Frida Kahlo and the perils of fandom

In the final room of Tate Modern’s landmark Frida Kahlo exhibition, the artist’s brows are everywhere: on a pair of Crocs, on a bejewelled rubber duck, on a gigantic pack of sanitary pads that comes with a limited-edition Mason jar. Frida: The Making of an Icon, billed as the first major exploration of Kahlo’s rise to global fame, is a blockbuster: more than 41,000 tickets were sold before it opened in the summer, making it the highest pre-selling exhibition in the Tate’s history. It doesn’t have many actual Kahlos, though—around one for every five works by other artists—and so it wasn’t her oeuvre itself which was at the front of my mind as I walked back through the Turbine Hall. I was thinking instead about that last room, packed with commercial merch and devotional fanart, and the questions it left me with: is it A Good Thing that Kahlo’s image is appropriated in this way for, and by, fans? And what might a closer look at “Fridamania” have to tell us about fandom today?

Fairly obscure in her own lifetime, Kahlo began to gain global fame in the late 1970s, bursting onto the scene in the UK thanks to a 1982 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and the publication of Hayden Herrera’s biography the next year. It was the 2002 film Frida, though, in which Salma Hayek played an amped-up, glamorous version of the artist, that heralded the explosion of Kahlo merch. Nowadays, Fridamania is a highly commercialised phenomenon, Mari Carmen Ramírez, the exhibition’s curator at the originating Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tells me: “By our latest count, [there are] more than 100,000 objects on online platforms like Amazon and Etsy.”

The history of that commercialisation is a troubled one. The Frida Kahlo Corporation, which holds numerous trademarks for Kahlo’s name and likeness in the US and UK, was founded by her niece and grandniece, along with a businessman named Carlos Dorado, in 2004. Years of infighting followed; Kahlo’s great-grandniece Mara de Anda Romeo accused the Corporation of cutting the Kahlo family, who did not hold a majority stake, out of decision-making, leading to a protracted and ongoing series of lawsuits.

Most high-profile among these was a spat over the Kahlo Barbie doll, released in 2018, which de Anda publicly criticised for its inauthentic Mexican costume and lack of a monobrow, claiming that the Corporation didn’t have the rights to license the image. (The doll—on display at Tate Modern—is also strikingly white-skinned and able-bodied.) De Anda won a temporary injunction that year which halted sales of the Barbie in Mexico, but it was cleared for sale again in 2021 after Mexico City’s Superior Court of Justice ruled in favour of the Corporation. Nor is the family the only party the Corporation has tangled with: in 2024, it filed complaints against two Amazon vendors whose Kahlo products it claimed infringed its trademarks, and became embroiled in a dispute with the American baby-care company FridaBaby.

The Corporation has also signed off on a hefty catalogue of licensed collaborations—including with Puma, Converse, the fast-fashion giant Shein, Amazon, and a luxury apartment development in Miami with a huge Kahlo face on its side—all of which might seem to sit a little uneasily alongside Kahlo’s anticapitalist credentials. Tate Modern’s exhibition, for its part, is broadly uncritical of this side of Fridamania, seeing it as both cause and symptom of the valuable emotional connection that many people feel with Kahlo. “Everybody that we know owns some kind of object or tchotchke related to Frida and has built a relationship to Frida through that object,” Ramírez says, “[and] this gives way to a series of networks of relationships and emotional attachments to the artist that it’s impossible to dismiss.” It is unproductive to discount the commercial aspect of Kahlo’s fame, she believes: “You cannot really say, ‘No, that’s negative, we have to salvage the pure image of the painter’,” she continues, “because that is no longer the reality today. So in the exhibition, rather than repudiate that aspect of Frida or see it as something negative, we embrace it, and we try to explain why it happened.”

In the gallery, the vitrine full of rubber ducks and Crocs is positioned opposite a case filled with handmade folk art, including a selection of Mexican religious objects featuring Kahlo—gorgeous, brightly-painted nichos, or small shrines, and sacred hearts. Also in this room is Nahum B Zenil’s haunting Mexican-Curios (1993), which translates Kahlo into uncanny doll form to criticise her commercialisation. Largely, though, the exhibition presents mass-market merch and personal devotional material as two sides of the same Frida-worship coin; Kahlo’s legacy is well served by both, it suggests. Good news for the gift shop.

That question—of whether Kahlo’s adoption by companies and by fans is ultimately positive—is both important and, in the end, unanswerable. In a post-digital age, it also seems a somewhat redundant question to ask: things have moved on. It’s now almost inevitable that images, voices and names will be appropriated, at least by fans, for both profit and play—not least because AI and social media have made it remarkably easy. AI art platforms can create realistic images of anyone doing anything; fans have used audio tools, such as those by ElevenLabs, to mimic celebrities’ voices; AI chatbots let you hold conversations with your idol of choice. (The homepage of one such website, Character.AI, offered me Paul McCartney, Sabrina Carpenter, Brigitte Macron or Lucrezia Borgia.)

It’s now almost inevitable that images, voices and names will be appropriated

The early days of the internet saw some teething problems with this dynamic, in which stars and brands are forced to surrender total control over fan behaviour. In the early 2000s, Warner Bros famously took aim at a number of teenage Harry Potter fans, dispatching legal threats to owners of sites such as harrypotterguide.co.uk on the grounds that the domain names infringed intellectual property rights. The move spurred both a worldwide fan boycott of Warner Bros-owned merchandise and catastrophic PR, and the company ultimately relented. Today, this kind of use of IP is incredibly common, and a globally variable patchwork of legal principles means that much of it is entirely above board. It can certainly be harmful, though: last year, Robin Williams’s daughter Zelda took to Instagram to plead with fans to stop sending her AI-generated videos of her late father. “You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings,” she wrote.

Amid the fast-moving swirl of AI-powered fandom, controlling trademarks and copyrights is messier and more difficult than ever. Michael Jackson’s estate, for instance, reportedly sent OpenAI a takedown demand over videos using his likeness on its now-defunct text-to-video app Sora. Earlier this year, the Motion Picture Association, which represents all major Hollywood studios, publicly called on the Chinese tech company ByteDance to halt what it called the “unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale” by its AI video generator, Seedance 2.0.

The wrangling inherent within IP law hasn’t changed, then. What is entirely new is the rise of fan behaviour that is legal but beyond the control of creators and celebrities. And this behaviour has massive influence; a viral, AI-generated TikTok edit, shared at scale, can have real cultural weight. Far from clamping down like Warner Bros tried to do a quarter-century ago, though, many IP-holders now actively embrace it; in their eyes, fanart, fanfiction and memes are free marketing. Mel Stanfill, a media studies scholar and professor at the University of Central Florida who researches fandom, tells me that there is now an “uneasy truce” between fans and IP-holders online. “There is always the potential of brand tarnishment,” they continue, “but there has been a sense that fans are showing how much they love this thing, and their love is contagious, and so it is promotional”.

This runs right to the top of the entertainment food chain: Netflix’s European marketing chief has said that the company’s marketing teams are “tasked to generate fandom and drive conversation”. And AI hasn’t yet dampened this enthusiasm. At the dawn of the internet, Stanfill says, “the potential to either freak out and try to shut [fandom activity] down or embrace it [went] up. The trend has been embracing up until the AI moment, and I’m not seeing a big sea change right now.”

Looking at fandom through the Kahlo lens, then, makes it clear how far the landscape has shifted from a pre-digital era: the Frida Kahlo Corporation’s model of brand management and fan cultivation, laser-focussed on judicious IP control, feels emblematic of a different media universe. But there are similarities between Fridamania and the TikTok world, too. Arden Decker, who worked with Ramírez on the Fridamania section of Tate Modern’s exhibition, sees certain elements of Kahlo’s afterlife as case studies of fandom’s ability to distance us from a figure’s original intentions. Corporate entities creating Kahlo merch, Decker says, will brand products with “‘powerful woman’ [and] ‘rebel’… but what are we really learning about her and how she engaged politically during her lifetime?” This strand of Kahlo fandom, Decker believes, “has morphed and shifted and gotten us further away from understanding who Frida really was, and what her art was really about”.

This is turbocharged when the internet and AI are added to the mix. The rise of social media has led to fans often consuming more fan work than original IP: a 2024 YouTube report found that 66 per cent of Gen Z Americans spent “more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself”. And this is likely on an upward spiral, predicts Paul Booth, a fan studies specialist and professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University. “I think it’s going to increase, and I think it’s going to fracture the media environment,” he says.

66 per cent of Gen Z Americans spend ‘more time watching content that discusses or unpacks something than the thing itself’

Fan theories, short-form snippets and memes are super-effective at stripping context from original works and repurposing them into something with a different cultural meaning. Think The Matrix’s richly layered, open-ended “red pill” metaphor, which has become an internet byword for a misogynistic worldview; or the many gym-bro, hustle-culture TikTok edits of Patrick Bateman, stripped of his satirical role and now pedestalled as an inspirational “sigma male”. When Theresa May donned a bracelet decorated with Kahlo’s face to deliver her 2017 Conservative Party conference speech, it was in the same vein. Presumably our former prime minister was invoking Kahlo in her capacity as girlboss, not as Stalinist.

Fridamania is also an early example of a fandom commercialised not only by the IP-holders but by the armies of Etsy and Amazon sellers who count themselves Kahlo fans. In this respect, it is an outlier within a broader fandom landscape that remains, for the most part, stubbornly non-commercial. But that picture is beginning to shift, as monetised models take shape: although fan work is still more often exchanged without payment, it is becoming increasingly common to crowdfund fanfiction and fanart online, Stanfill tells me, particularly amongst younger adherents.

In many ways, then, Fridamania anticipated, even in its early days, the temperature of fandom today. But tech has rendered fandom more unpredictable, and more addictively customisable, than ever. On the chatbot site Character.AI, I asked a Kahlo bot how it felt about Fridamania. “Fridamania?” it typed, after a moment, “Ay… it’s like being buried alive in roses. Everyone wants to wear my braids, paint their nails like my flowers… but they don’t know the pain behind them.” And then, uncannily: “She smiles softly at you. But I’m glad you’re not just another fan… you see me.”