Tinder Users Appropriating Art For Sexting

'Love' by Robert Indiana m.a.r.c. via Flickr
'Love' by Robert Indiana  m.a.r.c. via Flickr

Robert Indiana, Love 
Photo: m.a.r.c. via Flickr

Ever-popular “dating” app Tinder has an alarming new trend.

The influx of  men standing in front of (if not on) pieces of artwork in their profile pictures has caught the eye of one Texas-based blogger and artist, Sally Glass. Her Tumblr site, titled simply “Tinder Guys Posing With Art“, has been making waves around the internet lately, the Daily Dot reports.

Glass’s Tumblr features screenshots of men posing with works of art by (among others) Robert Indiana, Richard Serra, Banksy, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, and James Turrell alongside the original artwork with its title and artist’s name accompanying it. The app itself, which launched a little over two years ago, has become very popular among a certain subset of people and has, by some estimates, more than 10 million active users worldwide.

“Tinder has always been a casual thing,” Glass told the Daily Dot, “Pretty soon, after I tried it for the first time, I started seeing guys here and there posing with, or climbing all over, artwork. I guess it was that I was doing a lot of research and writing about art, so I was naturally inclined to figure out what certain pieces were. I thought it was funny that I’d much rather scour Tinder for photos of dudes with art than actually go on a date with one.”

The 29-year-old artist says she sees her blog as a way to ” document […] my experience as a single woman bored with the ways in which this technology is presented to me.” And so the Dallas native has resigned herself to blogging about dating apps rather than actually using one for its intended purpose. “I’d rather make a funny archival project than find a life partner through a smartphone app,” she says.


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