XVALA is a contemporary artist who is known for using controversial celebrity images and artifacts in his work[1] and for his "Fear Google" campaign addressing loss of privacy in the Internet Age.[2] The artist has cited his concerns about the public nature of personal information in the Internet Age as the driving force behind the campaign[3] but also says that he does not believe in censorship.[4] XVALA describes his work as belonging to the "Post-PC era".[4]
Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.
The Post-PC era is a market trend observed during the late 2000s and early 2010s involving a decline in the sales of personal computers in favor of post-PC devices; which include mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers as well as other mobile computers such as wearable and ubiquitous ones. These devices emphasize portability and connectivity, including the use of cloud-based services, more focused "apps" to perform tasks, and the ability to synchronize information between multiple devices seamlessly.
XVALA's real name is often reported to be Jeff Hamilton[5][6] but this claim is disputed.[7] The name "XVALA" is an internet tag created by the artist for the purpose of exclusivity. The XVALA tag was not originally tied to any URL or email address and generated zero search results.[4] XVALA gave meaning to the tag by creating unique content that eventually connected to the internet through search engines.
In information systems, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information. This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system, although they may also be chosen from a controlled vocabulary.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. Thus http://www.example.com is a URL, while www.example.com is not.</ref> URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (http), but are also used for file transfer (ftp), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.
Controversy
Fear Google/Scarlett Johansson Street Art in Los Angeles
One of XVALA's earliest and most enduring uses of a controversial celebrity image was the display of a photo of Britney Spears with her head shaved, taken by paparazzi in 2007 and later placed online, where the artist found it. In 2011, he used nude photos of Scarlett Johansson that had been hacked from the actress' phone and leaked publicly online, posting multiple copies of the photos in public areas across Los Angeles with "Fear Google" stickers covering her breasts and buttocks.[8][9] He called his use of these types of images a "disruptive innovation".[4] Later that same year, he used garbage gathered from the homes of tech industry pioneers Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Jimmy Wales to create an exhibit called "The Not Very Well Hung Hangers of Silicon Valley".[10] The name of the exhibit comes from its cornerstone piece, a wire hanger from Mark Zuckerberg's trash that XVALA painted Facebook Blue and bent into a phallic shape.[10][11]
Britney Jean Spears is an American singer, songwriter, dancer, and actress. Born in McComb, Mississippi and raised in Kentwood, Louisiana, she appeared in stage productions and television series, before signing with Jive Records in 1997. Spears's first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), were global successes and made her the best-selling teenage artist of all-time. Referred to as the "Princess of Pop", Spears was credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Paparazzi are independent photographers who take pictures of high-profile people, such as athletes, entertainers, politicians, and other celebrities, typically while subjects go about their usual life routines. Paparazzi tend to make a living by selling their photographs to media outlets focusing on tabloid journalism and sensationalism.
Scarlett Ingrid Johansson is an American actress and singer. Johansson is the world's highest-paid actress, has made multiple appearances in the Forbes Celebrity 100, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She aspired to be an actress from a young age, and first appeared on stage in an Off-Broadway play as a child. Johansson made her film debut in the fantasy comedy North (1994), and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Manny & Lo (1996). She gained further recognition for her work in The Horse Whisperer (1998) and Ghost World (2001).
In 2012, XVALA used garbage collected from the home of Steve Jobs, along with a mold formed by the Chinese company M.I.C. Gadget, to create a sculpture of the AppleCEO.[12] He then produced multiple copies in both Apple White and Apple Black (intended to represent the 2010 suicides at Foxconn) and sold them as part of his "Think Different" exhibit.[13] The project was doubly controversial because M.I.C Gadget had already twice been forced to halt production of the sculptures due to cease and desist lawsuits brought against the company by Apple.[12][14] XVALA also created art from Kim Kardashian's garbage in 2012, appropriating a deflated basketball and using it to create a piece titled "Slammed and Dunked".[15]
Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate and investor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. It is considered one of the Big Four of technology along with Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
Kimberly Noel Kardashian West is an American media personality, entrepreneur, socialite, model, and actress. Kardashian first gained media attention as a friend and stylist of Paris Hilton, but received wider notice after a 2003 sex tape with her former boyfriend Ray J was leaked in 2007. Later that year, she and her family began to appear in the E! reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Its success soon led to the creation of spin-offs including Kourtney and Kim Take New York and Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami.
"Mark Zuckerberg's Not Very Well Hung Hanger"
XVALA gained international[16] attention in major media outlets in 2014 due to his plan to use nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton at his "No Delete" exhibit in St. Petersburg, Florida.[8][17][18] The photos had originally been stolen from storage in the cloud and leaked online. Both XVALA and his publicist, Cory Allen, denied that the exhibit was intended to be exploitative and, on the contrary, was meant to open discussions about the nature of celebrity and art especially with relation to questions of privacy, freedom of speech, and content ownership.[17] Nevertheless, the exhibit ignited backlash in the form of petitions and a boycott.[19] Due to a combination of legal[17] and ethical[16][20] concerns, XVALA later decided not to use the photos of nude celebrities and substituted pictures of his own naked body.[21]
Jennifer Shrader Lawrence is an American actress. Her films have grossed over $5.7 billion worldwide, and she was the highest-paid actress in the world in 2015 and 2016. Lawrence appeared in Time's 100 most influential people in the world list in 2013 and in the Forbes Celebrity 100 list in 2014 and 2016.
Katherine Elizabeth Upton is an American model and actress. Upton was named the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Rookie of the Year following her appearance in the magazine in 2011, and was the cover model for the 2012, 2013 and 2017 issues. She was also the subject of the 100th-anniversary Vanity Fair cover. Upton has also appeared in the films Tower Heist (2011), The Other Woman (2014) and The Layover (2017).
St. Petersburg is a city in Pinellas County, Florida, United States. As of the 2015 census estimate, the population was 257,083, making it the fifth-most populous city in Florida and the largest in the state that is not a county seat.
Appropriation in art is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts. In the visual arts, to appropriate means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. He was careful about his use of the term Dada and was not directly associated with Dada groups. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art, and he had a seminal influence on the development of conceptual art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to use art to serve the mind.
Andy Warhol was an American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertising that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
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