Are viewers of on-line contents entitled to the truth? “Excellences & Perfections” and the saga of Amalia Ulman

Do the viewers of digital contents have a reasonable expectation for verisimilitude, namely something that has the appearance of truth, in what 

they observe on-line? I am not referring to the genre of “reality shows”, where this Kat assumes that viewers recognize that “reality” is a relative term, and the ultimate result is fashioned by those who create and produce the program. Rather, I mean a situation where the viewer is attracted to these contents precisely because he or she believes that they are not being mediated.

“OK Kat”, I can already hear, “this is an interesting thought, but what does it have to do with anything under 39,000 feet?” Consider the story of Amalia Ulman. In connection with the publication of the book, “Excellences & Perfections”, a blog post recently published on cnn.com, written by Alicia Eler and entitled “Amalia Ulman’s Instagram art hoax exposed the flaws in selfie culture”, recalls for us the great stir that Ulman created in 2014 in connection with her presentation of “Excellences & Perfections” on Instagram.

What Ulman, a young artist born in Argentina and having later lived in Spain did, was to present via postings on Instagram, largely through selfies, her life as a young woman ‘on the go’ in Los Angeles. Ulman’s project began innocuously enough, with her first post, which consisted of the phrase “Part I” together with the caption, “Excellences & Perfections”. The post received 28 likes. She went on to recount her day-by-day trials and tribulations, chronicling such things as the trauma of a lost boyfriend, pole-dancing classes, breast-enhancement surgery, posing in skimpy lingerie, escorting, this and more, augmented by emotive textual commentary, all against the background of being an “It girl” in Los Angeles.

In doing so, Ulman was being told that she was destroying her career as a “serious” artist. Au contraire--nearly five months after the first post, Ulman uploaded one last post, consisting of a black and white image of a rose, which was captioned---“The End”. During that time, she had attracted 90,000 avid followers to her Instagram site, enthusiastically waiting for each next installment of her personal saga. Far from destroying her career, she had succeeded in drawing more and more attention to herself.

Except that it was not really her personal story. Soon after her last post, Ulman announced that it had all been one great staged performance. In Ulman’s words—

“Everything was scripted. I spent a month researching the whole thing. There was a beginning, a climax and an end. I dyed my hair. I changed my wardrobe. I was acting: it wasn’t me.”

It was all (or nearly all) either made-up or staged. What Ulman had done was to divide up her Instagram performance into three distinct “episodes,” described by The Telegraph as “inspired by stereotypes of how young women present themselves online.”

Episode I-- Ulman as the artistic girl from the provinces comes to LA, breaks up with her boyfriend and becomes an escort.

Episode II- Described as “ghetto aesthetic” à la Kim Kardashian, Ulman cultivates an anti-heroine persona, “starts acting crazy and posting bad photos online”. She “gets a boob job, takes drugs, has a breakdown, and goes to rehab”.

Episode III- It is all about her “recovery”, uploading pictures signaling that Ulman was on the way to becoming a “kind of girl next door,” replete with yoga and juices.

But when it was all over, and the truth of her project came out, the response to Ulman’s performance took a bifurcated route. On the one hand, the art world saw it as a pioneering form of performance art within the context of social media, so much so that The Telegraph described Ulman, in an article entitled “Is this the first Instagram masterpiece?”, as now being “feted as one of the sensations of contemporary art.” She went to exhibit some of the pictures from Excellences & Perfections at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, and Tate Modern’s Performing for the Camera (London being the town in which she had struggled as an art student only a few years before). And now, Excellences & Perfections is being published as a book, replete with photos from the Instagram posts together with interpretative essays by notable commentators.

All well and good, no? Not exactly, because while Ulman had become the darling of the world of art commentary, she also became the object of anger among at least some of her Instagram followers. They, having become so invested in Ulman’s Instagram narrative, now felt deceived, like a consumer who becomes an avid fan of a certain brand, only to find out that the branded product is not what it had appeared to be.

Ulman views things differently. In her words—

“It’s more than a satire. I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction, and not something biological or inherent to any woman. Women understood the performance much faster than men. They were like, ‘We get it – and it’s very funny.’”

So, what was the ‘joke”? “The joke was admitting how much work goes into being a woman and how being a woman is not a natural thing. It’s something you learn.”

The question that arises is whether, as a performer via the Instagram platform, Ulman owed something more to her audience. In the related context of copyright, Professor Niva Elkin Koren has argued for the recognition of a user’s rights. She writes (in the Abstract to “Copyright in a Digital Ecosystem: A User-Rights Approach”) --

“A user-rights approach holds that permissible uses under copyright law should be articulated and treated as rights…. [T]his approach shifts the locus of copyright analysis from author’s rights to the creative process, emphasizing the role of users as partners in promoting copyright objectives. Rather than being "parasites" that benefit — unjustly — from limits on the just rewards of authors, users actively participate in promoting the creation, dissemination and use of cultural works. A user-rights approach further suggests that to achieve its goals, copyright law should be drafted, interpreted and applied in ways that consider the rights and duties of both users and authors.”

Surely there was no partnership between Ulman and the on-line viewers of her Instagram performance. Indeed, this was the very point of the project—to gain the

audience’s trust and enthusiastic emotive involvement with her largely make-believe narrative, where the final punch line was— “Just kidding”.

In Ulman’s own words—

“The idea was to experiment with fiction online using the language of the internet.”

Which brings this Kat back to a version of his original question. Do users of on-line contents have any legitimate expectation of verisimilitude and, if that expectation is not met, do they have a legitimate claim that they were deceived? Or is the vantage wholly artist-centric, which, for Ulman, meant that misleading the viewer was the way that she sought to make her points about feminism, sexuality, identity, class, and even pornography.

By Neil Wilkof

Photo on upper right by Amalia Ulman and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Photo on left by Hans Peter Schaefer and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Photo on lower right by Instagram and is in the public domain.