Bluejake

Blimey! Have to disagree - personally I concider the self-portrait to be one of the most important genres as an artist - to attempt to understand the way you are percieved by others is something that we all would really like to know. The artist spends so much time looking at people and the world around them, that it's impossible for them not to wonder what they themselves look like and how they are seen by others.

I understand completely how that can seem a little egotistical, but I think that that is a modesty issue - personally I think there's no place in art for modesty - lay it all bare - that's what I say.....

We all look at your pictures and can't help but wonder - 'who is guy?' ... a self-portrait helps us to see a little better .... although the flip side is that you never quite know what someone will think of you just through a picture.... that's up to you to put us right on!

Dickie, you didn't have to live through Jake's naked art show.

I am of the opinion that the self-portrait can be a work of artistic genius (or a grand failure) regardless of its self-referential nature. The viewer might never know that a particular work is a self-portrait, and thus judge its merits without bias.

Furthermore, the self-portrait is not always a meditation on how others might see the artist; its purpose might be to present to the world how the artist sees himself, or would like to be seen. I would even suggest that all art falls at least partly under the category of self-portrait, as what artist could ever remove himself completely from his own creation?

An antique, black and white television, riddled with 9mm bullet holes and crudely mounted on a wooden stake in a corn field could be a self-portrait - just as the shameless and egotistical whoring of an artist's all-too-available nude body could be put on photographic display in 1998.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about my distaste for the use of the word "trope," both correctly, and unfortunately in this case, incorrectly. "Trope" is one of those words you only hear in the hallowed halls of academia, as part of some boring paper or lecture that relies on high abstraction and flimsy metaphor in order to hide its basic lack of any real meaning or relevance. Trope is a word I am loathe to use unless forced to, as I am here, or would be at a gallery opening featuring "artful nude self-portraits."

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "trope" as:

"1. Rhet. A figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it; also, in casual use, a figure of speech; figurative language."

Examples of tropes include, but are not limited to, euphemisms, hyperbole, puns, similes, and irony - all figures of speech in language. How the art form of "self-portrait" could fall under the category of "trope" completely escapes me, especially the literal interpretations found on this site.

If one were to give you the benefit of the doubt, genius that you obviously are, one might hope your intention was to make a metaphor for some other unspecified trope. One can only hope.

i think you can use trope the way i used it- that is, to mean a somewhat tired or overused way of expressing oneself. Is oneself even a word? Probably not. But google, ever helpful, gives me this definition for trope, which gets at what I mean:

TROPE - The intentional use of a word or expression figuratively, i.e., used in a different sense from its original significance in order to give vividness or emphasis to an idea. Some important types of trope are: antonomasia, irony, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. Sidelight: Strictly speaking, a trope is the figurative use of a word or expression, while figure of speech refers to a phrase or sentence used in a figurative sense. The two terms, however, are often confused and used interchangeably. (See also Imagery)

Drunken webcam cybersex isn't a "naked art show", Jake.

Oh jaysus, as "artsy-fartsy" and pedantic as all the above sound, with the exception of jkotte who was actually kinda funny, it all just reminds me of ebay's naked tea kettle guy.