Ruby Thelot
As seen in:
Medium,
Substack,
Dazed Magazine,
SSENSE,
Nothing Personal,
ARTnews,
Artforum,
Ocula,
Protein,
Byline
and
Covers:
Art, culture, fashion, memes and technology
Articles by Ruby Thelot
“Enshittification” Isn’t Real Original
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts Today’s guest post is by Ruby Thelot, a professor at NYU and astute tech observer. You can watch his recent appearance on MTS here. Every year, more people use and spend more time on Big Tech platforms. It is fashionable to hate on social media and to pontificate about how it’s worsened, because the intellectual accoutrement du jour is being a conscientious (™) tech critic. This stated preference does not match the general public’s behaviours.
Aesthetic Stagnation
New aesthetics exist most visibly in new media. New aesthetics emerge through synthesis. New aesthetics require a philosophy. New aesthetics must be actively sought by audiences. New mass aesthetics require a shared vision of the future. The industrialisation of culture disrupts the cycle of innovation and risk-taking. The past and its artefacts weigh on the future. New aesthetics exist, but mostly in new media. Economics influences mainstream aesthetics more than audience taste.
What’s in a “Friend”?
You probably have too many friends on social media, but that’s not your fault. Technology often reconceptualizes our social infrastructure, and not for the better. Friendship is a great example. Social media began as a set of platforms meant to connect us digitally, but it has evolved in a way that muddies the definition of friend by commingling it with the notion of followers. Take Instagram: It is a confusing platform these days.
New York State of Mind
A purple electric bicycle, propped carefully on a circular bike rack and adorned with stickers and a mish-mash of accoutrements, sits in front of a large, colourful hand-painted mural announcing Greater New York, complete with playfully cartoonish pots of paint and a mouse nibbling a block of cheese. This is the first sight one encounters at the latest iteration of MoMA PS1’s recurring survey of artists living in the New York City area, staged every five years since 2000.
The Death of the Image Has Made Us Wake up to Reality
Never have we produced more images than at the time of their death. A million sharp knives carefully planted into the beating heart of the image. It looks around. Et tu? Yes, you. Yes, I. Yes, we. We have killed the image. 2025 will go down as the year the image died. One of my favourite image-related anecdotes of the year occurred in March, when OpenAI released a new image model with a style emulation feature that took the internet by storm and pushed AI-image generation into the mainstream.
Tom Lloyd Forever Shines a Light on Black Art
That the late activist and artist Tom Lloyd was born in Detroit in 1929 is significant. Detroit, the city where Black bodies were absorbed by the machinery of American industry at the turn of the 20th century. The city where technology became fully enmeshed with capitalism through the automotive industry. The city where Black and techno music became indistinguishable in the 1980s as a futuristic sound rooted in funk and soul emerged from its clubs.
With every new technology, we find new ways of showing affection. With every new technology, there emerges a new love language. In the 1997 Seinfeld episode “The Millennium”, that method was the speed dial. A quick recap for those who haven’t seen Seinfeld Season 8, Episode 20: Jerry is dating a woman named Valerie who, based on the quality of their dates, ranks Jerry on her speed dial – a set of nine programmable phone numbers that can be called in one click instead of the requisite seven.
‘The Studio Is a Cauldron for My Reckoning’
When I speak to Chase Hall, he is at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, finishing up the install for his new show. He’s wearing a burnt-orange sweater and meandering around the gallery to find a calm place for us to chat. The 31-year-old artist has been heralded one of the best new voices in painting due to his unique, provocative, and layered portrayal of Blackness, masculinity, and personal history.
The Garbs of DOOM
“It’s a way to add another messaging system in the work,” muses Eliza Douglas over the phone, reflecting on the costumes she designed for DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE, the latest performance of German visual artist and choreographer Anne Imhof, which premiered on March 3 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York for a sold-out run.
The Internet Was the Beginning of a New Folk Artist. Artificial Intelligence May Be Its End.
Everyone wants to be a creator. According to a report by YouTube, SmithGeiger, and the Fandom Institute, 65 percent of teenagers and young adults aged 14 to 24 now identify as creators. But the creator’s future is uncertain: the rise of AI-generated content is challenging their place in our limited and highly competitive attention landscape. What good is a content creator if we can generate unique content customized to each individual at will and at scale?
Ruby Thélot on how science fiction shapes the world
Store and/or access information on a device Cookies, device or similar online identifiers (e.g. login-based identifiers, randomly assigned identifiers, network based identifiers) together with other information (e.g. browser type and information, language, screen size, supported technologies etc.) can be stored or read on your device to recognise it each time it connects to an app or to a website, for one or several of the purposes presented here.
Why Drake is the most meme’d rapper of all time
The host of the first-ever meme symposium dedicated to Drake studies explores why the rapper is all over our social media feeds Drake is everywhere: the supermarket, the club, the gym, the car, the radio, starting fights with AI. If you live in a metropolitan area, you cannot escape him, especially in the US and Canada. In an interview earlier this year with fashion designer Recho Omondi, Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def, was asked whether he thought Drake’s music was hip-hop.
What Song Will You Play As You Await The Apocalypse?
The End Times is a column cataloging the omens of the Apocalypse as they occur in culture. You have a few minutes left. Melancholia is approaching. You have the aux. Your fingers grasp the phone, its brightness dull due to low battery. It recognizes your face and unlocks. What app do you choose? Is your final song on a streaming service? Do you have it downloaded in case there is no service? Is the song an unreleased deep cut only available on Youtube or in the Soulseek folder in your iCloud files?
Unsure How To Deal With New-Age Anxiety? Try Fantasy.
In “The Scream,” it is understood that the yell punctures the calm of the urban setting. The scream is a freak-out, by nature, temporary and cathartic. Our age is different in that the scream seems to be digitally recorded and played on loop on a buggy media player. There is no end in sight for the freak-out, it has become endless.
10 Ways Human Writing Will Survive The Textpocalypse
The End Times is a column cataloguing the omens of the Apocalypse as they occur in culture. I remember the first piece of writing I ever really loved. I was rummaging carelessly through the second drawer my father’s dresser looking for change and stumbled upon a beige book with crispy brittle pages, as if the book had been slow toasted for decades on a perennial radiator. I took it out.
A Story Of Two Pompeii Lovers
A Mount Vesuvius explosion, a french bistro, the Messiah's return, and more climactic events. Published The End Times is a column cataloguing the omens of the Apocalypse as they occur in culture. A million Cassandra’s could not convince me to leave without seeing you.
Last Days In Las Vegas
As Coney Island to Manhattan, Las Vegas is the incubator for America’s wildest ideas, a playground for experimentation, nuclear or otherwise. Just like Coney Island in 1906, the last grand idea is the construction of a giant sphere, the largest on Earth, allegedly. 875,000 square feet of spherical area all devoted to entertainment which should, God willing, open to the public in September of this year.
The Treachery of Images
Commentary by Ruby Justice Thelot July 5, 2023 Around 73,000 years ago, early humans in what is now Blombos, South Africa, dipped stones in scarlet ochre and carved into cavernous walls ladder-shaped figures, dots, and handprints to depict their world. The representational image is mimetic—it imitates nature. For Aristotle, the image is a simulation that engenders an emotional response in the viewer as they see themselves in what is being depicted, fictional or otherwise.
Byline
The End Times is a column cataloguing the omens of the Apocalypse as they occur in culture. A barren rocky landscape at dawn. Two vast legs of plastic stand in the desert. Near them, a group of young girls playing with baby dolls approaches and stares in awe. They abandon their pretend babies, smashing them into pieces, and embrace the monolith: stylish, slender, a woman, an aspiration, the new Idol, Barbie. Margot Robbie winks. BARBIE – Out July 2023.
You Will Live at Work
you will live at work the workplace of the future you will live at work why ever leave? why ever leave? we’re already working crazy hours anyone in a large corporation can attest to the long hours every week way beyond the 40 hours mark why ever leave?
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Ruby
Contact Ruby, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack