Prostitution of Art: Shil Sengupta [60]

Shil Sengupta
Arlington, MA, USA

1. Prostitution of Art--the dismemberment and rearrangement (prostitution) of a useable object for human gawking. Stunning and beautiful nonetheless.

2. prostitution of slave labor in the service of art--its prostitution because it stands for what it's not.

3. prostitution of the elements of art (color, form) in the service of a functional object

Functionalism Rejected: Shil Sengupta [17]

Shil Sengupta
Arlington, MA, USA

1. Functionalism Rejected: Traffic Light

The yellow paint that is functionally used to coat the traffic light in a sterile, unimaginative way turns against its own use by crying….the yellow paint turns against its own use and misuse

This is part of a three photograph series that is being submitted for this theme of the “Prostitution of Art” in which the sublime possibility of color and form is used toward purely sterile,functional, or economic ends. However, despite the color or form’s reification, its sadness becomes evident through its own subtle forms of resistance.

2. Functionalism Rejected: Detour Sign

White and orange were abruptly strewn onto a block into route incoming human traffic elsewhere with no regard for the possibility of these two colors. Yet, if one watches closely, one sees that these orange and white arrows begin to resemble sad, longing beings that are entrapped yet always in the process of escaping or at least resisting their functional misuse.

3. Functionalism Rejected: Entrapped Deity

In Mysore, India, there is a famed garden with various displays of water that are routed, spouted up toward the sky, and elsewhere in order to entertain the myriad tourists. In the midst of this bourgeois, commodified torture chamber of sorts, there is this out of place head of a deity which bares witness to the surrounding travesty. Its honest expression resists its own placement or displacement in this environment.