There is no conspiracy.

[daphnep]

Okay, after a fair amount of interest in my "Improving Aphrodite" post from the other day, I made it public, and I'm happy to see so many people as piqued by the injustice to art and anatomy as I was.

If you're here linked from another site, welcome, and come right in.

I feel I need to say one more word, though, in defense of the company (and the individuals) making the models and reproductions. This is my industry, it's my profession, and I'd like to tell you a little bit about how it works, and in the process, what YOU can do to stop it when you see something like this that enrages you.

Basically, there is no conspiracy. These are NOT a deliberate and wanton desecration of the original artworks; the sculptors and model-makers are "innocent victims" of the system and not deliberately trying to persecute women or harm anyone's body-image. In reproducing art, we often have to alter it a bit to fit the medium, heightening and brightening a painting's colors to make it look better (and more salable) on a poster, for example. What happened here wasn't someone saying "let's make Venus stick-thin and bobble-headed, anorectic and childlike, and carve away the flesh of her tummy and the bones of her hips", they just made a little sculpture and thought, looking at it, that it didn't look "right". So they adjusted a bit. They adjusted using their best eye and their best judgment, in a world where their own eyes and judgment have been formed by a million other images that came before this one. For every Aphrodite this model-maker has seen, he/she has also seen a million Photoshopped movie posters, advertisements, and magazine covers. His/her kids probably play with "Bratz" and "Barbie" dolls. He/she probably has body issues of his/her own, as most people do in our culture today.

And when that individual went to produce a model, they didn't see that it was inaccurate and grotesque, they thought it looked like something their customers (potentially YOU) would want to buy in a store or catalogue. And this is retail, and as I always say, "retail is the purest form of democracy", and it's a democracy that works really well: we can't keep producing anything that you, the consumers, won't buy. Keep in mind that I took those photos from a wholesale, to-the-trade publication. I didn't order those items to put on the shelf for MY customers. You probably haven't seen those on the shelves where you shop. The democracy is working. If no-one orders it, if I and all the other buyers think the pieces are hideous, the model-makers are going to come up with something else to sell. That's how the system works.

So you can write letters to companies if you want to, and explain why you won't buy their products, but it's the "buying the product or not" that the company cares about most--the system has been shaped by consumer sales: Oprah on a magazine cover, thin, sells more issues than Oprah on a magazine cover, curvy. Movie posters that show a disproportionally stretched actress sell more tickets than movie posters that show the actress as she is. "Bratz" dolls sell better than "Happy to be me" dolls, no matter what lip-service is paid to body-love and self acceptance.

So I want you to see these images, so that you can become a more savvy consumer of images, and so that you can recognize the distortions when you see them on retail shelves and advertising yourself. But I'd also like to implore you, before you dash off an angry letter to a wholesale art reproduction company (especially if it's a business you have not previously supported with your dollars) to think about the businesses you do support and the ways that you can positively encourage them to change and improve their habits, and watch out for times you find yourself "voting" for unrealistically deformed bodies, yourself, by responding to advertising that builds on all the same values and misconceptions that formed the terrible shapes of the plastic goddesses, below.

That's all. Thank you, again, for reading.

Comments

[evilegg.livejournal.com]

So they are marketing with their wallets and not recreating with their eyes?

[ampersand.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear.

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't buy it. In either sense.

First, if those artists were making art for themselves, I'd believe that it was an accident, just the result of all the other things they've seen. But they're not doing that. They're making a reproduction. They have source material. Probably photographs sitting right there in front of them. If the result is so shocking to casual, non-artistic observers like me, then there's no way someone with an artist's eye should be able to look at these sculptures next to the source and say, "Yeah, I did a good job." They have to know what they're doing, and that means it has to be deliberate.

Second, I've been thinking about body image a lot lately, because I've been playing Saint's Row 2, a video game with body and face creator. I've created myself. Other people I play with have done the same. One of them created Samuel L. Jackson in the game, and he's instantly recognizable. If a bunch of geeks with a video game sculpting tool can get likenesses so right from photos, then a professional sculptor should be able to do the same.

You're right that it's driven by sales, but I don't think it's possible that the artists are unconscious of the whip.

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

I don't think that was her point. She said, the sculptors are not deliberately trying to persecute women or harm anyone's body-image.

In other words, they're doing it on purpose, but that purpose is not to be harmful, but to make money.

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

But here's the thing: we change art all the time in reproductions, for GOOD reasons. Take Michelangelo's "David", for example. If one makes an exact-scale smaller model of David, he looks TERRIBLE, because on a smaller scale, one notices what one doesn't see, looking up at him from 13 feet below: his head is enormous in proportion to his body. Michelangelo did that deliberately (and it is part of his "genius") because he knew that people would be looking up at him from 13 feet below.

A table-top model does not have the same proportional needs, and to make a reproduction that looks "right", a really good model-maker will gently and respectfully rescale David's head. I myself change art all the time, even looking directly at the original work, and making (I hope) subtle changes to translate the piece into a new medium--taking green out of a portrait's face to keep the subject from looking "ill" in reproduction, or changing tones to make a color translate into silkscreen inks, for example. ALL of the time, all of the changes I make, it is motivated by wanting the finished product to look good, and to be appealing as an object in a store (removed from the original), and to sell, so that we can produce it over and over again and to sell it over and over again.

I'm just a more conservative "changer" of great art, because I happen to respect it so much, I want my changes to be like good plastic surgery, where you can't even tell it was done. This was just poor model-making, sloppy cosmetic surgery by an unskilled person (who, from what I can tell...and remember, I have the additional context of the full catalog... has studied neither anatomy nor classic art)

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Precisely.

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Would there be any other reason to be in the plastic model-making business?

[metawidget]

I'd sort of thought along those lines -- the pictures of the reproductions look very much like tabletop miniatures (for Dungeons and Dragons and such) -- and they're designed to look good standing an inch tall, mostly from above. Macro photos of them often look pretty distorted and a weird mix of chunky and emaciated, but they look good in their normal size and place (among dice, papers and snacks).

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

*laugh*

Yes, exactly. D&D models are a great example. (We know that no-one is ever going to be carrying this model into the galleries in Denmark and holding the two side-by-side.)

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

So the debate over stick-thin models in fashion is now over - it's our fault?

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

I'm not laying "fault"...but we're late enough into the debate that enough people in the industry have tried the alternatives.

A toy company made a "Happy to be me" doll...sales were crap. "Bratz" dolls sales, meanwhile, skyrocketed, and took over, with their bobble-heads and deformed faces.

A magazine company made a "Celebrate Real Women!" magazine (called Mode) and it didn't sell, went out of business after a couple of years.

Fashion designers put on "plus size" fashion shows, even (the latest was in Italy) and you know what? They did it once. Why? Because it didn't move clothing like the shows with skinny models did.

So I ask you, if there's such a cultural consumer demand for "real women", beyond mere lip service, then why are none of these industries able to capitalize on it?

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

And I would agree there is no conspiracy - but our perceptions have been shaped. Super-tall and bony models are part of a very conservative tradition and attempts to change that within the industry are met with all sorts of resistance.

But we humans idealize ourselves, so I have to agree with you - that the marketing of fantasy doesn't lend itself to a big consumer demand for "real women".

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's why I think it's important enough to post those comparison images, just so we can all examine our own perceptions, and hold them up and say "look! How silly we are that we might not even notice them, when we're not paying attention, when it's all so obvious!"

[chaeri.livejournal.com]

well put!

slightly tangential question: i thought Oprah's ratings on TV went up when she was curvier than otherwise? of course, the fact that ratings and sales are tied to her weight says something very scary about the culture...

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Oh, Oprah....poor Oprah. I don't know. We could write a whole book on that woman and her body issues, just between a small handful of us here on lj.

I hope that's true, about the ratings. I hope one day she manages to find a little bit of real body-love, somewhere in among all her other discoveries.

[stachybotrys.livejournal.com]

Something I've been thinking about since your initial post about this is that it seems like a lot of us tend to forget that the original pieces didn't represent stark reality either, but were idealizations that were marketable in their time. It's easy to forget because the reproductions are so badly done and flat out unattractive, but the real world that was contemporary to the original works was most likely not populated by people who looked like those represented any more than the stretched and bobble-headed reproductions look like the majority of the people walking around today. It's not a new phenomenon.

[merimask.livejournal.com]

Hi! Followed a link to your first entry & hence, here.

As a fellow artist, I totally agree & I see where you're coming from. The consumer drives the demand, and yet...it's the culture of mediocrity that gobbles up the skinny models & "skinny art", I think. The outrage (for me, as an artist AND a woman) lies in the fact that this revisionist sculpture was in a magazine selling fine art reproductions, masquerading as fine art. Kitschy fine art, to be sure...but fine art just the same.

On the cover of Vogue, I expect it. Even in BRATZ dolls, it's upsetting & yet, it's what we want as Americans (not me...I wouldn't buy a BRATZ doll for my kid if they were the only toys on earth). But revisionist classical art is as upsetting as revisionist history, & something to be avoided.

I completely understand that some models have to be revised somewhat to make sense in the scaled-down version (your example of "David" was spot-on & completely relevant) but taking classical art body-types & making them look like Kate Moss...that's just ridiculous.

Kudos to you...a very thought-provoking discussion, here. ^_^

[evilegg.livejournal.com]

You'd think they would asking themselves what makes it worthy of modeling in the first plac, and then stay stay true to how it really looks.

[esprix.livejournal.com]

I don't buy the artist saying, "It doesn't look quite right" and adjusting. They're obviously using the original as reference, so how can they *not* see they're making it different?

Now, if you mean "doesn't quite look right" as in "doesn't quite look like what it should look like in today's market/based on what I see around me" regardless of their profit motive, then that I could believe; i.e., if it was subconscious. Similarly, if they were told by a dilettante of a boss that she was too fat and no one would buy her that way, I could believe that, too.

[placeholder.livejournal.com]

Fascinating point about David! But the most noticeable thing about the tabletop Venae was that their heads had gotten enormous, actually, as though they were the only parts not shrunk.

Though to be fair, all apart from the cultural shift toward tiny skinny nudes, they don't even seem to be reproductions exactly so much as inspired-by homages. Their postures are different from the originals in a dozen little ways that don't seem to be any kind of functional adaptation, not even for the purpose of skinnifying.

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

So they're bad because the sculptors are just bad? Ok, that I can see, but it raises another question. Why hire bad artists to make your repros when there must be a zillion starving artists could do a better job? Makes me feel bad for them.

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Huh. You're right. Botticelli's female neighbors were probably all gossiping "have you seen those hips and those boneless, elegant hands? What an outrage!"

Ha. I love that.

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Badly done, and also indicative of our silly, brainwashed culture full of people who don't even know how naked women actually look. But not responsible for that culture.

I'm fine with people using the examples as a jumping-off point for talking about self-image in contemporary culture, etc. I just think it's misguided to send off angry emails to that company, as if it's something they came up with all on their own out of malicious intent.

(I keep imagining this poor company: it's probably got all of six staffmembers and a warehouse, and one of the owners has a connection to a guy in China who does plastics. Monday morning, the person who runs the desk is gonna be swamped with angry emails from random internet people who are completely disconnected from their industry. 8000 emails later, their sales are still steady, and all 6 breath a sigh of relief, because the outrage is completely irrelevant to their business.)

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

They might be sort of using the original as reference. These aren't officially licensed reproductions. This is some guy/gal in China with no fine-art background, probably working from a postcard or jpeg of a sculpture which he/she will probably never see in his/her life. I'm gonna cut them some slack.

[daphnep.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think one of the details that makes a difference here is that it wasn't a magazine per se, it was a wholesale, "to-the-trade" industry catalog.

It's an advertisement, like, "hey, if your customers are interested in art, you might be interested in what we have to offer." And I (and I presume others in my position who DO have fine art backgrounds and who also DO know a little bit about female anatomy) are free to say "no thank you". Which I did. And I thought the models were funny, because they were so pathetic and so poor in the full context of "products I can buy for my fine-art-loving customers". I think it's terribly sad if that were to be the only experience with Botticelli a person would ever have, and I think it's a sad indicator of what people (and businesses) expect Americans to want to buy, these days.

But I'm not buying them...so I'm not even giving people in my little slice of the universe an opportunity for that to be their only art experience, or their only concept of what a nekkid woman looks like.

I just wanted to pass the chuckle on to other art-loving, woman-loving friends before I chucked the terrifying thing into the trash can.