It has been an absolutely wild week in the entertainment world, thanks to the chaos that ensued at the Oscars.
By now, everyone and their cat has heard about – and formed an opinion on – Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards.
There is certainly nuance around the controversy – did Chris know Jada Pinkett Smith has alopecia when he joked about her hair? Should Will have been kicked out of the ceremony minutes before he won his first Oscar? What does Jada actually make of it all?
But while most of the Oscars viewers were reeling for hours after watching the shock attack, others had a different reaction: This needs to be a tattoo.
This week we reported on two tattoos depicting the now-infamous slap which were going viral on social media, and Metro.co.uk have now spoken with the artists behind the masterpieces.
Oscar Aguilar Jr, who is based in New Jersey, says he immediately knew upon watching the shocking clip that it was something that needed to be immortalised.
‘The first thing that came to my head [when I saw it] was what happened with Kanye and Taylor Swift,’ he said, referring to the notorious 2009 affair that saw the rapper take the mic from then-teenaged Taylor to declare Beyonce deserved her award.
‘It was the same thing,’ he said, describing it as ‘a monumental moment on TV.’
‘I wanted to capture that moment in the most simplistic way.’
Almost immediately after seeing the clip on social media, Oscar drew a quick sketch of what it could look like as a tattoo, and before too long had a client eager to get it on his skin.
And the next morning, just hours after the ‘monumental moment’ had aired across the world, it was done.
Oscar shared an edited video of the unveiling to his Instagram, complete with lights dancing between Chris’ face and Will’s hand, coupled with a remixed beat made up of the pair’s short but shocking argument.
The tattoo is made up of simple line-work – but is more than enough to get the point across, with the video going viral on multiple sites.
Oscar, however, doesn’t think ‘it’s just about the tattoo.’
‘I mean that’s what’s catching people’s attention, but it’s more about the moment and what that means to us as people,’ he said.
‘The best way to look at that work is as a combination of a tattoo, the music and the editing.
‘All that combined is what this is. What that content is. It’s not about the tattoo, it’s all of it.
‘That to me is a piece of art on its own.’
Oscar isn’t the only artist immortalising the chaos on people’s skin: Italian artist Giovanni Bracciodieta also shared his depiction of the chaotic altercation to social media.
And his approach to the tattoo was slightly different, as he told Metro.co.uk: ‘Basically I woke up that day and when I saw the video I was feeling like that slap was really meme-ish.’
When he ‘realised it was going viral,’ Giovanni asked on his Instagram account if anybody was interested in getting a tattoo of the instant pop-culture moment.
‘A guy answered, came to the studio, we did the draw together and then I tattooed him,’ he said.
He added there was no ‘particular reason for the guy to get this tattoo, he just liked the meme.’
‘We knew we were doing something unconventional that could have gone viral, so we just had a beer together and had a lot of fun doing this tattoo.’
As with Oscar’s tattoo, the response to Giovanni’s work has been ‘really positive,’ with the artist joking: ‘It’s blowing up the internet.’
Potentially the last time a moment went as massively viral as the Oscars Slap was that time US Senator Bernie Sanders sat on a chair at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration.
And, true to form, tattoos started appearing, with one Bernie fan’s ink going particularly viral.
He told Metro.co.uk at the time that he was friends with his tattoo artist, Samantha, and they had been ‘laughing at the Bernie meme all morning and one of us suggested it as a tattoo.’
He added: ‘’I’ve been a Bernie fan since forever and wanted a Bernie tattoo so it seemed like a no brainer.’
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