People using my art as click bait for titillating videos

Every now and then I do an image search through Google to see if people have appropriated my art, and where it appears. Apparently, my Swell With Bikini Dancing Girls is being used as a thumb for erotic videos, even if the video’s content can’t possibly match the thumb. Here are some of the video titles that use my art as a thumbnail.

1. Hot Sexy College Girls Party in Bikini and Thongs – Dirty Dance
2. Pathan Girls Dance In Bikini – Video Dailymotion
3. Watch Bikini Clad Girls Dancing At Tropicana Club Full …
4. hot sexy girl dance in bikini hot sexy girl dancing in bikini 6 …
5. Sexy Girls From Brazil (Bikini Dance) HD
6. Sexy Bikini Girls Dancing – YouTube
7. Vlegel Bring It Back Official Music Video Bikini Girls Sexy Dancers Miami Beach
8. [Full-Download] Hot Blonde Bikini Girl Dancing To Punk Rock
9. Sexy Bikini Girl Dance Video – Mp3, Lyrics, Albums & Video
10. Desi Hot Girl in Bikini in BED Seducing very Naughty

This doesn’t really bother me, even though I haven’t gotten one penny or probably even one click out of it . In fact I find it affirming. First here are some screen shots where people are using the image.

I didn’t link to any of the sites because, well, some of them are of questionable content.

So, why doesn’t this bother me?

If I think back to my inspiration for this image, it was YouTube thumbs. I confess to having watched my fair share of prank and fail videos. Those videos, and others, will always choose as a thumb any image of a girl that might be alluring to viewers. The short of this, I concluded, was that T&A are click bait. And I thought that if it worked for videos, it could work for fine art images. Keep in mind that I hate click bait, and I’m well sick of pseudo erotic art, so much of which is shallow and clichéd.

I thought about what I could do with gratuitous T&A, while also subverting it and building in ambivalence (I’m not about to do straight up low brow sexist drivel). I don’t remember the sequence of my conceiving the image, but I used the bikini dancing girls because they were already a little hard to have an easy take on. One could argue that their dancing was degrading or empowering. The “male” gaze is over-the-top obvious, with guys going into drooling hysterics, but so are the women in the audience. But once one notices the tsunami in the background, it changes everything. Now we are looking at a scene of imminent tragedy. The hand in the foreground reaching toward the girl’s back could be trying to pull on her bikini straps and take her top off, or warn her of the giant wave fast approaching. There is the allusion to global warming and people’s obliviousness to it.

For me the core of art is the image, and my objective is to create new images for the collective imagination. A lot of people say this is impossible, irrelevant, or passé. They speak for themselves. One measure of an image’s success is if it captures people’s imagination, is engaging, memorable, and causes them to pause, look, and contemplate (the other more important measure is its intrinsic merit). Here I was trying to lure people with surface eroticism into contemplating the deeper water of the human condition. People using the image as a thumb for their videos proves I at least succeeded at the former.

Just one of the videos that used my art for the thumb has been viewed over 6,000 times. That’s not as good as my KFC Mutant Chicken, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times (you may have seen it without knowing me), but it’s not bad. I get absolutely nothing out of it monetarily, but it does prove that images still have the power to capture people’s imagination.

Of course, I’d really prefer if it were my best images that went viral, and for the right reasons…

~ Ends

See more about “Swell with Bikini Dancing Girls”, including close ups, and how I made it here.