The Brooklyn Rail

“When did it become so deeply embarrassing to be a woman?” asks digital artist Maya Man, who is the author of FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, a periwinkle tome immortalizing the artist’s 2022 NFT collection of the same name. In the book, Man presents seven hundred algorithmically generated, bubblegum-toned graphics that parody the typical #inspirational quotes that have invaded women’s phones since the dawn of Instagram. Essays by artist Ann Hirsch, writer Biz Sherbert, and curator Sofia Garcia explain the question’s origin: over a decade’s worth of social media-driven female stereotypes from the “Girl Boss” of the 2010s to the perfectionist “That Girl” of our present TikTok era. Each of Man’s square memes remix cliché phrases like “Believe in your magic” into satirical lessons that include “REPEAT, OVERTHINK, OBSESS” and “DON’T LET THE INTERNET TEACH YOU.” It’s against this toxic-positivity culture that Man’s project is set into action, aiming to raise our collective consciousness of these worthless aphorisms. But an end to the embarrassment does not come in this collection, a project that ultimately becomes the very thing it wants to criticize.

At first, Man’s randomizing algorithm does produce some funny lines such as “TELL YOURSELF TODAY: I END MY CAPITALISM,” laid out in bold type over a gradient of pink and purple. Many bear hearts, flowers, and sparkles, all ironically cute-maxed to contrast the absurd and often depressing catchphrases. Another reads: “YOU’RE SAD AND YOU DESERVE A SCARY LIFE!” alongside a winking star. After thirty-plus pages, the irony wears thin. Instead of bucking “girl” trends, Man invents a new one: the “Irony-Poisoned Girl” who revels in her own demise. She channels the disaffected, shoulder-shrugging sarcasm that pervades the internet and now mainstream culture, too, found everywhere from 4chan threads to the Barbie (2023) movie. The Irony-Poisoned Girl is so exhausted by her own objectification that she figures if she can’t beat ’em, she might as well join ’em. One trope swapped for another—no risks taken.

In the essay “You Can’t Be Simple For Everybody” (taking after a phrase in the collection), artist Ann Hirsch understands Man’s memes as higher-order critical statements that shine with “true gems of poetry, wisdom, and even inspiration.” But where is the poetry in “I AM SHOPPING INTO MY FULL SCREENSHOT”? Unlike text-based artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, whose singular messages merge with image and architecture to level cutting social criticism, Man avoids picking a real fight. She’s preoccupied with cultivating a despondent-yet-adorable vibe, which dictates how the book is organized: by stylistic attributes that include the colorway “Dear Diary” and plain type “Basic Bitch.” It’s all style and no content in this mass of words.

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT perpetuates a genre of digital art that fiddles with the aesthetics of “being a girl online” rather than attacking the politics and ideology that plagues them. Man isn’t alone in this; the Irony-Poisoned Girl has long since outlived her critical potential. Man comes as the latest in a line of performative “digital girls” that have included over the decades Molly Soda, Amalia Ulman, Petra Cortright, and Ann Hirsch herself. In Glitch Feminism (2020), Legacy Russell’s critique of Ulman also rings true for Man: “Ulman did not disrupt or provide substantive feedback to the status quo,” she roasts the 2014 Instagram-native piece Excellences & Perfections, “but rather her performance, basic as ever, reveled in it.” Just the same, Man’s one-trick pony doesn’t run deep enough to correct any of the gendered narratives it wants to upend. It merely continues a failed “feminist” project that seems hell bound to trick women artists into repeating themselves over and over.

Man identifies a sexist online culture that belittles and exploits women but goes on to sell commodities to the very same: seven hundred NFTs, a menagerie of keychains, totes, and thongs, and one expensive art book singing its own praises. I wish Man had stayed angry. She could have gone for blood and effected a truly Dadaist destruction of female-targeted mass media, but instead she bought into her own hype. This is the false promise of “digital girlhood” art that appropriates female tropes to appeal for attention, tells us it’s criticism, all the while reaping the supposedly disavowed rewards. It disarms a real critique that could be made about the popular tropes that ensnare young women online.