Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles, California-based writer, digital and performance artist. She is the author of several books of fiction and poetry including E! Entertainment,ABRA,The Ravenous Audience, and Hoarders. Durbin's work primarily centers around popular culture and digital media, exploring the way the Internet, reality TV, and social media affect society and the human condition. She has called popular culture the subject matter of her work, as well as her artistic material. Of Durbin's writing, Christopher Higgs wrote for HTML Giant, "I call Kate Durbin one of the most compelling contemporary American writers because I feel like she's in her own lane. No one does what she does in the way that she does it."
Books
The Ravenous Audience, a collection of poetry that utilizes a wide variety of forms, was selected by Chris Abani for the Black Goat imprint of Akashic Books. The book deals with coming of age via a variety of media, from poems based on the films of Catherine Breillat to rewrites of archetypal figures such as Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Jezebel, and Clara Bow. In a review for Rain Taxi, Johannes Goransson called the book "iconophilic, starving...a poetics of Plath-influenced engagement with the peanut crunching crowd." Poet Juan Felipe Herrera called it "a brutal tour de force." E! Entertainment, Durbin's second book, consists of short stories crafted from meticulous notes on reality television shows revolving around women, class and lifestyle themes. Some of the shows in Durbin's book are Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and MTV's The Hills. Durbin calls the book's format "literary television, a genre unto itself." E! Entertainment also explores the courtroom trials of Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Knox, and Anna Nicole Smith. Nylon magazine said of the book: "Durbin elevates petty O.C. arguments between Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag to the status of serious literature." Heidi Montag praised the book, calling Durbin "pop culture's stenographer." Her third book of poetry, Hoarders, continues her work with reality TV. It is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2021. Hoarders examines the reality TV show of the same name.
Performance Art
Durbin's performance project Hello Selfie explored gender and the selfie phenomenon. The performance took place "IRL," in a public setting such as a mall or art fair, and online, simultaneously. Durbin called it "passive aggressive performance art," because the performers ignored the audience, taking selfies constantly and uploading them to the Facebook event wall. The three iterations with women performers wearing underwear, colorful wigs, and Hello Kitty stickers, took place in Miami at the Pulse Art Fair, Union Square with Transfer Gallery, and Perform Chinatown in Chinatown Los Angeles. The iteration with men in no shirts and pants took place in Brisbane Australia in collaboration with Arts Queensland. Hello Selfie received critical attention in The New York Times, Public Art Dialogue, and elswewhere; it was featured in the show Body Anxiety curated by Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan as well as a number of international and national art exhibitions in galleries and museums.
Internet-based projects
Durbin founded the online critical journal Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga in 2010, which ended its run in 2013. The blog critically engaged with Lady Gaga's "shock pop phenomenon" and "moved at the speed of pop," responding to pop cultural phenomenon almost instantly after they occurred, a way of doing criticism that was new at the time. Gaga Stigmata received considerable press attention from sources as diverse as NPR, CBC's Q, Yale's American Scholar Magazine, AOL, The Atlantic, Spex, Huffington Post, Pop Matters, Berfrois, Voice Tribune, and many others. Members of Gaga's team, including Nicola Formichetti, hair stylist Frederic “Freddie” Aspiras, and visual artist Millie Brown have also tweeted and praised Gaga Stigmata's work. The journal has been used as a resource in classrooms across the world, and has been studied at conferences as a phenomenon in its own right, as a new way to do criticism in the era of the internet.
