Hip, like I can "doa" nude

Fresh, like I did these last week

and just like a thousand other photographers' work, making them.

predictable, like pages of a well known book

and

common, like peas in a dish full of peas

Throw an onion into the dish, or a carrot, or something to impress me.

Yeah, the author's question was "is he worth the hype?" Well, which hype? McGinley gives us these images of his ideal existence, and the commercial photography market loves them. Nothing wrong with that - they sell photos (with ad copy, or next to features, or wherever), or lifestyle images, and they like these and think that their paying customers will like them too. Paris Hilton and Rage Boy are examples of the same behavior by their respective media outlets. And I'll bet they're all "worth the hype" in that the coverage results in more revenue for their media outlets than the alternatives.

On the other hand, as art goes, he's more a piece than a maker. McGinley's fantasy life is artistically interesting, and his photos are artifacts of that fantasy life, but there's no development of photographic or compositional technique going on here. His shots belong in the time capsule after the Benetton ads, maybe next to the A&F ads - or maybe the A&F ads are better examples of American fantasia than his pictures. To the extent that he is hyped in the art world (and I wouldn't know either way), it's a case of mistaken identity combined with a desire to claim his success for the nearest artistic "genre." To call back an old Slate piece, McGinley strikes me as what Bryan Curtis would call a "Dane Cook type of photographer."

just not as well.

I agree

Nice post, reopines. And I agree -- McGinley is just a fashion and advertising photographer who has benefited from the dismal "art" scene of the last 10 or 20 years.

The photographs are exactly the 'art' that the hip, young, culturally wafer thin deserve. They're the logical outcome of Warhol's art that made art from the attention he lavished on commercialism. McGinley is just reflecting the culture by having commercialsm actually considered art.