Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat
Art in the age of online shopping
Someone told me to go in blind to a YouTube video called “Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat” by the channel Bobby Fingers, so I did. The title seems cryptic but isn’t: through an extensive artistic process edited into twenty-eight minutes, Fingers sculpts a hyperrealistic model of Jeff Bezos’s head, fashions it into a boat, and rows it out into the water. Really, it’s more of an odyssey than that—he apologizes to an old friend, tries to pitch some action figures to a toy manufacturer, shows security footage of him chasing off a “drifter who likes to eat tampons out of the bins in front of the studio,” sings with his band called King Kong Company in front of twenty thousand people at a music festival, harasses someone over email, and gets told off by his boss for harassing someone over email. After lamenting Bezos’s baldness, he shares his own fears around balding, then flies to Turkey to get a hair from his butt grafted onto his head as a preventative measure. The smiling surgeon tells him, “This is a first for us.” I was sure it was a bit, until the team of doctors shaved his head and put surgical masks on and injected him with syringes. Everything is real, and the craftsmanship is striking.
But the polish all over Bezos’s head and the video at large dips into the uncanny valley—people who spend enough time online start to develop an anti-industry plant distrust of someone who pops out of nowhere with well-produced content from the start. The name “Bobby Fingers” sounds like it’s trying slightly too hard to hit that combination of authentic and silly. It reminds me of the teen-girl vloggers I used to watch who titled their channels after their first and middle names to convey pleasantness and femininity: Marla Catherine, Ava Jules. Then again, a Google Doc version of “it girl publicist” (as deemed by PageSix) Kaitlin Phillips’s Christmas gift guide I’d come across said the painter Cumwizard69420 was shaking up the art world, so maybe anyone can do anything these days. Phillips linked to the painting she’d bought her husband for Christmas—a blocky rendering of Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher—and a piece about him in Artforum.
Bobby Fingers is a pseudonym, obviously, but the real man’s background eluded me. Was he primarily a sculptor or an entertainer? He referenced a Patreon, which I doubted a fine artist would need. The Romantic image of strings-off art patronage by the rich (who now use art to hide their money in foundations) doesn’t exist anymore, so isn’t Patreon a way to crowdfund the arts month by month with the large, bald, beautifully sculpted invisible hand of the market? I’m not convinced—that’s still a YouTuber tactic.
Fingers has three other long-form videos on his channel: “Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama,” “Steven Seagal Choke Hold Diorama,” and “Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama.” Sure. In an interview with Andy Baio, he wrote, “I like men who have failed us…The feeling they give is interesting. Like a dog who has chewed something we once enjoyed. But we move on.” He shares an approach to his subjects with Cumwizard69420, who largely, as Sam McKinniss writes, “enjoys painting ridiculous people chewed up and spit out by the internet.” A YouTube video is itself a type of diorama, down to the site’s preference for horizontal video, and his other videos place a person in a moment rather than depicting a person alone. But Jeff Bezos is a larger target, in all senses, than these celebrity men in crisis.
“Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat” does what the best video content does, before it crosses the threshold where video is “cinema” and content is “art”: blurs the lines between fiction and reality, calls attention to its own artifice, switches between modes (timelapse with voiceover, clip of a live “diorama performance” he put on, confessional interview, skit) with ease. I’m reminded of this video, a postmodern descent into madness of a “weekend in my life” recap that someone rightfully called “the greatest work of art of the biden era.” Fingers falters at the end—pardon the wokeness—when he gets political, or at least when he tries to spell it out for the viewer. Concluding the making-of section of the video (before an incomprehensible and unnecessary pirate skit) with “If Jeff Bezos can venture into the great unknown with a ship shaped like a massive dick, then so can I!” is basically funny and slightly moving, but it’s also where Fingers ends up in YouTube sensationalism instead of art-world sensationalism. Or maybe it’s an art-world sense of purpose, whereas people on YouTube do things just to do them. In return, people watch them with dumb, open-mouthed curiosity. MrBeast recently paid a man ten thousand dollars for every day he spent alone in an abandoned grocery store, and I watched it because I wanted to see how long a man would last alone in an abandoned grocery store. He made it forty-five days.
Titling the boat “The Amazon,” calling attention to the body of water (and climate change, and deforestation in the Amazon, and all those other calamities sped up by hyperconsumption), is a good touch. Apparently the company was originally called “Cadabra,” but Bezos changed it after a lawyer misheard it as “cadaver.” How prescient. The Amazon was the world’s largest river, he said, and he wanted to build the world’s biggest online bookstore. Fingers’s use of polystyrene he stole from a dumpster to shape the Bezos mold, and its subsequent recycling “cuz it’s important to reduce, reuse, and recycle,” is similarly clever. Where’s the sustainability in flying to Turkey for a gag? Is that something we should expect from anti-Bezos art, or art in general?
In the video’s final minute, Fingers chooses YouTube showmanship—namely, engagement farming—over his artistic endeavor. He announces that he’s hidden clues throughout the video that reveal the GPS coordinates to buried treasure, stating that someone has already found Michael Jackson as hidden in his previous video. I think he heard something about finding more meaning in great art by experiencing it over and over and thought this meant he should implement a treasure hunt to incentivize repeat viewings from his audience. This gimmick doesn’t say anything about Bezos. This gimmick assumes his viewers need to look for discrete clues in his work for personal gain, instead of giving them the time and material to understand the subtext of his art on its own merits. Given its inclusion in his previous videos, the buried treasure seems to be his thing. That makes me wonder why he’d spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building a functional boat shaped like Jeff Bezos’s head in the first place. If he wants to be the treasure guy, he should just be the treasure guy.
Bezos, so expertly rendered, is blank. As a boat, he’s literally empty. At least Elon Musk’s face conjures some emotion in the viewer. And this is who rules our world now? From Jia Tolentino on Mark Zuckerberg:
“The dissonance at the heart of Facebook is at least partly due to the fact that it was this man, of all people—this man who once said that having different identities showed a ‘lack of integrity’—who understood better than anyone that personhood in the twenty-first century would be a commodity like cotton or gold.”
Bezos’s baldness evokes a similar type of contradiction: he shrunk the world, allowing people to order anything online and have it delivered far quicker than it should be, but the one thing he can’t get back is his hair. Attempts to project an image onto him, like the buff space cowboy aesthetic of his fiancée Lauren Sanchez’s Vogue cover story from November, fail and are routinely mocked instead. Zuckerberg has managed to somehow own his inhumanity, showing off his doomsday bunker in Hawaii to us normals and winning medals in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Bezos, on the other hand, is pure vibelessness. As Fingers reflects, “I have spent months getting to know every pore on his face, yet I feel very little for him.” Steve Jobs may have been the last entrepreneur-billionaire to have a real mythos around him. The “genius” label doesn’t seem to stick as well post-Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, who raised billions of dollars from venture capitalists and former government officials with half a pitch and half a product. Similarly, that liberal circles considered Elon Musk a visionary inventor less than five years ago seems laughable now.
And the baldness, I kept realizing, is really all I know about Jeff Bezos. Fingers even admits within the first two minutes that “[the] reason why I chose Jeff Bezos is because he’s bald, that’s it. That way I didn’t have to deal with 7:1 scale hair,” later wondering, “Does being bald make you a better businessman?” Bo Burnham’s lockdown musical comedy Inside, another work straddling art and the internet distinction of “content,” dedicates the synthpop bangers “Bezos I” and “Bezos II” to the man himself, encouraging him to work harder and harder despite already being on top of the world. When Burnham sings, “CEO, entrepreneur, born in 1964,” it surprised me. I didn’t know Jeff Bezos was a year older than my dad—his baldness makes him somehow ahistorical, like he doesn’t even belong to a particular generation. “Look at where you came from, look at you now”: where did he come from? Somewhere on the west coast, maybe? Insulting “Zuckerberg and Gates and Buffett,” urging Bezos to “fuck their wives, drink their blood” reminds me of Bobby Fingers. I think Bezos’s plainness drives us to these extremities because there’s nothing to grab onto. He just seems evil.
Watching Fingers paint and scrape things off and carve thousands of individual pores into Bezos’s face evoked nothing in me. Instead, I started thinking about the overlap between performance art that gets canonized in galleries and Artforum and what recordings end up on the internet instead. The dominant type of video on YouTube, as much as you can say something dominates the platform, is extremity content. What’s the difference, functionally speaking, between Tehching Hsieh’s “Time Clock Piece” and any MrBeast video? Hsieh had even recorded one frame of film for every instance as part of his accountability practice. He could compile them into something titled “PUNCHING A TIME CARD EVERY HOUR FOR A YEAR” and rack up a hundred million views.