Dirt: Creating infinity

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt’s senior staff writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news. This week: Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama; the money powering Reels; and Discord acquires Gas.

Last week, on my way to the Whitney Museum, I stopped by the Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama pop-up in the Meatpacking District. Upon entrance, my vision was blighted by a torrent of black-on-yellow polka dots, the trypophobic effect amplified by reflective spheres scattered around the interior. Palm-sized mirror balls were arranged into the LV logo at the store’s center. The display was garish and horrendous, but very much in line with Kusama’s visual style.

To the credit of LV’s interior designers, the space managed to replicate the unnerving claustrophobia that I’ve felt in Kusama’s Infinity Mirror rooms. I once suffered a mild panic attack in Phalli’s Field, an enclosed room filled with red-on-white dotted fabric sculptures in phallic shapes. The episode led me to develop an abiding interest in Kusama and Conceptual art, even though I find Instagrammable art installations — whether it be “fine art” or explicitly for-profit projections of fine art (namely, the Van Gogh exhibit) — gimmicky and incredibly boring.

With Kusama, it’s become harder to separate not just the art from the artist, but the art’s viral reception. The 93-year-old artist has lived in a psychiatric hospital since 1977, but remains one of the most famous and recognizable living artists today. Her mainstream popularity is an astonishing turn of fate: During the heyday of the New York downtown arts scene, Kusama’s work received peripheral recognition, compared to her male American peers. (Her first Infinity Mirror Room was priced at $5,000 in 1965, the equivalent of $47,000 in 2023, and received little interest from buyers and museums.) Today, the commercial demand for Kusama’s work has cast a pall over her reputation. Is she an artist or a celebrity profiting off a decades-old artistic brand? The distinction isn’t quite so clear. And who is agreeing to these deals on her behalf?

For Louis Vuitton, the collaboration affirms the luxury label’s products as pieces of fine art. But bedazzling a bag with polka dots does little to hide its blatant intent: Louis Vuitton is creating infinity out of consumerism.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Instagram continues to push Reels — and is paying creators thousands of dollars to post face-filter Reels. Snapchat used a similar strategy to launch Spotlight, a TikTok-like short video feature, in 2020, and has since reduced the money it pays out to creators. (New Yorker, Vox)

  • One creator started by posting “six to eight face-filter videos a day, [but] weeks later, after receiving advice from mentors in the music industry to post more, [he] upped his daily production to between sixteen and thirty. The Instagram algorithm rewarded this extraordinary proliferation of content.”

• Ryan Broderick on Mindy Kaling’s Scooby Doo reboot Velma and the conspiracy theory that tries to explain why the show sucks so badly. (Garbage Day)

• How did TVs get so cheap? Smart TVs are collecting data on people’s viewing habits and selling that information, a relatively new revenue stream for television manufacturers. (The Atlantic)

  • “Roku earned $2.7 billion in 2021. Almost 83 percent of that came from what Roku calls 'platform revenue,' which includes ads shown in the interface. And Roku isn’t the only company offering such software: Google, Amazon, LG, and Samsung all have smart-TV-operating systems with similar revenue models.”

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Discord acquires Gas, a popular poll-based social app predominantly used by high schoolers to compliment each other. (The Verge)

• Vulture profiles Saturday Night Live breakout star Sarah Sherman, accurately describing her as a “body horror comic” and “agent of chaos.”

• An interview with one of the artists who created a deep fake video of Kim Kardashian. Multimedia artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas, in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, has an exhibit at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, which contains the aforementioned video. (032c)

  • “The Kardashians have evolved beyond that idea of a human. They’re more advanced, higher beings as it were … They grew up seeing through the matrix and seeing how these pillars of a democracy, such as the justice system, could be shaped by media, by narrative, by storytelling. Part of the wisdom that comes with evolving to a higher being is the ability to be relatable to humans and not scare them.”