Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti

Author:Sophia Giovannitti [Giovannitti, Sophia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Women, Social Science, Prostitution & Sex Trade
ISBN: 9781839766701
Google: MYGAEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2023-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

On Legibility

Qualeasha Wood’s The [Black] Madonna/Whore Complex is a woven and beaded cotton tapestry depicting the artist on webcam within Apple’s Photo Booth application screen, wearing a dress and offering a cross and a heart, floating above early-aughts-looking text boxes that read, “are you ready?” and “young hot ebony is online.” Each text box contains what look like clickable buttons that read “enter salvation.” It was acquired by the Met in 2021, and the work is described on the museum’s website in this way: “By presenting herself as both holy icon and object of desire, Wood rejects the racist, sexist stereotype that views Black women solely as promiscuous commodities; she accomplishes this move by enshrining and controlling her own image … ‘If I’m going to get fetishized out here,’ she says, ‘I’m going to fetishize myself.’”

Wood is a digital native, born in 1996, intimately familiar with the fracturing and proliferation of the self that happens online. Her work is about seeing and being seen. In an interview with W, she explains,

By centering myself in work, I know that there’s a conversation around my image that’s happening, whether I’m present or not. It allows me to have surveillance on other people because I’m literally watching a conversation about me … After I got doxxed, I just realized there is no such thing as privacy … so I claim consent [of my image] for myself before it can be taken from me. I’m gaining ownership back over something that I felt was lost.

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