Katy Grannan is a favourite artist of Tony Podesta's. I imagine that Tony Podesta had the power to make or break an artist, and Grannan is doing quite well thank you. Her work is sold through auction houses such as Christie's, so we're not talking about her pieces selling for a few hundred dollars a piece. From memory, not too much has been written about her and, for whatever reason, her work has not been exposed to the same scrutiny as that of Priestess Abramovich and Djurdjevic.

But what Katy Grannan lacks in creative skills she more than makes up for with her skills to exploit the vulnerable, the abused, and those without a voice. Grannan can take a human being and let us forget that he/she is a person, like us. She has a knack for separating the 'us' from the 'them'. She takes street people and turns them into objects which may pique our interest, not because they are human beings, but because Grannan attempts to make them empty vessels for whom we feel little or nothing. She has that special touch of taking the soul, the heart, out of art and turning a subject with whom we would normally empathise with and feel for and into a 'thing' as relevant as a gnat.

Grannan has a penchant of stripping a subject of humanity, objectifying them, turning them into a 'thing' whose single function is life is to stand as a object of curiosity for the onlooker. Some look like victims, half dead or dying. And Grannan, falls into the tired, old formulaic and stereotypical cliche used by porn producers: dying females are sexy. No imagination, no gift required there.

Take her series Mystic Lake. Half naked or naked adults and children in unnatural reposes and reclining in apparent discomfort. But their discomfort is not of our concern. Their faces show no emotion--no happiness, sadness--nothing. They don't exist for themselves; they exist for the onlooker. They are like animals in a zoo, stripped of any personality because it would be uncomfortable for us, as the viewer, to feel compassion, unease, generosity or mercy. Some are children, clearly emaciated. They look like they are simply prey and we are the hunter. Starving children who look like they've been robbed of their spirit, trapped somewhere for too long to remember what it was to be loved and cared for, and now told to run in the forest for their lives because this is a game of the hunted and the hunter. What little they are wearing is sometimes ripped and threadbare.

The Saw Kill River series features, again, emaciated and vulnerable people make to look like automaton and victims. A near naked girl kneeling in mud in the woods; a young black girl looking untrustingly at the camera in an orange bathing suit and sitting uncomfortably on a rocky road in the middle of nowhere. It conjures up the idea of a vulnerable, prostituted woman being left out in the wilderness by some john who has just escaped a psychiatric unit. There is an emaciated pubescent boy, a delight for those with pedophilic tendencies. It seems as though Grannan wants the viewer to see them as bodies only, soulless and emotionless.

The Poughkeepsie series features a young girl, barely in her teens, sitting provocatively on a leopard-skin rug on a bed. In the corner is a statue of a naked adult couple embracing. Again, she is unsmiling, seemingly non-chalant and ostensibly consenting. Grannan has exploited and turn her into another object, who's raison d'etre is not to exist for herself, but for the paedophilic viewer who will pore over the pictures with one hand whilst masturbating with the other.

Once we had the Renaissance artists like Raphael, Da Vinci. We had Rembrandt and then Van Gogh and Picasso. We have moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, the farcical inanity. No technique, no competence, no brilliance required now. As long as an artist plays up to the peccadilloes and fetishes of the super-rich, it's all good. https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/poughkeepsie-journal http://newyorkarttours.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/katy_grannan.jpg https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/category/grannan-katy https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/podesta-wapo-article-photos-of-naked-teenagers-on-the-walls/