Jim Carrey is quitting Facebook and dumping his stock — and is urging everyone else to do so as well.
“We must encourage more oversight by the owners of these social media platforms,” Jim Carrey said in a statement to CNBC. “This easy access has to be more responsibly handled. What we need now are activist investors to send a message that responsible oversight is needed. What the world needs now is capitalism with a conscience.”
The comedian tweeted on Tuesday he was selling his Facebook shares and deleting his page because the company profited from Russian interference during the 2016 U.S. election. He asked all “other investors who care about our future to do the same.” Carrey did not state how many Facebook shares he owned or sold.
He added the hashtag “#unfriendfacebook.”
But what about those of us that use the platform to become noticed, to make it big, to earn a living?
“On March 9, 2015, at the University of Cape Town, the student and activist Chumani Maxwele walked over to a bronze statue of the nineteenth-century British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes and flung a bucket of human excrement at the monument. It was the first in a series of rebellious acts that became known as the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which would later inspire the student-led protest movement Fees Must Fall on campuses all across South Africa. The incidents helped trigger a nationwide debate about the glorification of white supremacy and the legacy of apartheid, and about the country’s need for fuller, more authentic representations of black life.
The controversy around these protests has had lasting effects not only among educators and students but also among artists. One of them is the photographer Mohau Modisakeng. This year, Modisakeng is representing South Africa, along with the artist Candice Breitz, at the fifty-seventh edition of the Venice Biennale. The thirty-year-old Modisakeng, who graduated from University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, in 2009, uses haunting and meditative self-portraiture to create striking images of a country that is in the midst of reëvaluating itself. Born in 1986, Modisakeng grew up in an informal settlement in Soweto, in a makeshift home without electricity. His mother was Zulu and his father was Motswana, and they were part of the influx of migrant workers that, in the early nineteen-eighties, flowed into Johannesburg’s sprawling southwestern townships, where most of the city’s black population was forced to live during apartheid. “In my art, the significance of growing up in Soweto is dealt with from a biographical standpoint. I am referring to memories from my childhood that somehow highlight what was happening in South Africa,” Modisakeng told me recently.
Modisakeng’s Soweto childhood has fuelled a research-based photography practice in which he creates layered scenes, littered with iconic symbols that explore the nation’s history by “trying to understand how it affects the black body,” he said. His photography and video work also follows the character-driven overtures of African self-portraitists such as Samuel Fosso and Iké Udé. In the photograph “Frame XV,” we see Modisakeng pictured holding a long sjambok whip, a visceral symbol of state-sanctioned violence that he remembers the police using to maintain order during the final years of apartheid. In the series “Lefa,” which is a Setswana word for “inheritance,” he captures himself, from above, lying in a bed of coal. The image evokes the industrialization of his home town of Johannesburg. The performative series “Metamorphosis” features images of Modisakeng in closeup and against a black backdrop, wearing his signature black-brimmed trilby hat, shaking white powder from his face and chest. It appears as if his body were physically changing form, in a state of transformation that alludes to South Africa’s long democratic struggle to define itself.
At Venice, in the South African Pavilion, Modisakeng has mounted “Passages,” a three-channel video projection that, like his photography, reveals the beauty and trauma of black bodies in motion. The nearly eighteen-minute work follows the individual journeys of three South African voyagers, each carrying a single possession, wading through waters, trying to get ashore. In Setswana, Modisakeng says, life is referred to as botshelo, or a passage, and human beings are called bafeti, or voyagers. It’s a view of existence that suggests that all experiences are transient.”
The Company of Men, an exhibition by George Towne, is a subjective perception of masculine menʼs desirability and beauty. The artistʼs 2007 painting, Fire Island- Sunset (Study), is similar to the Romantic painting, The Monk by the Sea, by Caspar David Friedrich. Each painting represents the emphasis of aesthetic experience, whether it is the playground of Fire Island for gay men as depicted in Fire Island-Sunset (Study) or an allegory of nature versus human in The Monk by the Sea. The paintings are a catalyst for each artistʼs maturity and therefore create an existential epiphany.
Through the reflection of his sexual identity, Towne was able to develop a true passion for male portraitures. The oil paintings synthesize the polemics of a gay male gaze. Towneʼs juxtaposition of men in blunt and provocative poses with that of nudity and tenderness is aesthetically visceral. The paintings are an outlet for
Towne to release a liquid flow out of a tube onto a canvas, therefore implicating his desire for these masculine men. Through an abjection of masculinity, Towne displays the social construct of how gay men are often perceived to have a masculine corporeal selfmisrelation. The release of the paint and the rendered context empower gay menʼs masculinity and deconstructs perceptions of identity and alterity.
Like Paul Cadmus before him, Towne transcends social aggregates of male beauty and desire. Subjects are positioned in confrontational and stylized mannerisms so as to legitimize menʼs sexuality and disembody male anxieties about being bare to public scrutiny. Also, Towneʼs male portraitures resemble that of Thomas Eakinsʼ male nudes created during the late nineteenth century.
Eakinsʼ depictions of male nudes went beyond that of his predecessors and created a veristic portrayal of the male body. Rather than conform to the idea of hegemonic masculinity often associated with the advent of modernity, Eakins illustrates male beauty as exposed, yet natural. Although classically trained, Eakins stripped men of their customary sophistication and depicted them in a native state.
The oil portraitures Towne creates seem to recontextualize the disparities that Eakins faced during a time when homosexuality was becoming linguistically characterized. Towneʼs paintings and drawings reflect the progression society has made in distinguishing what it is to be a contemporary gay male. The men Towne incorporates are of various ethnicities and captures the beauty and desire of each one regardless of their heritage. Each subject is placed in a setting that compliments his figurative verisimilitude.
Similar to Eakins, Towne places the men in confined and stark rooms. The confined setting establishes an intimate connection for the viewer and the viewed. The subjects are captured in states of reflection, often staring into the distance so as to accentuate the definition of their physiognomy. The esoteric reflection highlights how the GLBT community is often marginalized into subcategories of a larger culture. That is, declaring a person, a gay white male, gay black male, gay Asian male, etc. Towneʼs inclusion of all gay men allows for an amalgamation of the community as a whole and debunks any physical characteristics that may “separate” us.
