sharon arnold | dimensions variable: I Had My Facebook Portrait Painted by Matt Held

I first heard about Matt Held's Facebook portrait project in January, through Sharon Butler's blog Two Coats of Paint. She showed us a painting of herself in dappled light with a forward expression; beautifully painted in these opaque layers of buttery glaze. After reading his description of the project, I was completely sold. In fact, I completely art-nerded out.

Art historians like to talk a lot about the Gaze. What is the gaze, who is gazing, why are they gazing - or if you want to get really fancy, who is watching (flâneur) and who is being watched (fl â neuse). If art seems bourgeois and out of reach to a lot of people, it's no wonder. Art in the modern age is inherently bourgeois. It takes time - time to watch, make, appreciate, and think about. When art for art's sake took hold of Western culture, working people were understandably resentful. (that's just an example, I'm not saying the French Revolution started because of portraiture, although that would be a fun claim to make) Meanwhile, for those who could afford to spend, portraiture was the utmost in bourgeoisie -- who among us is vain, rich, and/or bored enough to have a dryly realistic large format painting of them basking in a dim light hanging prominently on the wall? Well, truthfully it's been the utmost in bourgeoisie going back to the beginning*. But that's beside the point. We're talking about the holder of the Gaze, and who's looking. To make a long story short, it's changing. Drastically.

In the age of social networking, we are flâneur et flâneuse all at once. I'm watching you watch me watching you, Twittering about it, and uploading the photo I've just taken of the aforementioned scene onto Facebook; where, if it's fitting to the project, you might send it to Matt Held and he'll paint it.

Naturally, this project appealed to my vanity. I joined the group and sent a Facebook message immediately - why did I think he would choose me? I didn't know, but I hoped to be part of it. Here was a chance to see how someone else sees me (talk about the utmost in vanity). So if I don't get the painting to hang on my wall for myself, what's the reward?

Participation. Connectivity. I was shy, but excited. Here's this artist in New York, challenging himself but at the same time, challenging the idea of portraiture and how we're all changing what it means, together. And I suspended ownership of my vanity when I clicked send on the email. Matt would choose the photo or not, and the representation of myself was out of my hands. Who would I be to the artist and to the rest of the world when they saw me?

Matt chose a photo my friend Miram Berger took when she was visiting from New York. An accomplished painter herself, she was click-clicking the shutter on her camera as I self-consciously moved through a comical ritual, mostly mocking the size of my nose. It was a fun day - breakfast in Fremont, drizzling rain and nothing to do but spend time with a good friend. Through Matt's lens it became a bright and beautifully rendered painting filled with colour. It shows a silly girl with blue-black hair and thick glasses, mock-picking her nose. What's her story, anyway?

And there's the clincher of the New Portraiture. We're invited into the scene, the stories are curious, and the pictures are snapshots of real lives; often drafted by the subject themselves. We want to know more about them, most likely because we are like them. Rather than some lofty idealised representation of culturally enforced perfection, potraiture has become not only an exaggeration of the idea but also a Cinéma vérité, a hipster editorial, a perversion, a study in heightened banality, an idea of excess, a reflection of ourselves; or at it's best, a really fun study of people finding each other in a living web of connectivity.

"Matt Held: facebook portraits" is on view September 10 through October 3, 2009 in Denise Bibro's Platform Project Space.