Florida Gallery Will Show Jennifer Lawrence’s Stolen Nude Photos

Jennifer Lawrence.
Photo: © 2014 Patrick McMullan Company, Inc.

The appropriation “artist” known as XVALA (real name Jeff Hamilton) has announced plans to exhibit recently stolen and leaked nude photos of actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton at an art gallery in (where else?) Florida. The not-art project provides further evidence of just how crass, invasive, and misogynistic the dominant culture in the US continues to be—and the sorts of dangerous things that can be passed off as art. When Perez Hilton is articulating the mainstream media’s most sane response to a news story, you know we’ve reached a new low.

The show, titled “No Delete,” builds on a series the “Post PC artist” has been developing for seven years, which he calls “Fear Google,” though must of us would just call it his porn collection. Previous installments in the project have included a canvas printed with an infamous photo of Britney Spears with a shaved head, displayed inside a gilded, 17th century frame, and a 2011 street art campaign in Los Angeles for which Hamilton pasted leaked nude photos of Scarlett Johansson on the streets. The exhibition at Cory Allen Contemporary Art—a gallery and public relations company in St. Petersburg whose “Showroom” resembles a suburban garage and whose scatological acronym “CACA” couldn’t be more appropriate—opens on October 30 and will feature the images of Lawrence and Upton, alongside a trove of other leaked celebrity photos that XVALA has been collecting since 2007.

“In today’s culture, everybody wants to know everything about everybody,” Hamilton said in a statement full of sophomoric Internet puns and hackneyed truisms. “An individual’s privacy has become everyone else’s business…It has become cash for cache.”

Publicist Cory Allen, doing his best XVALA impression, contributes this atrocious zinger: “The commentary behind this show is a reflection of who we are today…We all become ‘users’ and in the end, we become ‘used.’”

With any luck, the only people who turn up for “No Delete” will be protestors calling for the arrest and prosecution of Jeff Hamilton and Cory Allen.


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