, and remains one of the most debated topics in modern times with the unique twist of cultural leaders outside academia usually being the voices that teach us well. Try concretely defining cultural exploitation, for example, in a way that sets aside personal perspective on the concept. I'd contend it's insoluble.
    - dalbasal 8y ago
      People sell stuff with art on it?
fullshark 8y ago
What an odd ending to this piece. I don’t even understand the authors purpose in writing it now. What point is she trying to make, this is all over the place.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Right - all sorts of provoking language for no purpose. Everything is 'colonializing' whatever that means. How about: famous people get interpreted by different cultures differently?
  - TFortunato 8y ago
    What article did you read? The word "colonializing", doesn't appear in this article at all.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Ah this was the line I remembered: "This instance of colonising narratives in cultural translations was not the end but the beginning. "
      - TFortunato 8y ago
        Gotcha. And to be fair I don't want to just pile on, and criticize your reaction to it. I understand where you are coming from when you say: How about famous people get interpreted by different cultures differently", but I think it misses the larger point of the article, and the "colonising" quote in particular. Granted I am not a art guy by any means, but I took it to be referencing the larger concept of "cultural imperialism." In particular, it's the idea that Frida's art, or in this particular case her looks are not good enough, are not able to stand on their own, and therefore we need to tweak them to make them more palatable. So in this case it was "make Frida more sexy" in this ostensibly biographical picture about her, by applying a standard of sexiness and beauty seen by our culture, e.g. "less unibrow..." In a larger context, I take the idea of "colonising" culture, or the phrase "cultural imperialism" to be referencing similar themes: -that the 'natives' can't do things on their own. - That rich cultural traditions are somehow inferior, or need to be reduced down to a handful of icons w/o understanding of the larger context around them. I'm probably rambling - again not an art guy, and you can probably find a better reference on the topic than me :-) EDIT: So something I thought of that might be a good metaphor. On HN, there is often a lot of snark about media representations of "hackers" and tech folks in general, and how they get things wrong, or boil down complex ideas into an overly simplified (and wrong) version, or will try to make something that "looks techy", or 'looks like a hacker' while being clearly ridiculous to actual technologists. So while again its not the same, there are parallels - Basically this idea that Frida, and 'foreign' artists in general, can be boiled down to a few tropes or symbols to be come this immediately recognizable 'idea-of-frida' or 'idea-of-foreign/exotic-art' while completely discarding the nuance and the actual work / process of the artist.
SiempreViernes 8y ago
I wonder if stories like these really make people treat other cultures with respect, or just make the fearful that everyone else is just out for revenge and thus just amplify their avoidance of anything foreign.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  It's almost like you should learn a bit about what you take from other people. If that's too hard for you, go home and eat your mayo on white bread.
mwexler 8y ago
It feels like her visage has become more famous than her images or her name, though you do see a gradual rise in interest over the last few years of the phrase "Frida Kahlo"... (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=frida%20kahlo https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- alphakappa 8y ago
  Trends only shows data for the past few years, but searching usage in print can be instructive. Frida seems to have become hugely popular beginning in the 90's. Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be a rise in usage after the early 2000's Hollywood movie. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&year_start=1930&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CFrida%20Kahlo%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&ye...
Pxtl 8y ago
And this is why I was a little bothered by her inclusion in Coco. I loved Coco. It's a fantastic movie. But putting Frida in there as a recurring character seemed kind of bandwagon-y for the normally-timeless Pixar.
- ghaff 8y ago
  OMG, that went whoosh over my head. (In my defense, I watched it on a trans-Atlantic flight so I probably wasn't at peak mental state.)
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Hah, I know the feeling. Flying to India I couldn't sleep and watched so many movies with my brains just fried from low oxygen. I have no idea what Emperor's New Groove is about.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  And they flattened her into a egotistical narcissist. Fitting for a company that tried to trademark "Dia De Los Muertos" for the film.
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    not so much "egotistical narcissist" as Central Casting Eccentric Artist. They could have replaced her with a skeleton in black leggings and a turtleneck and it would have played identically. And that's what hit me as flat. A quick reference when Héctor tries to slip through customs, or like the El Santo name drop: fine. But instead of honoring her art or her politics they just had her as a bad theater choreographer. And plot-wise like they absolutely could have had her agitating about the socio/economic stratification in the land of the dead and barely changed anything whfg unir zvthry naq snzvyl fyvc va juvyr thneqf ner qvfgenpgrq ol n evbg . That said Coco is on Netflix right now and it's delightful.
splintercell 8y ago
One of my favorite troll attempts was when someone 'fixed' [1] Frida Kahlo. 1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-frida-kahlo https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-fr...
abruzzi 8y ago
I'm not very knowledgable about Frida Kahlo but I was a little nonplussed by the throwaway line about the film "Frida" and Harvey Weinstein. It seems like a guilt-by-association tactic. Its been a while since I saw it but my recollection is Julie Taymor's film doesn't seem to fall into trap that she claims of the other "fridolatry". It certainly doesn't portray her as a passive victim, but as an active creator of her life and art.
- jsmthrowaway 8y ago
  There was a bit of victimhood in the narrative, particularly around the extramarital affairs. That was my ex-wife's favorite film so I've seen it several times, and I finally deeply read about Kahlo (the Trotsky story especially intrigued me), and the impressions and conclusions I drew regarding some of the portrayed events didn't jibe with how I interpreted them in the film. Even without considering historical accuracy, after a few viewings, it becomes clear that the film is not well made despite Taymor. I think at the time it was an awards darling because, though it seems much more pedestrian now, a studio system film about a female Mexican cultural icon was even more unlikely to see the light of day then. I remember discussion around it highlighting its progressive nature, so that likely framed reception of the film, despite the occasionally clumsy script and at times loose interpretation of the subject matter. To be honest, when I saw this link pop up on HN, I immediately thought of the film as an example, rather than the Barbie (which is even worse, but oddly, I can't verbalize why). As for Weinstein, that attributed pull-out quote, if accurate, stands alone to demonstrate thought behind the portrayal. I'd say it's fair. Many figures are tough to interpret beyond death, to be fair, and maybe we're all wrong about her. Who knows. Arguable she'd find us discussing it amusing.
M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
> Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon Is this a man? He/she looks rather manish.
- jonathanlb 8y ago
  If you are not trolling, Frida Kahlo was a woman. One would know that from a cursory glance at her Wikipedia page.
  - M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
    You don't know that these days because even men who start presenting themselves as women get female pronouns by default all over the place. Not trolling, I've never seen or heard of this woman before.
    - Avshalom 8y ago
      If, impossibly, the exact same person had grown up in some other time or place who knows, but in the life she lived she was born female and lived her life as a woman, but with a defiant femininity; rooted in herself, her body, not in the capitalist beauty myth (N.B. the communist beauty myth wasn't much better and she rejected that as well).

69 points by Thevet 8y ago

Anecdata: I was shopping for a birthday card recently, and Frida Kahlo is everywhere at the moment. Her image has been fully commoditised, so you'll find stylised pictures of it on almost anything. Her image is becoming as ubiquitous as Che Guevara's in the 90's, or it feels that way, and in becoming so I imagine 90% of the people who pick up a Frida tote probably have no idea who she was or why she's famous, other than she had thick eyebrows.

ovao 8y ago
Her face is also peppered liberally in murals and street art in Los Angeles. It's unusual, because no other artist in Los Angeles seems to be particularly celebrated in that way — it's Kahlo's image that seems to be important more so than her art. It would be interesting to chat with the people responsible for those pieces to get a sense of what they knew about Kahlo and what attributes about her they find interesting. I have a similar hunch that many of the people plastering her face around the city probably actually know fairly little about her.
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  To be fair her face is also peppered liberally in her own art work. Page through the carousel at the bottom[0], I think I count 2 without her face in it. That said I suspect that, like many artists, she's iconic for being iconic. Her works have made their way into our cultural consciousness even if her ideas or her personal life haven't. I think that's okay. [0]: https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp
  - ovao 8y ago
    That’s something I hadn’t really considered. The link could very well be that simple.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Maybe they could do the same to Salvador Dali.
- eagletusk 8y ago
  Next up USA will bandwagon and put Frida on the 500 note like they did in Mexico in 2010.
baursak 8y ago
Yup: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/915543492977455104 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/915543492977455104
dalbasal 8y ago
I wonder what the correct ignorant assumption to make would be. Does this have some sort of meaningful... erm... meaning, or not? I mean, I think you could make a case for some sort of sign of the times...
- curiousgal 8y ago
  We won't know until we draw a representative random sample.
- jsmthrowaway 8y ago
  The meaning is that capitalist structure and incentives will necessarily lead to exploitation of culture. There is no moral dimension to this statement: it is merely a causal relationship based on how commerce works, how human psychology and purchasing behavior works, and what art and culture are widely accepted to mean. Commerce does not accommodate our ideas about cultural enjoyment very well due to the way it fundamentally functions. Them's just the breaks, and it's no more punitive to point it out than saying water is wet. That meaning you're touching on by asking, which is what commerce means in relationship with the arts, is graduate-level theory that you could doctorate in, and remains one of the most debated topics in modern times with the unique twist of cultural leaders outside academia usually being the voices that teach us well. Try concretely defining cultural exploitation, for example, in a way that sets aside personal perspective on the concept. I'd contend it's insoluble.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    People sell stuff with art on it?

fullshark 8y ago

What an odd ending to this piece. I don’t even understand the authors purpose in writing it now. What point is she trying to make, this is all over the place.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Right - all sorts of provoking language for no purpose. Everything is 'colonializing' whatever that means. How about: famous people get interpreted by different cultures differently?
- TFortunato 8y ago
  What article did you read? The word "colonializing", doesn't appear in this article at all.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Ah this was the line I remembered: "This instance of colonising narratives in cultural translations was not the end but the beginning. "
    - TFortunato 8y ago
      Gotcha. And to be fair I don't want to just pile on, and criticize your reaction to it. I understand where you are coming from when you say: How about famous people get interpreted by different cultures differently", but I think it misses the larger point of the article, and the "colonising" quote in particular. Granted I am not a art guy by any means, but I took it to be referencing the larger concept of "cultural imperialism." In particular, it's the idea that Frida's art, or in this particular case her looks are not good enough, are not able to stand on their own, and therefore we need to tweak them to make them more palatable. So in this case it was "make Frida more sexy" in this ostensibly biographical picture about her, by applying a standard of sexiness and beauty seen by our culture, e.g. "less unibrow..." In a larger context, I take the idea of "colonising" culture, or the phrase "cultural imperialism" to be referencing similar themes: -that the 'natives' can't do things on their own. - That rich cultural traditions are somehow inferior, or need to be reduced down to a handful of icons w/o understanding of the larger context around them. I'm probably rambling - again not an art guy, and you can probably find a better reference on the topic than me :-) EDIT: So something I thought of that might be a good metaphor. On HN, there is often a lot of snark about media representations of "hackers" and tech folks in general, and how they get things wrong, or boil down complex ideas into an overly simplified (and wrong) version, or will try to make something that "looks techy", or 'looks like a hacker' while being clearly ridiculous to actual technologists. So while again its not the same, there are parallels - Basically this idea that Frida, and 'foreign' artists in general, can be boiled down to a few tropes or symbols to be come this immediately recognizable 'idea-of-frida' or 'idea-of-foreign/exotic-art' while completely discarding the nuance and the actual work / process of the artist.

SiempreViernes 8y ago

I wonder if stories like these really make people treat other cultures with respect, or just make the fearful that everyone else is just out for revenge and thus just amplify their avoidance of anything foreign.

omegaworks 8y ago
It's almost like you should learn a bit about what you take from other people. If that's too hard for you, go home and eat your mayo on white bread.

mwexler 8y ago

It feels like her visage has become more famous than her images or her name, though you do see a gradual rise in interest over the last few years of the phrase "Frida Kahlo"... (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=frida%20kahlo https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alphakappa 8y ago
Trends only shows data for the past few years, but searching usage in print can be instructive. Frida seems to have become hugely popular beginning in the 90's. Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be a rise in usage after the early 2000's Hollywood movie. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&year_start=1930&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CFrida%20Kahlo%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&ye...

Pxtl 8y ago

And this is why I was a little bothered by her inclusion in Coco. I loved Coco. It's a fantastic movie. But putting Frida in there as a recurring character seemed kind of bandwagon-y for the normally-timeless Pixar.

ghaff 8y ago
OMG, that went whoosh over my head. (In my defense, I watched it on a trans-Atlantic flight so I probably wasn't at peak mental state.)
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Hah, I know the feeling. Flying to India I couldn't sleep and watched so many movies with my brains just fried from low oxygen. I have no idea what Emperor's New Groove is about.
omegaworks 8y ago
And they flattened her into a egotistical narcissist. Fitting for a company that tried to trademark "Dia De Los Muertos" for the film.
- Avshalom 8y ago
  not so much "egotistical narcissist" as Central Casting Eccentric Artist. They could have replaced her with a skeleton in black leggings and a turtleneck and it would have played identically. And that's what hit me as flat. A quick reference when Héctor tries to slip through customs, or like the El Santo name drop: fine. But instead of honoring her art or her politics they just had her as a bad theater choreographer. And plot-wise like they absolutely could have had her agitating about the socio/economic stratification in the land of the dead and barely changed anything whfg unir zvthry naq snzvyl fyvc va juvyr thneqf ner qvfgenpgrq ol n evbg . That said Coco is on Netflix right now and it's delightful.

splintercell 8y ago

One of my favorite troll attempts was when someone 'fixed' [1] Frida Kahlo. 1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-frida-kahlo https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-fr...

abruzzi 8y ago

I'm not very knowledgable about Frida Kahlo but I was a little nonplussed by the throwaway line about the film "Frida" and Harvey Weinstein. It seems like a guilt-by-association tactic. Its been a while since I saw it but my recollection is Julie Taymor's film doesn't seem to fall into trap that she claims of the other "fridolatry". It certainly doesn't portray her as a passive victim, but as an active creator of her life and art.

jsmthrowaway 8y ago
There was a bit of victimhood in the narrative, particularly around the extramarital affairs. That was my ex-wife's favorite film so I've seen it several times, and I finally deeply read about Kahlo (the Trotsky story especially intrigued me), and the impressions and conclusions I drew regarding some of the portrayed events didn't jibe with how I interpreted them in the film. Even without considering historical accuracy, after a few viewings, it becomes clear that the film is not well made despite Taymor. I think at the time it was an awards darling because, though it seems much more pedestrian now, a studio system film about a female Mexican cultural icon was even more unlikely to see the light of day then. I remember discussion around it highlighting its progressive nature, so that likely framed reception of the film, despite the occasionally clumsy script and at times loose interpretation of the subject matter. To be honest, when I saw this link pop up on HN, I immediately thought of the film as an example, rather than the Barbie (which is even worse, but oddly, I can't verbalize why). As for Weinstein, that attributed pull-out quote, if accurate, stands alone to demonstrate thought behind the portrayal. I'd say it's fair. Many figures are tough to interpret beyond death, to be fair, and maybe we're all wrong about her. Who knows. Arguable she'd find us discussing it amusing.

M_Bakhtiari 8y ago

> Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon Is this a man? He/she looks rather manish.

jonathanlb 8y ago
If you are not trolling, Frida Kahlo was a woman. One would know that from a cursory glance at her Wikipedia page.
- M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
  You don't know that these days because even men who start presenting themselves as women get female pronouns by default all over the place. Not trolling, I've never seen or heard of this woman before.
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    If, impossibly, the exact same person had grown up in some other time or place who knows, but in the life she lived she was born female and lived her life as a woman, but with a defiant femininity; rooted in herself, her body, not in the capitalist beauty myth (N.B. the communist beauty myth wasn't much better and she rejected that as well).