Launched in 2004, Beautiful Agony is an erotic website “dedicated to the beauty of human orgasm”. The site gathers (and offers, for a fee) videos of people (men and women, young and old, sometimes couples but more often individuals) who have filmed themselves while masturbating. The unique thing about this site is that no nudity is shown: the subjects film themselves from the neck up, showing only their faces, because “that's where people are truly naked”. Beautiful Agony quickly became an internet phenomenon due to how its chaste sexuality raises a number of crucial questions already present in other, more neutral social platforms (like YouTube): where does the balance lie between our desire for ex- posure and the idea of protecting our privacy? What makes “normal” people want to reveal such an intimate moment? How has our relationship with sexua- lity evolved in the 21st century? Screenshots and videos, freed from the protec- tion of the fee-paying site, quickly spread around the web.
Artist/collector par excellence, Hans-Peter Feldmann, who has dedicated a vast number of works to the banality of beauty - women’s legs and lips, intimate activities like getting dressed and putting on make-up - and the repetitive nature of certain visual models, could not remain indifferent to the appeal of these images. But the interesting thing about this work is not just the nature of their source material. It is interesting that the artist of the wunderkammer, antique shops and flea markets, turned to the net to look for material. It is interesting that he has ended up operating like the other artists in this exhibition who owe everything to his art, his childlike curiosity, his ability to forge syntactic links between apparently distant images, his conception of intellectual property, and the visual solutions he has developed to present his works. And lastly, it is interesting that the internet itself has ended up looking so much like Feldmann’s work: from the modernist grid of Google Images, to the chaotic disorder of Tumblr, to the idiosyncratic, surprising connec- tions generated by tags. [DQ]

Hans-Peter Feldmann: Agony