About a year ago I saw a couple articles in the news about an artist that was making waves with their portraits of people with two sets of eyes and lips but ones nose. I wish I could remember the name of the artist ( let me know if you know). The effect plays with the human mind and how it processes faces. It is disorienting and a little unsettling. Art writers praised the artist with claims that it provoked thought of mans interpretation of himself and the fragility of our reality. The praise was over the top. The paintings were just really another type of countless optical illusions that confuses the mind, not a great new form of art that explores the human condition.
So the over the top praise was mildly annoying and insincere, there is a lot of that regarding art critique so I didn't dwell on it much. Then I started seeing knock-offs showing up in my art feeds in Tumblr and Twitter. At first they were direct translations of the original art executed with varying degrees of skill. The amateur artist would sometimes refer to how unusual their thinking was and implied the perception that they were exploring new territories and periodically their social media followers would praise the novel style. Of course, in reality they were just copying an exiting art meme and hoping to gather attention by jumping on the trend. Their work actually sends the opposite impression they are seeking. It's a statement of their own lack of creativity.
After a couple months a new phase for this trend emerged. artists began altering the technique. Why not 3 sets of eyes and no lips? So then there was an even greater stream of variations. The new wave a practitioners no doubt thought they were exploring new territories and establishing their fringy creativity. Then someone started posting pet animals with three eyes, the extra eye between the normal two. The optical confusion effect was completely absent in this case. for some reason the human brain doesn't struggle with that configuration. Around that time the craze died abruptly and its been a few months since I've seen any multiple eyes art in my feed. Now I wait for the next fad.
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