Monday, May 12, 2008
Your guide to the role of women in fine art and the world.
Jun 2, 1999 | I realize that the art world has been corrupt and indifferent to actual art ever since galleries began doling it out on steam trays, and the art business has been wheeling along on its own ability to advertise artists into popular stardom, but it's interesting to me that advertising has now taken total precedence over art. Now, the advertising is the art, in a much more direct and venal way than even mean-spirited pranksters like Andy Warhol or Mark Kostabi or tumescent attention-whores like Julian Schnabel ever imagined it.
Go to SoHo, where there was a legitimate "art scene" once upon a time, and today you'll see a world arranged around white-girl models under the age of 23. Models are the Advertised Woman, As Seen On TV, and SoHo is basically a big strip mall, featuring the same stores as any mall in Omaha: J. Crew, Banana Republic, the Gap. All the models this year wear tiny, tight capri pants from one of these three stores and smaller tube tops that show off their five-inch diameters all the way down, and little triangular head-kerchiefs, and tiny, feathery, insignificant shoes with such lacy soles as to suggest that the model is carried by loin-clothed ebony eunuchs from jet to hotel to posh brunchery. Models pose on cardboard in SoHo window displays, models roam around inside the same stores and sit in restaurants with their heads together like tent poles, smoking. And the world around them, while pretending to act nonchalant, can't keep its eyes away and trips over itself and slobbers all over them like they're Cleopatra. As soon as one strides blithely and round-eyed out the door, the shop-girl/waitress/peon gushes "Oh, she's such a special girl. And her friend? With the long, blond hair? So beautiful. And so sweet. Such a special girl. I love her."
If a chick is trying to become a super-popular visual artist, it helps a lot if she's a model, or just looks like one, and gets a lot of helpful mainstream advertising. I visited two art shows this week, both of which gave me that feeling I rarely get: that I dislike women so much I want to bore out my own reproductive system.
Japanese Wunderkind Mariko Mori's aptly titled show "Empty Dream" is at the Brooklyn Art Museum. Mori, whose publicity material says that she used to be a model, attended fashion design school before becoming a huge and ubiquitous face on the international art scene. When you see her stuff in magazines -- photo stills from her heavily effects-enhanced 3-D video works -- it looks super cool, very now and wow. Mori utilizes a Cindy Shermanesque technique of filming herself made up to be various fantasy people, in fantasy environments: She is dressed like a futuristic Japanimation character in some mundane shopping environment; she is a beautiful, hovering lotus spirit in a kimono, distributing rose petals over a pink and orange science-fiction lake; she is a Buddhist goddess in the desert, a Shinto goddess in the woods, a mermaid at a manmade beach, a 3-D teenage comic-book heroine. All very cute and fetching, with no boobies or crassness of any kind. The Japanese, when they want to be, are wonderfully fey and self-reflective about sending up their own sing-song, commercialized galaxy, and bands like the Pizzicato Five are great at concocting loungey lullabies to breakfast cereal and the like. However, when you actually see the very pop-culty Mariko Mori exhibit, and it dawns on you how Lite it really is, and what a fucking behemoth pile of raw unfiltered cash was sunk into every piece, it makes you kind of sick inside, like you've just eaten the four-by-eight-foot head of a marshmallow Hello Kitty.
All of the photo pieces are large and elegant, and the 3-D short movie is perfectly realized. Then, the credits roll and roll and roll and you witness the cavalcade of tech boys and genius cameramen and top lighting designers who made it all happen with that unstopping bounty of money, and you realize that Mori really is mostly a model; she may have some cute ideas, but she's hardly the crafty genius making her vision unfold. Later, I found out that Mori belongs to one of the richest families in the world, her father being a leading Japanese industrialist, and that she's always been able to realize any fancy that popped into her pretty little head. It is cool stuff, for an MTV video. When it's sitting in beautiful, huge, pristine white rooms and treated with the reverence normally afforded artists like Robert Irwin or Ellsworth Kelly, it makes you feel like you've just had your spiritual wallet stolen.
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