{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":91,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0eb3abe7a771ed661d1001e9c4887b632193ab090ab23a4ec7a117479cd08007"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"Using the selfie format as the visual representation of a luxury brand thus collapses these aspects of traditional fashion photography. First, there is no expert mediating aesthetic value, as now the models become the arbiters of photographic quality themselves. There is no voyeuristic game of seduction as the model’s gaze looks back into the mirror and thus the audience exclusively consumes the model’s own seductive play with themselves. The model, instead of the professional photographer, has the power to mediate the ways that their “beauty” will appear to the public. The fashion selfie plays within the discourse of empowerment as now it is the model that initiates the hedonistic game and therefore the model is not merely an object to be consumed by the photographer’s and audience’s gaze but an active subject creating their own imagery. Of course, in the fashion world this empowerment is deceptive as it is again the creative director curating the fashion brand who decides which selfies are allowed to be publicly shown.\n\nIn short, the use of selfies is an anti-fashion statement that questions fashion’s reliance on quality, elegance, and beauty, registering a symbolic revolt against conventional fashion iconography. To go back to the production of reflexivity in communicative capitalism, the use of selfies invites audiences to question, reflect upon, and momentarily transgress the rules of fashion as a social system as instead of demonizing them as banal and lowclass. Vetements welcomes their lowliness into this system and thus violates its archetypal values. This insertion of an utterly banal practice into luxury fashion milieus is again resonant of Duchamp’s appropriation of the mass and the unworthy in readymade art, yet as we saw with ugliness and will see with poverty in the next section, it is exclusively oriented toward corporate profit. Negativity is curated in a way that the risk of a backlash is contained and the whole enterprise continues to add value to the brand.\n\nIn the Vetements selfies (Figure 4.2), the models render their own, supposedly unmediated and unfiltered, eroticism available to viewers; the selfies are unpolished, with no make-up or efects, as if they would be quickly sent to a friend. Most of the time these models are not luxury fashion professionals but aspiring ones typically with (only) thousands of Instagram followers. Their feeds may contain posed photos but also posts from their everyday life, most often overtly emphasizing their sexuality and cool lifestyles. This is another curatorial-marketing strategy as by tagging “ordinary persons”, Vetements links with “the people” instead of the elites (although again it is only the elites who can aford its clothes). The Vetements selfies communicate a loosely transgressive atmosphere by means of banal and populist tropes. In the bottom right picture, for instance, the female model has a dick sticker on her phone case, claiming a sex-positive hedonistic empowerment. In internet culture, the “unsolicited dick pick” constitutes a threat and the figure of the “dick” usually stands for male aggressiveness and harassment. The positive identification with a dick then rejects the figure of the womanvictim in favor of a woman who celebrates sexuality in her own terms, and it does so as an everyday casual afair instead of as a grand political statement.\n\nAtmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies\n\n91","previous_page":90,"next_page":92}