Free art piece #50
This one is called “Look ma, I’m a woman/man now and my friends love me”.
There seems to be an eternal divide between children’s perception of their parents’ expectations and parents’ acknowledgement of how well they’re doing against said expectations. The flaw here is that these expectations are rarely, if ever, voiced out. The two parties are trying to fulfill a contract that was never written and that is, hence, unfulfillable.
The gap is reminiscent of romantic novels where the lover whose love is unmet sinks into despair. Expectation misalignment. Venkatesh Rao, in “The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial”, illustrates how this misalignment is leading an entire generation to be falling out of integrity:
Premium mediocrity is in part a theater put on by Maya Millennial in part to spare the feelings of parents. Inter-generational love, not inter-generational war.
The premium mediocre harbor few illusions about their economic condition. The false consciousness at the heart of it is manufactured for the benefit of a parental generation that is convinced it has set the kids up for success.
In the blame-the-millennials generational war, we sometimes forget that millennials are the children of boomers, and that by and large, broken families aside, there is genuine affection going both ways. It is important for parents to believe that their hard work through the late eighties and nineties was not for nothing. That they succeeded as parents. That they set the kids up for a life better than their own. That despite everything, their kids are alright; it’s only others’ kids who are all about participation trophies, narcissism, and entitlement.
Considering the above, the artist is to write to her friends on her Birthday and ask them to qualify her with 3 attributes and a story that connects them and illustrates said attributes. She is to make it clear that these might be shared in the future only with some very close connections. The artist is to then share that with her mother with the title:
“Look ma, I’m a woman/man now and my friends love me”
It’s important to note that this gesture does not resolve the fundamental absence of a contract and the freeform interpretation each party therefore makes of it. This piece is meant to be an illustration of the ongoing divide between both parties’ understanding of their relationship and love.
