Scroll Art 11/12/23 - 11/19/23

art from tiktok and instagram reels that i liked

posted by TikTok user gorlstime on Nov 12 (link)

This video is the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree rolling through the streets of New York late at night, which is an evocative image. Its statement is spread out between the text on the video and the caption and the video itself, but I guess sometimes the fun of art is working for it. It’s a simple metaphor: “daily performance as a woman is like a pine tree taken out of its forest to the city to be a christmas tree”. It’s a little over-the-top instagram poetry, but I think it’s a very cute post and it’s amazing to me that it has found such viral traction, with a few million faves on TikTok as of time of writing. As a tree fan I think the way it simultaneously anthropomorphizes and feminizes and makes a community of trees in the caption is cool. 

This TikTok probably never would have found viral traction without Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film that came out this summer. While Barbie doesn’t say anything strong about gender, it creates a framework that’s used all the time on TikTok for gender-based discourse.

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posted on TikTok by west22ndband on Nov 7 (link)

This video is from the summer but the band reposts it frequently to promote their music. I posted it captioned “this is what the entire city of austin looks like” because it's hard for me to shut off the virality impulse and also because this is a very evocative image of Austin, a juice bar with vegan meals and a band on top underneath a green tree.

On my trip to Austin this spring, I walked by this exact Juiceland, the one in Barton Springs. I was mildly hungover at 3pm in the afternoon walking back into the city of Austin along the Greenbelt trail. Barton Springs is a really beautiful area of Austin, on the less-developed south side of the Colorado River but still very close to the giant skyscrapers recently built as tech wealth comes to the city. 

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Posted by TikTok user anawolfermann on Nov 8 (link)

I’ve always really loved TikToks in this genre, of changing your life by moving across the world. I don't think moving instantly fixes your life, but I also don't believe “where ever you go, there you are” type reduction that every place in the world is the same. People move and find new passion for places closer aligned to their identity. 

I posted this TikTok to my Twitter because I’m moving to New York, and it’s fun to see someone else’s exuberance about moving to the same city. A lot of reposting is like this, relating to someone else who has the same feelings as you in a different shape. 

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posted by TikTok user tylerwoodwardd on Nov 17 (link)

This TikTok is nostalgia for 2018.  Doc Martens and Kanken backpacks are objects that relate to this moment, and longtime readers of coldhealing will know what I think about the importance of objects in generating identity. Clairo and Brockhampton are music, and Emma Chamberlain is a vlogger. 

This 2018 cultural moment fell just a year later in late 2019, when it was popular on TikTok and even in the real world to use the mocking term “vsco girl” to refer to a cartoonized version of it. The stereotype was girls in big t-shirts who watched Emma Chamberlain carrying around hydroflasks and Kanken backpacks saying internet catchphrases. They were mocking the subculture not for any of its content, but for its uniformity and its overonline roots. 

I think nostalgia for the recent past is interesting, because it shows that culture is very alive. People care about the recent past, especially kids, and kids are usually the ones that culture is happening to. Culture on the internet is very democratized and moves very fast, so sometimes it’s hard to understand, but things are happening here.  This cultural moment rose and fell and is nostalgized in just a few years.

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posted by Instagram user cherrycakebby on Nov 12 (link)

I love these extended strings of adjective posts, especially when they use some nouns as adjectives, and I repost them all the time. They're used super frequently in Gen-Z assertions of personal identity, for art to exist right alongside the physical world to define who they are. Often it's for temporary assertions of identity, like this here. She’s not always this sort of person, just when she’s in this outfit.

In this case, she's taking basic Americana, white t-shirt and blue jeans at the gas station, and saying she's not doing it a boring way, but in a more tasteful way that evokes the art of Lana Del Rey. Lana Del Rey’s music is very Americana, she has Nabokov Whitman tattooed on her arm, and she's used in this sort of adjective string often. It’s interesting because Lana Del Rey herself probably wouldn't see any distinction between “boring” Americana and her fans who approach Americana from the fresh perspective she gave them. There's narcissism in calling people who've lived their whole lives in Americana “boring”, obviously. But I also think that narcissism is fine. Whatever it takes to reenchant America for the next generation. 

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Some other TikToks I took screenshots of this week: