Youtube personas: Miranda Sings

For this post I want to talk about sincerity and irony is regards to a Youtube persona, Miranda Sings.  Here are some video by her.  I have also included the links to each video, as the youtube comments are essential to the development of this persona.

Youtube link

Youtube link

It is interesting to see how the character has developed over time.  Here is one of Miranda Sing’s first videos:

I think this last video reveals a lot about the character.  Miranda Sings is a fictive persona made up by actress/comedian Colleen Balligner.  Ballinger drew her inspiration for the character from other students in her college acting in singing class.  This evolution is best described in an article by the Sunday Times titled “Miranda: teaching the world to sing”:

“Appropriately, the character was born on Christmas Eve 2007, when Ballinger was on a break from what she terms her “private Christian university”. ‘There were a lot of cocky girls who thought they were really talented, and they weren’t. They were so rude and snotty, it drove me nuts. Then I saw all these girls trying to make a career out of putting videos on YouTube for thousands to watch, clueless to the fact that they were terrible. The characters were so ridiculous, I wanted to make one of my own. Miranda was created out of spite.’

Ballinger made several videos as Mirandasings08 — her parents were shocked that she was ‘butchering’ her voice — which attracted a few hundred viewers. Last year, she still doesn’t know why or how, things suddenly went crazy. Her parody of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies has received more than 700,000 hits, while both her infamous Voice Lesson and Poker Face postings have attracted more than 400,000.

‘Viewers thought Miranda was real,’ she says. ‘I got a lot of hate mail from people, saying ‘You are stupid, you can’t sing’, and I was eating it up. Some people are still coming up at the end of my shows, telling me, ‘You are such an inspiration. I really love your work — keep trying to make it.’”

Now she has over 40,000 subscribers and almost 12 million views.  At least some of those subscribers are likely to believe that Miranda is sincere.  And what about the others?  Do they like her because she is ironic or do they want to believe that Miranda is sincere?  Where does her appeal lie?  I am also interested to know if Ballinger’s ideas about sincerity and what constitutes good singing have changed through this whole experience.  She now tours around the world as this character performing a cabaret show.

Sincerity: New Sincerity, Neo- Sincerity, and Irony

My interest in sincerity came from trying to understand seemingly sincere moments that came out of cliches, tropes, and popular culture.  Yea, these things are ironic, but what happens when an honest moment of understanding comes out of them?  My thoughts on sincerity are not fully formed at the moment, so I will rely on what I have read.

In an article in Wired magazine titled Sincerely Ours: Glee’s Success Cements Age of Geeky ‘New Sincerity’ author Angela Watercutter claims that “Irony is out; Sincerity is in.”  Although the TV show, Glee (about a high school show choir) is the start and end point of her arguement, she covers a broad range of theory and culture to provide a context and examples for her argument.  Like many others writing about sincerity, she mentions the September 11th attacks as a possible start of the end of irony saying “Following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, there was a brief period during which the detached, sarcastic smartass stance just didn’t seem appropriate.”  Again similar to other authors writing about new sincerity, she said irony did not end there, but it planted the seeds for a new “engaged irony”.   Theories about New Sincerity seem to rely not so much on irony verse sincerity, but on the two working together, sincerity built out of irony.  Watercutter says “ Looking for irony in everything makes the ironist see nothing at face value…Neo-sincerity is a move away this brand of irony — a mindset that can just say, ‘Well it was a catchy song’ and move on.”

In 2006 an exhibit titled “Neo Sincerity: The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic is a Single Letter” was shown atthe Axpeart Gallery in New York.  The exhibition text has been especially useful in my consideration of sincerity in art:

“Irony as it has been practiced in art and popular culture in the last half-century has been a distancing device. Unless you want to be taken for a born-again or a talk show host, forget about wearing your heart, let alone your principles, anywhere visible.”

This statement gets right to the point of my conquest: What, then, does it mean now to make sincere art?  What is sincere art?

Throughout my next blog post, I will explore a variety of examples that present interesting questions in regards to Neo-Sincerity or New Sincerity.  In doing so, I hope to discover further exactly what New Sincerity is.

Future Blog topics that have been spamming my mind with sincerity concerns:

You-tube Personas

The Daily Show and the Rally for Sanity

Musicals, specifically Spring Awakening

Artist, Mike Kelly

Fox News mis-posting an article from the Onion as news

Sarah Palin

Representational painting

Drake, Nicki Minaj, and other pop singers

Links

New Sincerity wikipedia page

A Manifesto for The New Sincerity

Sincerity Now!

Irony is dead! Long live irony!

 

“Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending”

 

Mike Kelley, "More love hours than can ever be repaid" 1987

Article:

Levine, Cary. “Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending.” Art Journal May 2010: 74-91. Print.

Link to the article

This article starts by describing the piece pictured above, “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid”, a wall hanging made up of handmade toys, dolls, blankets, pot holders, and stuff animals sewn together.  The objects were found, abandoning in thrift store, not made by the artist.  Levine writes “The work highlights the gift-giving, in which pieces of thread and fabric are invested with deep emotional content- affection, adoration, sympathy, appreciation- to be passed on to friends, family members, and acquaintances, who are indebted to return the favor.”   She compares the piece to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.  While Pollock represents a safe co-optation of the feminine by a male artist, Kelley, says Levine, is an awkward, grotesque mixture of genders.

She continues the article in defense of Kelley against the claims that his work is “casual sexism”.  Cited in the article, Faith Wilding, a feminists artist/crafter key in the feminist art movement in the 70′s, “characterized his craft works as ‘a mere reversal of gender signifiers’ that does more to reaffirm his masculinity and his mastery of ‘the feminine’ than to disrupt gender stereotypes.”

This seems to be an issue of sincerity.  Wilding believes Kelly is being ironic.  Levine, the author, appears to avoid Kelly’s actual content and instead focuses on other reads of the work.  I, on the other hand, think I believe that Kelly actually is insisting a kind of literal honesty, that these craft items hold more love hours than can ever be repaid.  I am basing this read on my (limited) knowledge of Kelly’s other artworks and writings.  Irony is definitely a tool of his, but not the only one.  Kelly is an interesting artist.  After he had gained some success, he became unsatisfied with how people were perceiving and writing about his work.  In order to overcome issues conerning sincerity and irony, he started writing about the work himself; ”I decided I had to write about my own work if my concerns were to be properly conveyed,” (Welchman).  His works and writings will be revisited throughout my posts in a variety of contexts.

Works Cited

Kelley, Mike, and John C. Welchman. Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. Print.