Pierre Maraval, as part of June 2008’s Luminato/L’Oréal arts festival, took my portrait this morning. He calls his latest project Toronto’s Mille Femmes and describes it as a cultural landscape of women who “enrich” Toronto.

And, luckily for Mr. Maraval, in our culture we all are expected to wear make-up, so L’Oréal flips the bill in this murky synergism of capitalism and ‘capital A’ Art.

Each woman is asked to provide a word that will accompany their portrait. Each portrait and word will appear in both a gallery show and companion book. I looked at what words other women had chosen: libre, honest, étincelante, fabulous, cosmopolitan, flexible and even jedi. The other women with me deliberated thoughtfully before committing their word to paper.

I, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. I handed my paper to Maraval’s assistant.

“What is this?” she asked in her thick Quebécois accent, “I do not know of this word? What could it mean?”

Everything, I answered. Just everything.

My word? Can’t you guess? All praise Twitter. Testify!

“Tweet.”

Newton wanted to reshape his retina, I want to Tweet.

Mr. Maraval spent little time with us women of the cultural landscape. I guess he’s like the monument to our backdrop? He did ask me about Twitter in a dulcet, reserved tone. And then he told me to tilt my chin higher.

I did spend almost an hour in tech talk with the brilliant make-up artists behind the scenes about Fring for the iPhone and the future of mobile web part of the landscape of L’Oréal; this pleased me far more than the free “Star” lip gloss I got.

More in Web 2.0 Museum | Sphere: Related Content | Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 11:17 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.