The Shame of Temu

Local artist Julie Aldridge’s battle to reclaim her mosaic design from the counterfeit hoards has brought attention back on Temu and its proliferation of scandalous rip-offs, it’s clones of Indigenous design that are so dreadful you’d wonder why anyone with any sense would buy them.

One reason: Price.

Revisiting this situation is sad because we are fully in a lowest common denominator world now. The proliferation of AI would attest to that and the shoppers paradise that is Temu is driving it.

The Spinning Wheel makes you think you’re going to get a great deal but that reality is far from the truth as you are cajoled by the platform to spend a minimum amount to ensure you get what? The bargain.

And as if to ensure no category is absent from this shoppers nirvana, there exists art. Temu doesn’t have Indigenous Art but some sellers are flicking ridiculously cheap pieces of art claiming they are Aboriginal.

So let’s see what Temu offers and the first that I noted, I’ll call The Blue One. It’s a little 30x40, priced at only $11.66 and sold by TWtin, a purveyor of wall decorations. How can this possibly be Indigenous Art? In its render it is a meaningless assemblage of dots and circles, pattern-matching the most common elements of the art.

Let’s find something bigger.

A banner that is unrelenting in its desert colours. This is sizeable at 150x100 and a steal at only $6.72.

Again, how can this be possible? This one’s sold by YSQZ, the sort of user name hacked out in a couple of angry keyboard taps. Go deeper and you see this guy’s focus is on the party market with his birthday and Christmas banners.

And what these people don’t understand with their vapid interpretations of culture, is that they are doing immeasurable harm to an industry that prides itself on authenticity, where the act of laying down a painting, is to communicate a dreaming that the artist has been handed to nurture over generations and to keep alive.

The description given this piece of AI slop is “2D Plane Aboriginal Pointillism Landscape”.

Let’s stop for a second. Pointillism?

pointillism
noun [mass noun]
a technique of neo-impressionist painting using tiny dots of various pure colours, which become blended in the viewer's eye. It was developed by Seurat with the aim of producing a greater degree of luminosity and brilliance of colour.

Is YSQZ of the opinion that all Indiginous art is pointillist or does the presence of the word lend the work credibility?

So do people think this genuine Aboriginal art? No probably not but the price tag and overall brightness of the image, may stop them buying the real thing. And that is indeed a problem because not only are they disrupting artists livelihoods but they’re destroying the eco-systems set up to sustain it.

Look at what you see in the first row of Google results for the search term “Aboriginal Art”. Every single picture is from Temu as they’ve paid Google for those spots and we already know that’s not real.

Another search on Temu for “Aboriginal artwork framed” reveals a dozen more vapid auto-abstractions that employ techniques commonly associated with Indigenous art.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse you see this thing and it’s only $6.51.

Again it employs many recognisable motifs of the work and then some more which are dead wrong with the overall effect just the insult and disrespect for a culture that’s had to struggle like no other just to stay alive.

Temu don’t care. As with any Internet business it’s all about volume and turnover. We must do better.