Update: I was surprised to receive an email from TradeMe today, telling me artist Joshua Drummond had pulled his painting of NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon.
I’d bid on the piece last week — and had since been outbid by a lot of other people.
I reached out to Josh, who was as surprised as I was. He then checked his email — and found that TradeMe had pulled the auction.
As of 12.33pm October 8 in New Zealand, TradeMe has pulled the Chris Luxon painting claiming it “was potentially risky for buyers or against the family friendly spirit of the community.”
As I explained below in my original piece, artist Josh Drummond was raising money for Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal (the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief).
That is, apparently, no longer happening.
Josh has reached out to TradeMe for further explanation, including asking if Mr Luxon had anything to do with this.
Webworm also approached TradeMe, who provided a statement this afternoon:
We don’t allow listings that feature high profile politicians with material of a sexually suggestive nature and/or graphic iconography. For example, in the past we have removed listings relating to Jacinda Arden. This is not a new policy.
To be clear, this is the only reason that the listing was removed.
In regards to our Terms and Conditions, Trade Me reserves the right to remove or edit any listing at any time for any reason.
James Ryan, Policy and Compliance at Trade Me.
I am not too sure what to make of this. “Sexually suggestive nature and/or graphic iconography” is certainly a take, but as Josh explained in his original Webworm interview:
A bunch of people who’ve seen the painting seem to think it’s a butthole. It’s not a butthole.
If your butt looks like that, seek help urgently. It’s just meant to represent flesh, something between elbow skin and a throat and an areola and a boil and varicose veins.
Meanwhile, Josh has released this statement in regards to his painting, and its removal from TradeMe:
I am quite genuinely shocked to have TradeMe delist my auction for “A Photorealistic Painting of Christopher Luxon” on the grounds that it was — somehow — unsafe for buyers, or not family-friendly. I have asked for clarification from TradeMe as to how the auction was unsafe, or unfriendly. I haven’t yet received any. At the approximate time the auction was removed, bidding was at $805, with 60 bids and 23870 views, and it was on 386 watchlists.
The painting and the auction itself are both satirical art in a proud tradition of free political speech and criticism, with influences as diverse as Yeo’s portrait of King Charles III, Namatjira’s portrait of mining magnate Gina Rineheart, Ronnie van Hout’s Quasi, God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert, Δ17 from Doctor Who, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, starring Jim Carrey.
The portrait in question is simply an accurate rendition of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s face, based loosely on a publicly-available photo, surrounded by a rendition of “flesh”. While — like much art — the portrait is meant to be striking and to cause a reaction in the viewer, it is not intended to be redolent of any particular body part, and is not obscene in any way. Indeed, anyone who does believe that this painting looks like any actual human body part is urged to seek attention from a dermatologist or other appropriate medical specialist.
As noted in a comment in the Q&A, the auction was intended to benefit the charities Rainbow Youth (for LGBTQ teens) and Kiwipal (for Palestinian children) with half of the proceeds being split between those organisations. Its abrupt removal means I can no longer make my intended charitable donation.
I note also that I have, in the past, listed two other satirical artworks on TradeMe, one of broadcaster and politician Michael Laws and one of currency trader and Prime Minister John Key. The “Relaxed Painting of John Key” portrayed the former Prime Minister in the style of a Zig-Zag rolling papers packet and smoking a marijuana cigarette, which as far as I know, never happened. The “Horrible Painting of Michael Laws” auction portrayed the artwork as a cursed artefact possessed by many demons. Neither of these auctions was censured in any way by TradeMe. In fact, the Horrible Painting was overtly celebrated by TradeMe staff, being added to Cool Auctions. The auctions and their spirited Q&A were also reported on, positively, by New Zealand news media at the time. The winners of the respective auctions received their artwork in good condition, and placed positive feedback on my TradeMe profile.
What’s more, TradeMe has, in the past, allowed numerous other parody and political artwork auctions to run their course. These included the auctions titled “Jacinda and a Terrible Orange,” and "NZ ART- ORIGINAL JACINDA ARDERN "THE SCREAM" "HUGE 1.02 MTR X 76 CM OIL” which was a satirical painting of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the style of Munch’s The Scream.
I accept that some of the questions asked on my auction could be perceived as rude. Unfortunately, that is entirely out of my control. I made every effort to answer rude questions in a way that undermined their rudeness, and I left questions that I considered too rude deliberately unanswered. I also submit that it’s entirely within TradeMe’s power to remove any Q&A that they consider inappropriate without delisting an entire auction.
Since TradeMe’s abrupt takedown notice, I have noted a number of other current auctions that I would suggest are much less friendly than mine was, and yet remain proudly listed. These include MAGA and “Make Ardern Go Away,” merchandise, archaeological treasures like moa bones, rip-offs of Maori carvings and greenstone taonga, and — still listed, at the time of writing, with 10+ copies available for $25 each — a portrayal of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on a dishwasher-safe coffee mug, bearing the caption “I’m a massive CUNT.” Again, I’ve attached screenshots below.
In light of all this, I have to ask you, TradeMe: why did you de-list my auction? Was it for your stated reasons of family-friendliness and buyer safety — or was it because people complained, or someone political had a word in your ear, or your inbox? Why are you censoring legitimate (and sometimes even funny) artistic expression and free political speech, and why are you denying my ability to make a charitable donation from the auction proceeds?
My request for TradeMe is simple: please reinstate the auction, the Q&A, watchers and bids, with a time extension of several days to make up for its unwarranted removal, so it can run its course.
Or, please describe publicly in as much detail as possible why the auction was removed, and explain why artists cannot rely on your platform to sell their legal work in a free market with freedom of expression.
— Josh Drummond, “Artist”
I will update this story as more comes to light. I would note that all this seems even more unusual when TradeMe happily lists items like, er, nazi rifles:
For my original interview with Josh about the Luxon painting, see the bottom of this Webworm.
For Josh’s various Webworm columns (yes, he writes here!):
Hi,
I will explain the horrifying painting of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon shortly.
But first, I got a text from my friend Aaron over the weekend:
In short, Aaron had loaded about a year’s worth of our text history into Google’s AI (privacy, what privacy?) — and instructed the AI to create a podcast about me based on those texts.
That’s what today’s podcast is — just a couple of AI people talking to each other about me, based on nothing but a text thread between me and my friend. It’s truly awful and I told Aaron as much.
Aaron is a wonderful human — a talented musician and music producer who fosters dogs for “The REAL Bark” on the side. He also enjoys terrorising me with new technology, sending me all manner of news about crypto, NFTs and AI.
“Being a bit of a nerd I always get excited when the next AI thing shows up, but once the “wow” factor is over I’m usually just left terrified.
I like AI when it helps humans do more cool shit. I don’t like it when it does the cool shit instead of us.
Just yesterday at the same time as discovering this, some music software also got announced that can mix artists’ music for them and apparently make it sound like a finished product, saving them having to hire a mix engineer. That directly puts me out of a job. Ha!”
His latest terrifying thing was this audio he sent. It’s awful for a variety of reasons:
It’s never fun hearing yourself being talked about in such a specific way. Remember, this is based on personal texts (nothing saucy, don’t worry) — and hearing a computer talking about you just makes me feel ill.
If Aaron hadn’t told me it was AI, I wouldn’t have known. This makes me feel both old and stupid.
The voices are really good. They sound like real people. The “thinking” pauses are correct. You can hear their lips make that noise that lips make when they open.
They don’t have lips why did I just say they have lips.
It makes me look at certain podcasts — especially just podcasts that involve nothing more than two people prattling on to each other — in a different light. I imagine those hosts throwing 100 existing episodes to the AI, before telling it to “make me a fresh episode but about moo deng” and taking the week off.
Joe Rogan could do this very fucking easily with his nonsensical content — and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s dong it already.
I like to think Flightless Bird is safe as that show sees me going out in the real world, not just endlessly riffing into the ether.
At times it really got things right — at 3’00” one the cheeky shits says, “He’s always getting sick” before accusing me of going out too much. Accurate.
I don’t like hearing AI tell jokes. At one point they suggest (at 9’48”) I do an investigation into competitive dog grooming and call it “Paw and Order”. That’s actually quite good.
And Aaron agreed how uncanny the whole thing was, just in regards to how intimate it felt.
I lost it, too.
While we’re talking about horrible podcasts, podcaster Dr. Bret Weinstein — who’s made a lot of false claims about Covid and a lot of false claims about HIV/AIDS (on Joe Rogan’s podcast, of course) — held a rally called “Rescue the Republic” over the weekend.
All you really need to know about the event is that it featured Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand endorsing Donald Trump whilst furiously praying. Yes, Brand’s latest idiotic persona is “born-again Christian”.
It’s been a weird few days of various terrible people endorsing Donald Trump, including former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Shazam! star Zachary Levi.
New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Chris Luxon is also a Trump man — which is why I wanted to end today’s missive on this:
It’s a portrait of New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Chris Luxon, by Webworm semi-regular Josh Drummond. It’s currently up for auction, with half of the proceeds split between Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal (the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief). Josh is keeping the other half to help keep his kids fed. Fair.
Josh invites you to ask very serious questions over on his auction.
I am a big fan of his work — and these causes — so to wrap up this Webworm, I did a little Q&A with him about his latest creation.
A Q&A with Artist Joshua Drummond
Dear God, what is this abomination? Please explain what is going on in your mind - why are you doing this?
Man, I’m not entirely sure what it is or why I’m doing it. I guess there’s a bit of a backstory. Part of it is that most of what I paint is cute stuff, self-conscious kitsch, like birds wearing hats or landscapes from video games.
A few years back I decided I wanted to see if I could learn to paint photo-realistically. It worked, kind of - I ended up spending a bit more than five years working sporadically on a painting of our cat that was meant to be a birthday present for my wife and I only finished shortly before she died. (The cat, not my wife.)
After I finished the painting I decided I never wanted to do any genuinely photorealistic stuff ever again, as it’s too fiddly and time-consuming, but I was able to use the skills I’d picked up to do a decent painting of a Bored Ape as payment for a mate who’d helped me out with my parody NFT project, the Bird Hat Grift Club.
I ended up taking a similar approach with this portrait of the Prime Minister - realistic enough, but not so you’d mistake it for an actual photo.
The other part of the story is that I’ve done this a couple of times before, that is, painted portraits of people I don't have a high opinion of and sold them on TradeMe.
Dislike can take up a lot of mental space, and I’ve written quite prolifically of the agony of having no real ability to change what is quite clearly — as in scientifically, objectively — wrong with the world.
I guess painting is a way of processing this.
The people I’ve painted so far have either been prominent mainly because they’re so objectionable (like Michael Laws) or have been gifted lead roles in making New Zealand a significantly worse place (like Christopher Luxon.)
And I guess I’m just kind of fascinated by politicians of all stripes; the way that they have to sacrifice their humanity to gain and maintain power. Especially with Luxon, you end up with this caricature who speaks entirely in trite slogans and gormless cliches and never seems to respond sincerely to questioning.
I find this so weird and objectionable — people always talk about how politicians should be “someone you’d like to have a beer with” but if someone showed up at my house talking in the fundamentally Martian patois that top politicians adopt I’d kick them out.
Another thing is that I don’t have a very high regard for my actual artistic skills, and I think contemporary art is mainly a grift that enables the ultra-rich to either appear learned and magnanimous or just indulge in money-laundering.
This limits my chances for a career in the contemporary art world. I’m fine with that, art is very much a part-time gig for me, but what I do consider myself good at is TradeMe auctions. The real art isn’t the painting, it’s the auction and the Q&A that arises. That's where I have the most fun, anyway.
I guess the last part of the reason I did this is I just find it so completely absurd, to the point that I kept cracking up while working on some detail of the painting.
I’m very aware that it’s quite a strange thing to do.
And that might stem from the fact that I’m very sleep-deprived, as our daughter was born just a few weeks ago, and I’ve got my son crawling around on my lap as I write this.
It all adds up to create an interesting mental space.
What gear did you use? How did you paint this? How long did it take?
It’s acrylic paint on canvas. I used the biggest, cheapest canvas I had: it’s a metre tall. I’ve had it for over a decade. I don’t know where I got it, and I could never think of the right painting to put on it, and as I moved houses and such it just kind of came with me getting more and more decrepit.
It was covered in spiderwebs and cat hair and dead insects, so I decided it’d be the perfect substrate for a portrait of the Prime Minister. I used acrylic paint because I’m familiar with it, even though it’s probably not the ideal medium for a painting like this.
The best thing about acrylic is that it dries very quickly. The worst thing is that it dries very quickly, so you have to be sitting at the easel with a little spray mister thing to keep the surface moist if you want to blend paint on the canvas.
Occasionally, if you want to make a quick blend or correction, it makes sense to lick your finger and smudge the canvas, which is why the auction (truthfully) describes the painting as being 0.1 percent body fluids. It’s interesting to think there's some of my actual DNA in it, and that some of the painting is probably in me.
I hope it’s not too toxic.
Maybe a weird question, but did you listen to any music or podcasts while painting it?
Yes. This is going to sound like the biggest suck-up ever but I did listen to Flightless Bird while I made it — the “Navy Dolphins” and “OnlyFans” episodes. I also listened to Behind the Bastards; I’m a big fan of that pod and they had a weirdly appropriate two-parter about the “evilest painter,” Thomas Kinkaide.
I also listened to an audiobook of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, a book I reviewed for The Spinoff. My friends and I exchanged a lot of rambling voice messages.
And there was a good mix of music. The soundtrack to the 2016 Doom game, a bunch of shoegaze instrumental rock like Mogwai and Maybeshewill and Godspeed You Black Emperor, a band called Berlinist, the album Typhoons by Royal Blood, some Radiohead and Low Roar, and in the end phases of the painting I got really into Incubus again for some reason.
I am looking at this painting and my brain does not want to process it. Please tell me, as the artist, what is going on here?
You know that internet gag where someone sees something awful that leads them to comment “what a terrible day to have eyes?”
That’s what I’m going for.
If your brain doesn’t want to process it then it’s working. I love that sort of thing. For an example, I really like Henrietta Harris’ work — she renders people (and cats!) in this rich illustrative style but with multiple eyes or noses or distortions in the picture that make it quite genuinely difficult to tell what's going on and the overall effect is enjoyably disturbing.
For the Luxon portrait, I could tell it was doing what I wanted it to when I took a friend down to my basement studio without hinting at what I was working on and she screamed when she saw it.
It was very important that Luxon look as much like Luxon as possible, while his ...environment looked as surreal and disturbing as possible.
Also I should clear something up.
A bunch of people who’ve seen the painting seem to think it’s a butthole. It’s not a butthole.
If your butt looks like that, seek help urgently. It’s just meant to represent flesh, something between elbow skin and a throat and an areola and a boil and varicose veins. Human skin is weirder the more you think about it, right? We’re just naked flesh covering pulsating veins topped with a knob of hair, if we’re lucky. (I'm not, and neither is Luxon.)
Originally, the painting was meant to be Luxon’s eyes and nose and mouth in the centre of the picture with the rest of his face stretched across the canvas a bit like the Last Human from Doctor Who, but I didn’t have the artistic skill to pull that off. Then I had the idea of making it look a bit like Jim Carrey emerging from the robot rhino in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, except with Luxon kind of joined to whatever he’s emerging from, like the uvula at the back of your throat.
And I wanted him to look very happy to be there, just thrilled off his nut, but also with a kind of grimacing grin like Hide The Pain Harold or the old Flight Centre captain a few seconds before the ad ended. Because I based the portrait on what I think was Luxon’s LinkedIn profile picture, it mostly works.
Do you want Luxon to see this, and if so what do you want him to take from it?
Sure. There’s a good chance he sees it, but if he’s anything like my previous subjects he’ll refuse to comment.
On the other hand, it’s 2024, shame is the new fame, he’s got a social media team, and there’s every chance he tries to make some kind of hay out of it. While I hate to break the character I’ve put together for the auction, I’d like to get ahead of any attempt to leverage this. What I want him to take from it, and what he absolutely will not, is: people see through you.
And he — and you — should be a bit horrified by this, actually.
For me, what’s creepy about this painting isn’t Luxon’s sweaty, grinning face; it’s what’s implied to be behind it. Of course the painting is meant to be gross and funny but, if you’re looking, it’s also meant to be frightening, because it’s representative of the insane situation the country and the world are in.
Behind that grinning mask, that millimetre or less of paint, is a howling vortex of anthropogenic anti-reality bearing down on us to devour all possibility of a decent future. If you saw the mini-series Chernobyl, that show had the perfect metaphor: the gaping maw of an open reactor; the cost of lies.
We’ve put all this carbon in the atmosphere, incurring a debt to the laws of thermodynamics, and physics is coming to count the cost. And Luxon and his ilk are — somehow — pretending that we don’t need to do anything meaningful about this; instead we need to do all the things that led to the problem, like neoliberal economics and fossil fuel production, harder and faster and more cheerfully. I find that inhuman, and terrifying, and so should you.
Ideally, Luxon would too.
But he won’t.
Just to be clear again, where is the money for this auction going?
It’s currently up for auction with half of the proceeds split between Rainbow Youth and Kiwipal, the Kiwi Trust for Palestinian Children’s Relief.
As an evangelical Christian, I’m sure Luxon will be enthused about both those causes. The other half will be going to a cause I like to call “buying food for my children.”
Is there anything else you’d like to add? This is your time to shine.
I am very tired. Part of this is the new baby in the house and part of it is that I clearly have too many hobbies. You can purchase my artwork here.
I have two newsletters: one about self improvement, and one about media and politics that I find too depressing to update.
I write other stuff too. For a completely different product of dwelling on dislike: if you don’t enjoy the heel turn JK Rowling has taken, read my Harry Potter fanfic. What a great way to close out this Q&A!
-Joshua Drummond.
David here again. Let me know what you think of the AI podcast. I also wanted to express my gratitude for your feedback to the Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams piece.
You are good people and I’m lucky to have you here.
David.
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