The Game of Digital Beauty: Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits

“Have you ever felt like you’re failing at a game you didn’t even know you were playing?”

That question sits at the heart of Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew’s deeply self-aware examination of how AI manipulates our sense of self-worth. Through digitally generated pageant portraits, she reveals how artificial intelligence quietly turns beauty into a competitive system — one defined by data rather than desire.

In Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew explores what it feels like to fail at a game you didn’t even know you were playing — the algorithmic game of beauty.

Andrew’s portraits are both dazzling and disquieting. They mirror the way algorithms score, rank, and replicate human faces according to invisible criteria. The result is a form of gamified perfection — seductive, standardized, and impossible to win.

By translating this invisible digital “game” into art, Gretchen exposes how technology co-opts self-perception, trapping us in cycles of comparison and calibration. Her work doesn’t just critique; it documents the emotional residue of living under machine vision.

Following her acclaimed exhibitions at Hope 93 Gallery (London), Heft Gallery (New York), and the Untitled Art Miami Beach Acquisition Award, Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty cements Gretchen Andrew’s voice as one of the leading conceptual provocateurs in the intersection of art, feminism, and AI.