Miley Cyrus's Fruit-Fingering Album Promo Rips Off a Woman Artist (and It's Not the First Time)

Sarley, an Oakland-based artist with over 400,000 Instagram followers relative to Cyrus’ 94 million, uses “humor and absurdity to boldly challenge how sexuality is perceived and defined,” as her website puts it. She is widely known for creating videos of herself sensually touching fruit that resembles all manner of genitalia, and her work has been written about extensively, everywhere from Cosmopolitan to GQ. Halved fruits that look like vulvas, including melons, papayas, and oranges, are a Sarley signature. In video close-ups on the fruit, she caresses, squeezes, and pokes. Juices squirt, nectars gush. Occasionally, she’s smacked an ass-like piece of dough or taken a knife to the head of a penis-shaped mushroom.

This is not the first time that Cyrus has produced content that is strikingly similar to that of an uncredited and uncompensated woman artist’s work. In the 2015 video for “Do It,” goopy glitter was dribbled down her face like a My Little Pony money shot. She also licked and spit the sparkly spunk. It was all unavoidably reminiscent of Marilyn Minter, whose work is inspired by advertising and pornography, and which has featured women mouthing gelatinous, and sometimes glittery, gunk. Cyrus has since collaborated with Minter for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, but at the time the artist told a reporter, “I know, what a rip off, huh?… I’m so used to it. I don’t care. They’re never going to do what I do. She should have hired me. I would have made it a lot better!”

We will update this post if and when Cyrus’s representative gets back to us. In the meantime, please do enjoy Sarley’s original version below.