Early in 2009 I began painting journalists, bloggers and infolebrities, especially those affecting New York City as best I could describe it. The great digital continuum had swallowed an industry and was steadily digesting. Panic and opportunism came in all colors, flavors, and shapes. That was either the point or the problem.

I gave 99 of the works away for free. Free was a feature. Free was everywhere and it was a failed experiment and a new reality for journalists and creatives and just about everyone. Free was the played out pop song that kept on playing and I covered it even if I resented it a little too.

There was a lot of press and coverage for the work. Many reveled in the project, some were genuinely touched-- a few found it impotent and annoying. I was described on a comment board as "an instant personality." My kingdom for an instant.



Subjects ranged from the famous and the dead to the infamous to the interpersonal to the random. Edward R. Murrow, to Perez Hilton, to my food blogging neighbors.

I meant to paint stolen glances, distortions, cartoons, and one-offs. I wanted a range of insight and distance, people I'd considered at length and others that rose up in flash bulbs and hot links from the infinity cloud. The images were click throughs, screen grabs, precious, shoddy, delicate and inexact. Often I failed to make a 'good' picture. I kept a lot of the failures around. Poured urethane on top. Tried again.



Aesthetic debates are usually left to those too busy or too clever to make images themselves. In this case I was aiming for something like Alex Katz in the Weimar with a ballpoint pen and a corn syrup addiction.

Each portrait was to be barely interesting enough in its own right, and terrifically interesting relationally. That's part thesis and part coping mechanism. It's a form of premeditated honesty which makes everyone nervous, including me. A commenter on The Awl described these works as "painted by Francis Bacon's unicorn in the manner of Velasquez's younger cousins' bunny rabbit." Sounds about right.



When the project caught some internet eyeballs, the list of subjects was opened up to crowd manipulation. You could email me if you wanted to be painted, and suggest who to kick out. The "media" was just about anyone who self defined. A lot of people did.

I couldn't keep up and I started cherry picking and some people got upset and other people just didn't care, though no one went so far as to ask to be removed. I wandered around with an enlarged sense of both purpose and guilt, like every other MFA I knew.

This was around the time I started to meet many of the subjects in social eddies and worry about their vanity, as much as my own. Sensitive times--that particular commute when you first notice all outward facing surfaces of a grisly city double as mirrors and broadcast your mid-west gait, your disney grin. Sensitive times when all of your imaginary friends learn your name too.

Vanity was compounded by production crews as it happened everyone was on the cusp of reality television. Some of us did it and some of us didn't and everyone was equally disappointed. One show that happened was called Work of Art. There were three or four others trying to exist that didn't make it. Realities unrealized.



NDA's were passed out as party favors, social affectations became narrative device, there were mustachioed lesbians starting art labor unions, there were people intent on always wearing the same hat, there were people wiping their foreheads with sponsored wet naps, there were shows curated by NBA stars, there were endless James Franco discussions, all hyper color figments, bodyparts, ambitions, nippleslips, the bitrate collateral of peoplematter laser pointing their x-ray vision to new media campaigns with iconic bullet points and riveting headlines--we could all see through it, man-- This Is The Worst It Has Ever Been.

But damn. Damn if the free booze came on the tabs of plutocratic data sadists who would choke a digital kitten just to know my age, sex, location, and favorite band. Damn the correlation. Damn if my digital habits were the complicit inertia of late-capitalism bourgeoisie-point-oh. The academic lot were applying for tenure on their "Fall of Rome" doctoral work which most often concluded in Lady Gaga as the final solution and vague references to peaceful off-the-grid societies where friendship was not only a metaphor. It was all worth capturing, we precocious hamsters outrunning our wheel. Poses beget poses. It was the perpetually doom of 'liking' everything. It was the 'sublime like'.



These lonely, basic paradigms are the tenants of SoMe art. You use the tools of Social Media to organize data sets which define you against and in relation to your peers. You manipulate your data, either digitally, or in reality- to actualize some version of the person you would like to be. Everyone has access to the tools. Some are more inventive than others. It's not a movement, it's a symptom. I have been against defining it, really. Naming it is enough. Prescriptions are sure to follow.


One peculiar evening I found myself debating the merits of this project with a silicon valley venture capitalist who I'd also read enjoyed cliff diving. We were atop the modern design museum improbably at twilight and overhearing Chopin by a measured hand who kept excusing herself, 'I am too drunk!' though the chords rang true--both sweet and vicious. The VC asked, "doesn't all great art involve suffering?"

It did, I said, but the moment was lost profundity; too forced. More often I am thinking of a cheeseburger jingle or the generic ring tone I can't bring myself to change. The absurd details of my actual experience is rarely a match for the vapid, technicolor screaming of an inner monkey life. Whistles, ads and distractors. I am always playing the inner ocarina.

Social Media does involve suffering, but it's the integrated malaise so cleverly disguised that to mention it, one drowns in their own solipsism. It is sad, for example, that instead of using the machines to remind myself of important things, I am more often trying to remind the machines that I am very important.

"Why didn't you paint yourself?" the cliff diver asked me. I could see he lived very much in the moment.

I did though. I am this acidic, jubulient, technicolored blob. I am all these little sketches and drips and formal abortions. It's not how I look, but it's how I feel-- and if I could zoom out enough it'd be derivative Chuck Close bullshit. But I don't have that kind of discipline. I am painting from the point of view of the goldfish. 'Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.'



Through this work I met a lot of exceptionally decent people. Here I offset any cost benefit analysis of giving things away for free. Reciprocity is the willful suspension homo-economous.

Tao Lin and Stephen Elliot read one evening at the gallery. Tao's piece was an eleven minute explicit description of a finger bang. Following that a woman from a large PR firm who came to the reading asked me to do something cool for HP printers, you know, for free, which I suppose she reasoned was my shtick.

William Powhida was there in the front row sitting next to her with a 40 oz in a paper bag. I didn't do the HP thing.

My friend Nicole Atkins played an acoustic set a few weeks later. She was haunting and lovely and this had nothing to do with social media but I had the room and so we had a show. There were some mutton chopped stragglers who stopped by her set. They were in a band called "Ass Transit." Later they stole a painting and used the iPad to display porn- an interracial cum shot as I recall. It was sort of beautiful. New media's most facile use, unencumbered. The iPad saving a beleaguered industry one cum shot at a time.

Early on I met the social media anti-guru Zachary Adam Cohen. A former derivatives trader turned food blogger. Often he checked in to see if our friendship was 'too offensive.' His twitter stream read like a truck stop bathroom as dictated by Saul Bellows. Some people didn't get him. Zach leaned right--but mostly he preferred to piss into the wind. He was so earnest it's horrifying. I spoke with Zach a lot early on and don't hear from him as much now. A few times in your life you get to tell someone they're 'worth a lot of em.'



On May 8th, 2010 I gave away 99 of the works to those who had submitted the best requests. The others were placed for sale on 'the paywall.'

Some sold. A few others were stolen. All forms of exclusivity have their champions and their usurpers.

Trying to depict the New York media society is already failure of scale and perspective- at one's own inclusion the reality is quickly diminished. It is a gimmick, a mileau at which to cast poses.

At one's omission, the city is twice a lie. The outsider can never be truly inside, the insider can never see their own devise, and in that way this city is neither skeleton or guts, it's all connective tissue.

If any one soul were to leave, on any one night, not check in or steady their blog, not pass their bits for we would all die instant deaths-and often do. These avatars are imitations of life that need constant assurance

but had learned not to reveal themselves so to preserve job prospects and better illusions

this project, a peon to association always toed the line short of friendship--and put

the acute grief for the most heretical but also true thing I can say for social media

of all the good that social media might have done- friendship is a concept dealt the greatest damage.