Critical 5 art events this week in NYC: to photoshop or not, September 5-8

This week worth of art is all about no filter. Okay, more like a lot of it.

We Tripped El Hadji Diouf At The Museum of the Moving Image

In 2011, a comedy website posted a doctored video of soccer player El Hadji Diouf being tripped by an “invisible opponent,” and issued a challenge to the site’s viewers, to come up with what, or who, tripped the player. We Tripped El Hadji Diouf presents the best of the best, or the best of the amateurs. The hilarious clips use widely available image-editing tools to add in adversaries like a giant foot stomping down. Nothing professional or fine arts about it, just the guilty pleasure of laughing at something stupid on the Internet. 

Myths and Realities at Visual Arts Gallery

Myths and Realities explores fantasies shaped by documented and invented realities like a reinterpretation of Depression era homesteaders all as women and a single photograph made by layering 200 exposures. This exhibit will have you distrusting your eye. With a little bit a squinting and “what the…” to follow.

Naked before the Camera at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Get ready to bare it all. Or see others who do. Naked before the Camera surveys the history of the naked body in art. With absolutely no filter, this exhibit may have you wishing some one did do a little airbrushing. But it wouldn’t be art if we weren’t a little uncomfortable, would it?

The Hateful Years at Luxembourg & Dayan

The Hateful Years brings together more than 100 of Mark Flood’s paintings and collages including decimated pop singers’ faces and landscapes transformed into coarsely rendered advertisements for such things like fast food and gasoline. And a porn collage? Sometimes nothing’s sacred when alteration and humor are involved.

Pearly’s Beauty Shop at Swoon Studio

Treat yourself to some of this photo-shopping improvement and travel outside the city to a beauty parlor where real painters do your nails, sculptors do your hair, and conceptual artists do your makeup. Feel like going all-natural? DJs Roofeeo and Dirtyfinger along with performances from Lady Circus' Anya Sapozhnikova, Shenandoah Davis, and Audra Pace will be more than enough to keep you busy.