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Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth (Artforum review)

Jan 2017 🇺🇸 Artforum

In this January 2017 Artforum review, critic Naomi Fry assesses Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth exhibition and its accompanying 504-page Phaidon catalogue, mounted at New York's International Center of Photography. Fry traces Greenfield's 25-year photographic arc from 1990s Los Angeles conspicuous consumption through princess culture, cosmetic procedures, and the 2008 financial crisis to present-day global wealth inequality, arguing the work captures a contradiction in which material abundance coexists with visible unhappiness in many of its subjects. The review describes Greenfield's photographs as associating heavy exposure to status- and image-driven culture with dissatisfaction and status anxiety, rather than treating wealth itself as a straightforward source of wellbeing. TechKids Foundation cites this review as an early, serious critical reception of the body of work that shaped Greenfield's subsequent documentary Generation Wealth and, later, Social Studies.

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Fry, Naomi. "Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth." Artforum, January 2017.

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