The rise of #hotboybadart

I’m a sucker for a curly haired twink. Throw in some exposed abs, call them a painter and that’s me done for, and yes… my Instagram algorithm has too deciphered my sultry little secret. Recently, my Explore page has been inundated with topless boys swivelling canvases under superimposed text declaring: “revealing my art so I can afford fat blunt$” or “*wishing I could look at men with big b00bs all day but then remembering I can paint*”.

The #algo-art #artreveal #thirsttrap boys have sieged my feed like an 18th-century pirate to a merchant ship, pillaging all ‘wholesome’ content and replacing it with questionable paintings and thick, naked thighs. Whilst I wish I could sit here and say “Eugh! This is so annoying! I don’t want to see hot, topless, straight boys painting Cy Twombly rip offs!!!!”, I have often found myself down this rabbit hole, chaotically spam liking all of their posts (that wasn’t me, that was Patricia), then crawling out of its firm, hypnotic grip at 2 am.

Let’s call a spade a spade: we are apparently living through the oppressive revival of the straight white twink. In a recent article for GQ, Raymond Ang established the “chaotic (demon) twink” as the “archetype of the moment”, with actors like Mark Eydelshteyn (Anora), Drew Starkey (Queer), Harris Dickinson (Babygirl) and Timmy Chalamet (A Complete Unknown) dominating our screens, magazines and feeds and ready to jump-scare-thirst-trap-queer-bait the girls, the gays and the repressed straights at any given opportunity.

The #algo-art #artreveal #thirsttrap reels are a small branch of a much larger tree. ‘Gimmick Art’ (as I like to call it) has been plaguing our timelines for years, and has also sunk its claws into the skin of the ‘real’ world art world (if you can call things that happen in reality real anymore) with stunts like Banksy’s self-shredding painting. The Internet trend can range from Damien Hirst slapping Key Stage 2 leaf stamps onto canvas and artists setting their own paintings on fire, performing circus tricks, using tattoo guns, dressing as cowboy strippers, vacuum sealed bondage sacks, topless yoga, to one performer who I found running on a treadmill in front of giant rotating blades caught somewhere between the Saw movie franchise and David Copperfield illusions. These artists will use any device to chain you to their page, increase their likes and engagement, and thus accelerate their influencer status. In that sense, ‘Gimmick Art’ could be defined by its prioritisation of click bait content over ‘authentic’ artistic endeavour, whatever that means.

The ‘Gimmick Art’ social media phenomenon is dissected in detail (itself through Instagram reels) by artist and critic Justin Bua. Through specific case studies, he praises what he believes to be raw artistry and condemns gimmicks. But much like the #algo-art boys and #gimmickartists, has found ascension through his own criticism and personality as a brand. Bua is proof of the unstoppable and inescapable meta-cannibalism that social media allows for. As Carl Jung once said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”.

As we collectively descend further into the depths of Internet culture, we are all left desperately grappling for any form of real, intimate, human connection. Like a long distance relationship ‘shock collar’, heartbeat bracelet, or a remote controlled vibrator, the paintings offered by the #algo-art #thirstrap Insta boys are not necessarily of interest in a formal sense; but what they are offering is an entrapment of their eroticism and physical presence. They have utilised the thirst trap to create a form of fandom enabling them to sell eye-wateringly questionable paintings for eye-wateringly high prices. By presenting themselves as untouchable and unattainable, they are selling an opportunity for their followers to own a part of them. As Whitney Houston proudly declared when she opened for Luther Vandross in 1985, “If you give me some of you, I’ll give you all of me”, and these boys are really giving us (almost) all of them. What you’re buying into is a physical manifestation of the adoration of the idol: the chance to own a sexually charged part of someone else, even if it is a dry humped Basquiat rip-off.

This ideology is nothing new and the erotic male form has been used over centuries to gain commercial and cultural capital. Caravaggio immortalised the queer-presenting-boy-youth and, although undoubtedly one of the best technical painters of all time, the mystical longevity of his work does, in many interpretations, lie in his painting’s repressed, encoded (homo)erotism. Rumoured to be gay, his body of work is peppered with young, sexually ambiguous and promiscuous boys, enticing the viewer in whilst simultaneously pushing them away: an open doorway to an impenetrable maze. So, it could be argued that Caravaggio’s works are early thirst traps. This idea is expanded in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s 1998 article Caravaggio’s Secrets for The MIT Press:

The poses and the looks in these paintings have generally been recognised as erotically provocative, an accurate enough description if we mean by that a body in which we read an intention to stimulate our desire, not only to contemplate the body but to approach it, to touch it, to enter into or to imagine some form of intimate physical contact with it […] given all this, it seems plausible to say that Caravaggio has painted a series of sexual come-ons.

The male queer ‘sexual come-on’ is prevalent throughout art history, found at its height within the innumerable representations of the now gay icon Saint Sebastian. If we take Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian (1620-39) and Giovanni Battista Caracciolo’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (c. 1625), both painted in the wake of Caravaggio, it is clear that 17th-century painters recognised the allure of cum gutters – AKA the arrows of desire – and were utilising male eroticism to drive intrigue in their work. This has been perpetually reimagined, from Peter Berlin’s erotic commodification of himself and Elvis Presley causing fans of all genders to wet themselves, orgasm and faint at the thrust of a hip, to Harris Dickinson radiating his sexuality throughout his own body of work. I’m not suggesting any of the Insta boys are reinventing the wheel – we all know sex sells.

Through subtle and technical artistry, these historic depictions of the erotic man anchor experiences of sexual freedom, repression and desire. My issue with the #algo-art #artreveal #thirsttrap Insta boys is their disregard for the ‘art of the thirst trap’ itself. In their work (reels), the presentation of the male form seems to have performed a mitosis. Unlike the ‘whole’ Saint Sebastian, we have two parts: the vapid object of the painting (prop) and the unsubstantiated male form (or #hotboybadart).

@_codygene is perhaps our steamiest. The painter’s page is a party of flesh, an amalgamation of deep chiselled abs and paintings of his self-created fictional muse, Hero. Hero is an ever-changing otherworldly presence, a fear-inducing human-rabbit hybrid presented as having the body of a Greek God and a floppy rabbit head. As Cody explains on his website, “When humans see Hero’s naked body, his smiling bunny face, they aren’t quite sure what to do with him. Is he an alien? A superhero? An angel? (Hero, of course, prefers the term ‘friend’).” His reels delve into his process and he is frequently found squeezing paint tubes by his scantily clad crotch or squatting to pick up materials in nothing but pink tighty whities. Sadly, his work entitled IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE THIS EARTH has already sold at $1,200, but, you’re in luck as his most recent work HERO DEFENDS THE EARTH! is available for the same (or in four interest-free payments of $300 with Afterpay).

@laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaars, (AKA Lars Stenchly) whilst often wearing more clothes than some, poses topless next to his technologically-blurred paintings or large surrealist cyborg landscapes framed in gauche historic gold frames. His website features a single painting for sale, Crossroads, which as described by the artist, “explores a pivotal moment in humanity’s history: the point where we must decide the direction of our technological development. It is a visual reflection on the tension between the utopian potential and dystopian risks posed by emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)”. The painting (and the essence of the artist’s bare nipples immortalised via Instagram) could be yours for a mere £12,245.

@augusta_alexander’s content combines large-scale flaccid, abstract landscapes frequently accompanied by the bare soles of his feet. Our biggest gyration criminal, he can often be found dry humping his unstretched canvases on the floor and rolling around barely clothed. Although no works are for sale on his website, I was able to find a series of works listed on Artsy, including The Smoker (2023) priced at a respectable €10,000.

Whilst some art critics would declare these works ‘low art’ and may bar their entry to the contemporary canon, art, like sexuality, is a spectrum. It can’t be defined simply as high or low. These boys are carving out their own market, independent from that of contemporary art. When bolstered by the artists’ naked bodies, the paintings seem to amass a new currency. This comes at a time when emerging painters in the ‘traditional’ market are increasingly putting themselves front and centre of their own ‘brand’ to get seen and sold. In an era where it’s almost impossible to be a full time artist without the help of mummy and daddy’s bank account, why should anyone shit on these works when they have proven market value? Why is it such a faux pas for artists to publicly flog their works? I wonder whether there’s something we can all learn from the #algo-art #artreveal #thirsttrap Insta boys. I am reminded of The Apprentice season one episode five, where candidates were required to flog professional artists’ works in Cork Street galleries as though they were apples and pears down the market.

Instagram reels were only invented in 2020, and TikTok only became popular in the UK a year before. Though I fear these social platforms are destroying the ‘purity’ of painting forever, perhaps this is evidence of a democratisation in the elitist art market I have so desperately longed for. Maybe it’s time we all get our kit off and join the Insta boys, dry humping our canvases into the hands of collectors. Has this new-age-chronically-online-internet-era murdered art forever or can grass grow from the concrete? Only the future will tell. Vive la révolution!