Deep thoughts about glamour, in honor of Sarah Baker at the IAO. Also: The 2017 Art and Olfaction Awards finalists!
If your hair is bed-head messy due to hours of blow-drying and hair product, does that make it more glamourous? If your paint-splattered t-shirt was custom-ordered from an artist in London’s East End, is it more glamourous than a similar shirt ordered from an artist living in the suburbs of Houston? Is staying in a cheap hotel more glamourous if the hotel is in Monaco, or in Belgrade?
We’re willing to bet that your answers went something like this: Yes, yes, Monaco. Ours did. The answers are based on a social code we all receive from media, magazines, movies, etc. — one that posits glamour as a sort of glorified hyper-capitalism, built on the back of a beluga-caviar-at-Trump-Tower-sized dollop of classism. Is it possible – for instance – to be glamourous and poor? Is there any glamour in the grinding routine of a nine-to-five work day? Who decided that Paris was more glamourous than Nairobi, that architects were more glamourous than plumbers? Is glamour merely an illusionary attribute engendered by incessant news-feed scrolls of pouting selfies taken by bronzed youths sprawled out over yachts across the Mediterranean?
Artist Sarah Baker has made a career out of exploring the tropes of glamour, and we could not be more excited to host her at the IAO in April. We will be sure to ask her some of these questions during her private view on Saturday night. You should ask her a question or two, yourself – perhaps over a glass of glamourous white wine (no shitty warm beer out of a can, please. We’re fancy, now.)
– Your comfortingly normal and yacht-free friends at the IAO
+ THIS AND MORE, IN OUR APRIL NEWSLETTER
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