Barbiezone
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In Hollow Woman: The World of Barbie From Within and Without Barbie encounters cultural studies.
Barbie so eloquently summarizes mass culture that she makes an easy target for artists looking for a medium to express their criticism of consumerist values. The result is hundreds of sculptures and photographs of Barbie dolls contorted, chopped up and otherwise molested. Goralik dismissed this art. “You take something that’s clean and make it dirty,” she said. “Very funny.”
Georgy Nikich, the curator of “Barbiezone” at RuArts, took a similar stance. “If you look up Barbie on the Internet, you’ll come up with dozens of sites with pictures showing ‘What I would do with Barbie,’ all of them negative,” Nikich said by telephone Monday. “The only positive site about Barbie is Mattel’s.”