CHARLOTTE TILBURY LAUNCHED ITS KIM K lipstick in 2016: a vibeless, neutral, basic bitch pink. Kim was in on it, of course. As Phillipa Snow writes in Trophy Lives, her riveting new illustrated essay about fame and art, Kim is “not only a perfectionist but one who never stops working on her art, which is herself.” As a cultural critic, Snow mines the extremes of pop culture and high art; her last book, Which as You Know Means Violence, was a study of art and pain that name-checked both Jackass and Chris Burden. Here, she contemplates the idea of the mega-pop personality as an artist’s muse. She draws on a wide net of references—ranging from James Baldwin to Gaston Bachelard—as she coolly deconstructs celebrity spectacle in the white-cube world. Trophy Lives works in multiple registers: Snow offers a surprisingly tender reading of the “existential vulnerability” of Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga’s sacrificial effigy alongside the middlebrow performance art of Marina Abramović and Amalia Ulman. Like dolls, they all have angelic faces, the kind worth yearning for.
Basic comes in only one shade. Variation is a weakness, not a strength. Celebrities must be “just like us” even as they’re the sirens and titans that dog our dreams. Through buzzy, referential readings of artists like Maurizio Cattelan and cover girls like Kate Moss, Snow lays bare our bald desire for transformation, exploring the porous boundary between the worlds of art and commerce: Cattelan’s infamous nude statue of a collector’s wife, Ulman’s mimicry of mainstream femininity, Kim K’s bland, white McMansions where McDonald’s is a guilty pleasure and eating hamburgers is a whole personality.
Snow reminds us that the “art world” is really the “money world” and how fickle our attraction to fame really is. We can always smell a fake; in the museum, gold roses often smell like shit. Snow argues that Paris Hilton closes the cosmic gap between creator and creation: a master of set decoration, voice modulation, and made-for-television airhead antics. But Hilton was also so reviled that she was hired to die in a horror movie like a slutty Christ on the cross. “Didn’t Warhol himself say, anyway, that good business was the purest form of art?” Snow asks.
Even when celebs stand before a Rothko, they perform the act of “Hot Woman Has Brains,” Snow deadpans. This performance is more than just “mixed media”—it’s life itself. The famous woman must empty herself out to take in the world and become a martyr to the masses. Indeed, Warhol’s own Marilyn Diptych eerily erases a woman whose book smarts were eclipsed by her Betty Boop voice and marvelous body. For Warhol, Monroe was both iconic and disposable—merely one in a long line of pretty blondes. The great thing about plastic limbs is that they’re interchangeable.