Editor’s note: This story is the second edition of Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.
Painting the internet is hard. The internet is a bunch of content that reads and looks like something we’ve already read or seen; then you paint it, and it’s just that thing we’ve already seen. The method of approach comes down to curation: what to depict, again?
In Sam McKinniss’s new show “Law and Order” at Jeffrey Deitch, the filter was law enforcers and law breakers. Most of the “characters” in his new paintings, as he calls them, are figures whose images have gone viral or are familiar faces in our media landscape. These characters include Jeremy Meeks, whose mugshot went viral more than a decade ago because he’s hot; Luigi Mangione, looking over his shoulder after he was apprehended outside a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania; Chuck Bass, from the teen soap opera Gossip Girl; and a pair of riderless horses streaking down an urban street, one of them bleeding.
McKinniss told Cultured that he wanted to “almost illustrate the immediate moment of what it feels like to be living in America right now.” Yet those horses were galloping down the streets of London, not Manhattan. That detail doesn’t really matter. For McKinniss, America isn’t a place. It’s a semi-abusive relationship with iconic images.
There’s a history to understanding America as an evolving regime of iconic images. From the dream factories of Hollywood to the advertising innovations of Madison Avenue, this country’s character is deeply rooted in the production of visibility. Of America, Jean Baudrillard once wrote, “Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photographs, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.”
Yet there was something that delighted Baudrillard about the fakeness of this nation, and many have shared in his glee. From Paris Hilton to Andy Warhol, the ironic (and then, not so ironic) overindulgence in the commodity aesthetic is classically American.
Sam McKinniss, Vida and Trojan, 2025.
Photo Grace Dodds/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
There is also a political dimension to visibility. We are taught in history class that social progress is a matter of moral consensus whose consolidation only becomes possible when an issue is represented. There are images that “shock the national conscience,” as Susan Sontag put it in Regarding the Pain of Others, thus catalyzing a mass response to which our government must respond by enacting change. That’s the myth, at least. For this reason, freedom of speech and representation tend to be central to our culture wars. We think visibility is where we get our rights.
“Law and Order,” however, represents a twist in these two myths of American relationships with iconic images as social media blurs the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and politics. If Americans perhaps uniquely know themselves through images, it’s no wonder social media represents what it feels like to be in America right now.
Installation view of “Sam McKinniss: Law and Order,” 2025, at Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Photo Genevieve Hanson/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch
But what is that feeling, really? The emotional response I have to McKinniss’s painting is basically indistinguishable from the experience I have of being online.
Walking through the gallery replicates the dull sparks of recognition one encounters in the act of scrolling: Chuck Bass (a laugh); Flaco, the escaped zoo owl (I’m sad he died); a politician (Callista Gingrich); the escaped horses (epic); the juggalos (interesting, I guess); and so on. That stimulation which we now gloss as “dopamine hits” resolves into something negative. I feel provoked to make meaning out of what I am seeing and between the things I’m seeing, yet I have the need to rebel, to put up a guard of disdainful indifference. If I’m being sold something, I’d rather not pay attention, if it is tragic, I know my cry won’t do anything. And then there is the final nail in my coffin: the flatness of the merely circulating, which sometimes has the horrifying effect of suddenly coming to matter.
Sam McKinniss, Callista Gingrich, 2025.
Photo Grace Dodds/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles
This effect is quite the magic trick on McKinniss’s part: The paintings recede and become content. Under a heavy swipe of varnish and rendered with all the softness of a compressed JPEG, most of these images seem totally interchangeable. Having already encountered these images online, this recognition of the paintings as content produces the impression—a false one, I’m sure—that they are easy to make, that he can make a lot of them, and quickly.
Are the paintings good? Is this state of affairs “good?” It’s an accurate picture, which is to say, it’s often quite an ugly one.
There is one painting in “Law and Order” that depicts an image that is not iconic at all, or at least I didn’t recognize its subject. It’s a small painting of an inconspicuous compound of buildings seen from above. By consulting the checklist, I learned what it represented: the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, otherwise known as the La Salle Detention Facility. If what it feels like to be in America is to be helpless in the wash of images, here is where place reasserts itself. Here is the important, unseen thing, the site where people are disappeared, often without access to legal counsel, medical care, or clean water. It is an unassuming work, but somehow a cathartic one. I felt like I saw something important.
