Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jun/11/frida-kahlo-fridolatry-artist-myth

by Thevet • 8 years ago

69 46 8 years 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.

omegaworks2• 8 years 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.

fredley• 8 years 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.

ovao2• 8 years 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.

kjeetgill2• 8 years 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

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Maybe they could do the same to Salvador Dali.

eagletusk• 8 years ago

Next up USA will bandwagon and put Frida on the 500 note like they did in Mexico in 2010.

baursak• 8 years ago

Yup: https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/915543492977455104

dalbasal2• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

We won't know until we draw a representative random sample.

jsmthrowaway2• 8 years 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.

fullshark• 8 years 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.

JoeAltmaier3• 8 years 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?

TFortunato4• 8 years ago

What article did you read? The word "colonializing", doesn't appear in this article at all.

pjc50• 8 years ago

You don't know what it means, but you're provoked by it?

SiempreViernes2• 8 years ago

The article talks about how the talented painter Frida Kahlo is understood by many as simply an exotic snack, and finished with the extreme example about how someone is declared to be dressed as Kahlo by the single feature of having a unibrow.

A comparable example would be an article about the hollow understanding of the 1960 hacker culture finishing with a story about how someone was declared to be dressed as Stallman because they held a printed email.

tomjakubowski• 8 years ago

with a story about how someone was declared to be dressed as Stallman because they held a printed email.

As an intentional Richard Stallman costume, a single printed email would be great. Although maybe too easily confused with a Knuth dress-up. :-)

kjeetgill2• 8 years ago

Hey, thats only because I have the long hair and beard everyday. Nobody appreciates the subtlety of the Stallman costume I wear year round.

Joking aside, while I see what the author was getting at I think it's a little unfair considering how prominently her face and brows are featured in her own work. Kahlo CHOSE that as her icon [0].

[0] https://www.sartle.com/artwork/my-nurse-and-i-frida-kahlo

mwexler• 8 years 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=...)

alphakappa• 8 years 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&ye...

Pxtl2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.)

Pxtl2• 8 years 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.

omegaworks2• 8 years ago

And they flattened her into a egotistical narcissist.

Fitting for a company that tried to trademark "Dia De Los Muertos" for the film.

Avshalom2• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

One of my favorite troll attempts was when someone 'fixed' [1] Frida Kahlo.

1. https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-fr...

abruzzi• 8 years 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.

jsmthrowaway2• 8 years 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_Bakhtiari2• 8 years ago

Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon

Is this a man? He/she looks rather manish.

jonathanlb• 8 years ago

If you are not trolling, Frida Kahlo was a woman. One would know that from a cursory glance at her Wikipedia page.

M_Bakhtiari2• 8 years 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.

Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry

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