
Frida Kahlo and the birth of Fridolatry - Thevet
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jun/11/frida-kahlo-fridolatry-artist-myth
======
fredley
Anecdata: I was shopping for a birthday card recently, and Frida Kahlo is
_everywhere_ at the moment. Her image has been fully commoditised, so you'll
find stylised pictures of it on almost anything. Her image is becoming as
ubiquitous as Che Guevara's in the 90's, or it feels that way, and in becoming
so I imagine 90% of the people who pick up a Frida tote probably have no idea
who she was or why she's famous, other than she had thick eyebrows.

~~~
ovao
Her face is also peppered liberally in murals and street art in Los Angeles.
It's unusual, because no other artist in Los Angeles seems to be particularly
celebrated in that way — it's Kahlo's image that seems to be important more so
than her art.

It would be interesting to chat with the people responsible for those pieces
to get a sense of what they knew about Kahlo and what attributes about her
they find interesting. I have a similar hunch that many of the people
plastering her face around the city probably actually know fairly little about
her.

~~~
kjeetgill
To be fair her face is also peppered liberally in her own art work. Page
through the carousel at the bottom[0], I think I count 2 without her face in
it. That said I suspect that, like many artists, she's iconic for being
iconic. Her works have made their way into our cultural consciousness even if
her ideas or her personal life haven't.

I think that's okay.

[0]: [https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-
fridas.jsp](https://www.fridakahlo.org/the-two-fridas.jsp)

~~~
ovao
That’s something I hadn’t really considered. The link could very well be that
simple.

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Pxtl
And this is why I was a little bothered by her inclusion in Coco.

I loved Coco. It's a fantastic movie. But putting Frida in there as a
recurring character seemed kind of bandwagon-y for the normally-timeless
Pixar.

~~~
ghaff
OMG, that went whoosh over my head. (In my defense, I watched it on a trans-
Atlantic flight so I probably wasn't at peak mental state.)

~~~
Pxtl
Hah, I know the feeling. Flying to India I couldn't sleep and watched so many
movies with my brains just fried from low oxygen. I have no idea what
Emperor's New Groove is about.

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fullshark
What an odd ending to this piece. I don’t even understand the authors purpose
in writing it now. What point is she trying to make, this is all over the
place.

~~~
SiempreViernes
The article talks about how the talented painter Frida Kahlo is understood by
many as simply an exotic snack, and finished with the extreme example about
how someone is declared to be dressed as Kahlo by the single feature of having
a unibrow.

A comparable example would be an article about the hollow understanding of the
1960 hacker culture finishing with a story about how someone was declared to
be dressed as Stallman because they held a printed email.

~~~
kjeetgill
Hey, thats only because I have the long hair and beard everyday. Nobody
appreciates the subtlety of the Stallman costume I wear year round.

Joking aside, while I see what the author was getting at I think it's a little
unfair considering how prominently her face and brows are featured in her own
work. Kahlo CHOSE that as her icon [0].

[0]: [https://www.sartle.com/artwork/my-nurse-and-i-frida-
kahlo](https://www.sartle.com/artwork/my-nurse-and-i-frida-kahlo)

------
abruzzi
I'm not very knowledgable about Frida Kahlo but I was a little nonplussed by
the throwaway line about the film "Frida" and Harvey Weinstein. It seems like
a guilt-by-association tactic. Its been a while since I saw it but my
recollection is Julie Taymor's film doesn't seem to fall into trap that she
claims of the other "fridolatry". It certainly doesn't portray her as a
passive victim, but as an active creator of her life and art.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
There was a bit of victimhood in the narrative, particularly around the
extramarital affairs. That was my ex-wife's favorite film so I've seen it
several times, and I finally deeply read about Kahlo (the Trotsky story
especially intrigued me), and the impressions and conclusions I drew regarding
some of the portrayed events didn't jibe with how I interpreted them in the
film.

Even without considering historical accuracy, after a few viewings, it becomes
clear that the film is not well made despite Taymor. I think at the time it
was an awards darling because, though it seems much more pedestrian now, a
studio system film about a female Mexican cultural icon was even more unlikely
to see the light of day then. I remember discussion around it highlighting its
progressive nature, so that likely framed reception of the film, despite the
occasionally clumsy script and at times loose interpretation of the subject
matter. To be honest, when I saw this link pop up on HN, I immediately thought
of the film as an example, rather than the Barbie (which is even worse, but
oddly, I can't verbalize why).

As for Weinstein, that attributed pull-out quote, if accurate, stands alone to
demonstrate thought behind the portrayal. I'd say it's fair.

Many figures are tough to interpret beyond death, to be fair, and maybe we're
all wrong about her. Who knows. Arguable she'd find us discussing it amusing.

------
SiempreViernes
I wonder if stories like these really make people treat other cultures with
respect, or just make the fearful that everyone else is just out for revenge
and thus just amplify their avoidance of anything foreign.

~~~
omegaworks
It's almost like you should learn a bit about what you take from other people.

If that's too hard for you, go home and eat your mayo on white bread.

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mwexler
It feels like her visage has become more famous than her images or her name,
though you do see a gradual rise in interest over the last few years of the
phrase "Frida Kahlo"...
([https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=frida%20kahlo))

~~~
alphakappa
Trends only shows data for the past few years, but searching usage in print
can be instructive. Frida seems to have become hugely popular beginning in the
90's. Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be a rise in usage after the
early 2000's Hollywood movie.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&ye...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Frida+Kahlo&year_start=1930&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CFrida%20Kahlo%3B%2Cc0)

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splintercell
One of my favorite troll attempts was when someone 'fixed' [1] Frida Kahlo.

1\. [https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-
fr...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kmallikarjuna/and-now-for-pretty-frida-kahlo)

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M_Bakhtiari
> Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon

Is this a man? He/she looks rather manish.

~~~
jonathanlb
If you are not trolling, Frida Kahlo was a woman. One would know that from a
cursory glance at her Wikipedia page.

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
You don't know that these days because even men who start presenting
themselves as women get female pronouns by default all over the place.

Not trolling, I've never seen or heard of this woman before.

~~~
Avshalom
If, impossibly, the exact same person had grown up in some other time or place
who knows, but in the life she lived she was born female and lived her life as
a woman, but with a defiant femininity; rooted in herself, her body, not in
the capitalist beauty myth (N.B. the communist beauty myth wasn't much better
and she rejected that as well).

