Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry | Hacker News Reader

Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry

theguardian.com

69 pointsThevet46 comments

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.

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.

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

That’s something I hadn’t really considered. The link could very well be that simple.

Maybe they could do the same to Salvador Dali.

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

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

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...

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

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.

People sell stuff with art on it?

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.

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.)

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.

And they flattened her into a egotistical narcissist.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Ah this was the line I remembered: "This instance of colonising narratives in cultural translations was not the end but the beginning. "

Gotcha. And to be fair I don't want to just pile on, and criticize your reaction to it.

I understand where you are coming from when you say: How about famous people get interpreted by different cultures differently", but I think it misses the larger point of the article, and the "colonising" quote in particular.

Granted I am not a art guy by any means, but I took it to be referencing the larger concept of "cultural imperialism." In particular, it's the idea that Frida's art, or in this particular case her looks are not good enough, are not able to stand on their own, and therefore we need to tweak them to make them more palatable. So in this case it was "make Frida more sexy" in this ostensibly biographical picture about her, by applying a standard of sexiness and beauty seen by our culture, e.g. "less unibrow..."

In a larger context, I take the idea of "colonising" culture, or the phrase "cultural imperialism" to be referencing similar themes: -that the 'natives' can't do things on their own. - That rich cultural traditions are somehow inferior, or need to be reduced down to a handful of icons w/o understanding of the larger context around them.

I'm probably rambling - again not an art guy, and you can probably find a better reference on the topic than me :-)

EDIT: So something I thought of that might be a good metaphor. On HN, there is often a lot of snark about media representations of "hackers" and tech folks in general, and how they get things wrong, or boil down complex ideas into an overly simplified (and wrong) version, or will try to make something that "looks techy", or 'looks like a hacker' while being clearly ridiculous to actual technologists.

So while again its not the same, there are parallels - Basically this idea that Frida, and 'foreign' artists in general, can be boiled down to a few tropes or symbols to be come this immediately recognizable 'idea-of-frida' or 'idea-of-foreign/exotic-art' while completely discarding the nuance and the actual work / process of the artist.

Maybe its just modernizing? Her look doesn't pass for modern sexy, but it was meant to be that at the time.

No, her look, and the prevalence of her using self-portraiture as her vehicle, were even then a repudiation of the prevailing standards of beauty. It was arguably even a repudiation of the existence of those standards.

So her very appearance was subversive, interesting.

Different cultures have different issues with their beauty standards.

Maybe in your culture it is against unibrows. Come to Asia and you will see how popular plastic surgeries and skin whitening creams are. BTW, fair skin fetish in the east is not new. It goes back hundreds or thousands of years, well before European colonization occured. It's so deep that the houries in Islam/Quran (gift that pious men get in heaven) are fair skinned.

Absolutely!

And that's pretty interesting about the "fair skin fetish" in the east, I was unaware of it.

I'm not trying to say that this is because of European colonization, or anything like that. I just think that people use colonization as an understandable metaphor when talking about art or culture, especially w.r.t how it is interpreted & distorted by other possibly more dominant/well-represented cultures.

I am not an art guy but I have read a lot of ARTFORUM. The problem the FA articulates is that in respect of surrealism, Kahlo knew what she was doing and where she was going, but because Mexico was perceived as a "province" or colony and Kahlo was not a dude, they basically treated her as if she were a 5-year-old who had naively stumbled on a craft of making surrealist-like kitsch pictures (per the article, I myself don't know what people were doing with Kahlo in that time frame). No potential for innovation or influence over the "true vanguard" of Art, just a sideshow. Doing something on her own in a way, but a dead end.

It actually appears twice, once even as a pull-quote. If you're ctrl-f'ing, remember it's spelled with 's' in British English.

Maybe I was being a bit snarky, but "Colonising"/"Colonizing" != "Colonializing"/"Colonialising" :-P

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

Will Ferrell thinks it's possible.

I don't know about him, but I've gotten pretty good at sniffing out the "white people are the root of all evil" narratives, even if the doublespeak is a bit beyond me.

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.

> 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. :-)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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=...)

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

If, impossibly, the exact same person had grown up in some other time or place who knows, but in the life she lived she was born female and lived her life as a woman, but with a defiant femininity; rooted in herself, her body, not in the capitalist beauty myth (N.B. the communist beauty myth wasn't much better and she rejected that as well).

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