{"id":66751,"date":"2025-10-09T01:24:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/66751\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T01:24:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:24:09","slug":"sam-mckinniss-paints-an-image-obsessed-america-at-jeffrey-deitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/66751\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam McKinniss Paints an Image-Obsessed America at Jeffrey Deitch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEditor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is the second edition of\u00a0Link Rot<\/a>, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.<\/p>\n

\n\tPainting the internet is hard. The internet is a bunch of content that reads and looks like something we\u2019ve already read or seen; then you paint it, and it\u2019s just that thing we\u2019ve already seen. The method of approach comes down to curation: what to depict, again? <\/p>\n

\n\tIn Sam McKinniss<\/a>\u2019s new show \u201cLaw and Order\u201d at Jeffrey Deitch<\/a>, the filter was law enforcers and law breakers. Most of the \u201ccharacters\u201d in his new paintings, as he calls them, are figures whose images have gone viral or are familiar faces in our media landscape. These characters include Jeremy Meeks, whose mugshot went viral more than a decade ago because he\u2019s hot; Luigi Mangione, looking over his shoulder after he was apprehended outside a McDonald\u2019s in Pennsylvania; Chuck Bass, from the teen soap opera Gossip Girl; and a pair of riderless horses streaking down an urban street, one of them bleeding.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Art<\/p>\n

\n\tMcKinniss told Cultured that he wanted to \u201calmost illustrate the immediate moment of what it feels like to be living in America right now.\u201d Yet those horses were galloping down the streets of London, not Manhattan. That detail doesn\u2019t really matter. For McKinniss, America isn\u2019t a place. It\u2019s a semi-abusive relationship with iconic images.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a history to understanding America as an evolving regime of iconic images. From the dream factories of Hollywood to the advertising innovations of Madison Avenue, this country\u2019s character is deeply rooted in the production of visibility. Of America, Jean Baudrillard once wrote, \u201cEverything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photographs, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn\u2019t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYet there was something that delighted Baudrillard about the fakeness of this nation, and many have shared in his glee. From Paris Hilton to Andy Warhol, the ironic (and then, not so ironic) overindulgence in the commodity aesthetic is classically American.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSam McKinniss, Vida and Trojan, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Grace Dodds\/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is also a political dimension to visibility. We are taught in history class that social progress is a matter of moral consensus whose consolidation only becomes possible when an issue is represented. There are images that \u201cshock the national conscience,\u201d as Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others, thus catalyzing a mass response to which our government must respond by enacting change. That\u2019s the myth, at least. For this reason, freedom of speech and representation tend to be central to our culture wars. We think visibility is where we get our rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLaw and Order,\u201d however, represents a twist in these two myths of American relationships with iconic images as social media blurs the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and politics. If Americans perhaps uniquely know themselves through images, it\u2019s no wonder social media represents what it feels like to be in America right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Three<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cSam McKinniss: Law and Order,\u201d 2025, at Jeffrey Deitch, New York.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Genevieve Hanson\/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch<\/p>\n

\n\tBut what is that feeling, really? The emotional response I have to McKinniss\u2019s painting is basically indistinguishable from the experience I have of being online.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWalking through the gallery replicates the dull sparks of recognition one encounters in the act of scrolling: Chuck Bass (a laugh); Flaco, the escaped zoo owl (I\u2019m sad he died); a politician (Callista Gingrich); the escaped horses (epic); the juggalos (interesting, I guess); and so on. That stimulation which we now gloss as \u201cdopamine hits\u201d resolves into something negative. I feel provoked to make meaning out of what I am seeing and between the things I\u2019m seeing, yet I have the need to rebel, to put up a guard of disdainful indifference. If I\u2019m being sold something, I\u2019d rather not pay attention, if it is tragic, I know my cry won\u2019t do anything. And then there is the final nail in my coffin: the flatness of the merely circulating, which sometimes has the horrifying effect of suddenly coming to matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSam McKinniss, Callista Gingrich, 2025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Grace Dodds\/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles<\/p>\n

\n\tThis effect is quite the magic trick on McKinniss\u2019s part: The paintings recede and become content. Under a heavy swipe of varnish and rendered with all the softness of a compressed JPEG, most of these images seem totally interchangeable. Having already encountered these images online, this recognition of the paintings as content produces the impression\u2014a false one, I\u2019m sure\u2014that they are easy to make, that he can make a lot of them, and quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAre the paintings good? Is this state of affairs \u201cgood?\u201d It\u2019s an accurate picture, which is to say, it\u2019s often quite an ugly one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is one painting in \u201cLaw and Order\u201d that depicts an image that is not iconic at all, or at least I didn\u2019t recognize its subject. It\u2019s a small painting of an inconspicuous compound of buildings seen from above. By consulting the checklist, I learned what it represented: the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, otherwise known as the La Salle Detention Facility. If what it feels like to be in America is to be helpless in the wash of images, here is where place reasserts itself. Here is the important, unseen thing, the site where people are disappeared, often without access<\/a> to legal counsel, medical care, or clean water. It is an unassuming work, but somehow a cathartic one. I felt like I saw something important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is the second edition of\u00a0Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,53848,53849,111,139,69,53850],"class_list":["post-66751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-jeffrey-deitch","tag-link-rot","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sam-mckinniss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}