“Leah Schrager’s meditation on her performance of celebrity as an arts practice was our most-read WWAOTW column in 2016. Writes Christian: ‘Schrager’s deceptively complex brand of feminism, expressed through the unashamed sexuality of her beautifully abstracted self portraits, makes her voice unique among new media artists.'” Artslant, 2017
“New York City-based Leah Schrager has been described as “ a woman of her time”. Why? This multifaceted artist is battling against and commenting on a number of contemporary issues from the male gaze and digital censorship to celebrity culture, digital identity and sex. By using and photographing her own body as an art object through an alter ego called “Ona”, she reclaims her identity, her body, and her sexuality in racy selfies.” The Art Gorgeous, 2016
“In terms of contemporary art, Schrager’s hybridization of various practices including performance art, social practice, the internet as context/interface, and solicited audience participation makes the work interestingly difficult to define concretely. More often than not, performers struggle to entice their audiences into participating…What’s fascinating is how Schrager has exploited the male gaze to garner participants who are willing to pay their own money to contribute to the development of her project. It’s a coy and, frankly, economically taut method to approach interactive performance work while avoiding actual individual exploitation through maintaining the valued anonymity of her participants (I’m looking at you, Laurel Nakadate).” – Sean J Patrick Carney, Vice, 2014
“Aforementioned bathroom–selfie–taker par excellence Schrager also appears in The F-Word as the Naked Therapist, a project that sees the artist take on the role of a shrink who slowly undresses during the session. Men actually hire her to do this; thus, as the Naked Therapist, she appropriates the male gaze for profit and sells her image as a cam–girl for social and monetary capital. She elevates sex work to the level of post-modern art simply by asking it to be viewed as such. Of all the young artists featured, Schrager’s work leaves her viewers most unsettled.” … “These porno-critical works smoothly read as “feminist,” while Schrager’s work sits in a more uncomfortable—perhaps more honest—contemporary truth about the place of women in the art world. Schrager revels in her sexualized power and abject labor and uses it as a conceptual segue to address not only issues of agency but to also sub–textually address which bodies are privileged over others.” – Rachel Rabbit White, Broadly, 2016
“The problem, according to the event organizers? The performance seemed like “self-promotion,” rather than art. Those are mutually exclusive now? Have they looked around the art world lately?” – Noreem Malone, NY Mag, 2012
“Schrager, in her text, coins the term man hands for the phenomenon by which wom- en’s images of themselves accrue status and art market value when used by male artists…. As Schrager writes, the artists’ “bodies appear as fantasies, mutations, glitches, nightmares, mundanities, dating profiles.” All content morphs and mutates online; it’s an assumption implicit in these artists’ work. If they practice mirroring as a critical strategy, they are mirroring not only tropes of representation but the ways in which those representations morph and mutate, move and shift, the way they are used. The flux, trickery, and metamorphoses that are a staple of online and IRL fantasy worlds are present in “Body Anxiety” as both aesthetic and critical tactics.” – Johanna Fateman, Artforum, 2015
“A resonant voice in the new feminist art wave, Schrager’s work often triumphs sex positivity by reframing the power dynamic between model and photographer and challenging the notion that provocative imagery is less than art.” – Margaret Bechtold, A Woman’s Thing, 2016
“Anyway, the gallery’s rather gross dismissal of the project as a “commercial venture” certainly carries the stigma that White is really nothing but a prostitute, of either the literal (see above) or figurative (why is it now “art”?) variety. (And just to be clear, I don’t think White is a prostitute in either capacity.) Either way, it was deemed not art, using former Supreme Court Justine Stewart Potter’s infamous and thorough, “I know it when I see it” test. It would be all too easy to make jokes at White’s expense, and it’s quite possible that it’ll feature in some late night talk show monologue soon enough. But really, this ignores the actually challenging questions raised by White’s practice: Does it qualify as art? Without regard to whether it constitutes good or valuable art–a judgment I’m not qualified to make–the answer, from my perspective, is that it most definitely does qualify as art. In fact, the debate touches on one of the central critiques of performance in the visual art world that we’ve been exploring … Namely, the visual art world, whether commercial galleries or non-profit museums, is essentially object-, and therefore commodity-, oriented. And the hyper-capitalism of the visual art market these days, with record-breaking sales that led New York‘s Jerry Saltz to recently proclaim it a “nasty” “disgusting” “freak-show,” exacerbates the problem; how, given the crass commercialism of the entire field, can a curator credibly claim that one practice is commercial in an acceptable way, while another is not?” – Jeremy Barker, Culturebot, 2012
“Sophie Calle in reverse” – Vanessa Place, 2018
“Leah Schrager started making something akin to NFTs before there were NFTs. For over ten years, the artist has been making one-of-a-kind digital art that explores themes of celebrity and sexuality, merging the worlds of porn and art in a kind of ongoing online performance piece.” – Hyperallergic, November 16, 2021
““WHENEVER YOU PUT YOUR BODY ONLINE, in some way you are in conversation with porn.” The large-type epigraph on the landing page of the online exhibition “Body Anxiety” was culled from an interview with artist Ann Hirsch, whose frustrated musings in ☆ミ, or Starwave, an invitation-only Facebook group for “Internet-savvy” women art- ists, curators, and writers, spurred Jennifer Chan and Leah Schrager to organize the show. But the tensions percolating in “Body Anxiety” are long-standing. This unruly collection of work from mostly little-known artists, many from overlapping feminist subsets of the male-dominated Net art and alt-lit worlds, addresses perennially contentious issues of representation (pornographic and otherwise)/ They take as a given that social media – as a platform for art, activisim, and sexual expression, and as a potent facilitator of image appropriation and abuse – is the primary context for such investigations today…. In recent conversations, Chan and Schrager, both artists themselves, told me they intentionally launched the “Body Anxiety” website on the opening date of “Ho,” not as a protest per se, but as a pointed alternative. In their lengthy, highly personal curato- rial statements, they focus on their activist desires to promote work in which the artists use their own bod- ies to push back against an online culture of hidden- camera porn and violently misogynist trolling. As Chan notes, there’s bravery inherent in such self- exposure, because the threat that the images “could be decontextualized and aggregated for entertain- ment or ridicule produces an invariable amount of anxiety for any woman who chooses to show her face and body online.” Schrager, in her text, coins the term man hands for the phenomenon by which wom- en’s images of themselves accrue status and art- market value when used by male artists…. As Schrager writes, the artists’ “bodies appear as fantasies, mutations, glitches, nightmares, mundan- ities, dating profiles.” All content morphs and mutates online; it’s an assumption implicit in these artists’ work. If they practice mirroring as a critical strategy, they are mirroring not only tropes of repre- sentation but the ways in which those representa- tions morph and mutate, move and shift, the way they are used. The flux, trickery, and metamorphoses that are a staple of online and IRL fantasy worlds are present in “Body Anxiety” as both aesthetic and critical tactics…” – Fateman, Johanna. “Women on the Verge: Art, Feminism, and Social Media.” Artforum. Print, 2015.
“Schrager uses technology to push a sex-positive, female-empowered agenda…. Schrager sees this cultivation of her image into celebrity as an art project. She wants to create the first ‘celebrity as an art project’ – a fascinating Warholesque response to reality television and social media cultures where people become famous with no particular talent or content. In this instance the artist follows in the vein of Cosey Fanni Tutti, a British artist who in the mid-1970’s posed for soft pornographic glamor magazines as an art intervention, then showed the photographs at galleries and was subsequently blacklisted by the photographers who shot the images. Schrager, like Fanni Tutti, is a sex-positive artist who wants to both challenge and celebrate the female body adn the act of looking at women. But like Fanni Tutti, and other artists discussed in this book such as Schnemann and Wilke, the fact that Schrager is an attractive young woman, a former model and dancer, means that her intention can get muddied in its reception. While four decades have spanned between the groundswell of second-wave feminist artists and Schrager, many of the same debates remain: is the artist’s intention critical to the meaning of the work? How does objectifying the young female body create a complex and precarious practice for feminist artist? How can technology further a feminist stance? And is it possible to create sex-positive work and still be considered a feminist? The artists discussed in this chapter grapple with many of the same issues that their predecessors did. IT is fitting, then, that they appropriate themes and techniques of earlier feminist artists. I have argued that they borrow motifs, but use twenty-first-century responses to further these themes and ideas. While these emerging artists have not found a solution to many of these questions, they have continued complex debates begun by second-wave feminist practitioners.” – Kathy Battista, New York New Wave: The Legacy of Feminist Art in Emerging Practice, I.B.Tauris, Print, 2019
“I love your work, and I think it’s so gutsy because it’s hard… I think if you were a cruise missile artist saying, ‘I just wanna make a million dollars per painting,’ I don’t think you would make the work you do. I think you’re really interested in the debate around bodies and women and desire.” – Kathy Battista, Women As/In Art Podcast Interview, 2023
“Very few artists in both Playboy and Artforum.” – Jerry Saltz, 2017