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This week, @freeze_magazine artist Cem A. joins Ben Davis on the podcast.
If you love art and use Instagram, you’re probably familiar with the @freeze_magazine account. This is a freeze spelled with an E, as in “Help me, I’m freezing”, rather than an I, as in popular art magazines and art he fairs. While this certainly isn’t the first art meme account, Freeze Magazine, which currently has over 160,000 followers, has gained a particularly large audience by turning the lens of his humor on the art world’s foibles. Masu.
Sometimes we make fun of incomprehensible art talks or vent the artist’s relatable anxieties. They may also use the meme format for more poignant effect, criticizing the poor treatment of artists and workers at the bottom of the art world hierarchy. Importantly, in the years since the account exploded, the account’s creator, known as Cem A., has done something rather unlikely. He made the leap from meme creation to real-world exhibition creation based on his unique voice on Instagram.
“If you only depict the dynamics of good and bad in your meme, it’s not very interesting. Instead, it’s important to create something that shows the different sides in between,” says Cem. “More than that, one of the meme’s functions is to just say, ‘The Emperor has no clothes,’ when it needs to be said.”
Commissioned by prestigious institutions such as Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and London’s Birkin, Cem delivers IRL projects that cleverly toe the line between digital culture, museum outreach, and conceptual art. doing.
Cem is best known as a funny and witty internet personality, but we’re curious about what it means to use memes as a platform for criticism, and what it means to take them seriously as a unique creative form. It says some very serious things about what it means. , and the strange and evolving relationship between social media and arts organizations.
Listen to other episodes:
Lucy Lippard’s life inside and outside of art
Art Angle Roundup: All About 2023
Artnet writers talk about art that brings joy
Curator Klaus Biesenbach talks about museums as social networks
Art Angle Roundup: A Buyer’s Market, Italian JRR Tolkien Tiff, and the Blackest Negro
How did New York’s exclusive cult influence the postwar art scene?
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