F  L  A  U  N  T

A typical clink of wine glass and coffee cup fills the smile, a twilit NOHO spot, where all-around and all-around-town artist Jeanette Hayes sits midst other pretty patrons just off work and dripped into the eatery. How many of the small crowd here might share her Midwest to Manhattan trajectory is hard to tell—how many might likewise see art in unicode must be few—but there’s zeitgeist overflowing nonetheless. “The thing is, I like what everyone likes,” she shares. “I just talk about it so everyone will look at it.” What follows are the thoughts of the young maker concerning things of contemporary relevance: portraiture, paparazzi, fair use, inspiration, America, copyrights and that old rascal, Jeff Koons.

I PAINT THE INTERNET: I think of myself very much as a New York artist. Also very American. I mean, I think my work really is the work of an American girl. But people like to give specific labels. I don’t say that I’m a digital artist, but a lot of times I get that. I do have a painting background, but then again, I do paintings about the internet, and I do work specifically to be viewed online, but maybe there’s more to it than that?

I PAINT BLACKBERRY MOBILE PHONES: I somehow got into these chat rooms with these young girls from, like, Costa Rica and Venezuela, and none of them spoke English, but they made the most glamorous, fabulous names for themselves just using characters and unicode and emoticons. So I made my own, and it happened that my friends wanted them, and I started making them for everyone I knew. But then the market for the BlackBerry started going down and I said, “It’s more fleeting than graffiti. It’s going to be gone and no one’s even going to have a BlackBerry.”

I PAINT TMZ: I’m a big fan of portraits. I think this is a time of paparazzi. People take pictures of themselves all day long. Self-obsession, obsession with other people, pretending not to have that obsession, Facebook, knowing people before you know them.

I PAINT JEFF KOONS: But then I feel like everyone is so accessible. I feel like if I want to work with someone, I’ll work with them. I will Google their work, take it, and work “with” them. I had one show a couple years ago where I bought a lot of Jeff Koons towels at a museum and was, like, “Okay, I’m Jeff Koons.” And I put Koons magnets up and was like, “It’s us: The Jeanette and Koons Show.”

I PAINT PROENZA SCHOULER: I have a clip from The Simpsons in my Proenza Schouler video. And I’ve gotten in trouble for it a couple times. I’ve gotten cease and desists, but I stick to my guns. It’s appropriation. If it’s on the internet, I will use it. I don’t think of it as direct stealing because you’re doing something with it. You’re commenting on it, you’re changing it, you’re doing something that makes it part of you. And this is why I am going as hard as I can now. We’re living in a time when the internet is the Wild Wild West. I think in a few years, people will pay for everything. Everything will be locked. And I think that huge creepy riots will happen. It’s kind of funny to think of it like an apocalyptic thing.

I PAINT INTERVIEWS: Do you remember on Myspace when people could post their own interviews and answer their own surveys? I already asked myself all of the important questions and if you want to go back into it, they’re all up, like my early interviews at age 11. So any important questions that no one has asked yet, I’ve already asked myself.

Interviewed by Gracie Leavitt

Photographed by Michael Schwartz