“Melania” Is a Forty-Million-Dollar Journey Into the Void
newyorker.com
“Melania” Is a Forty-Million-Dollar Journey Into the Void
Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.
Dean Kissick • The Downward Spiral: Persona (Part I)
(It’s arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.)
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Lil Miquela and her CGI crew will expose the “inauthenticity” of our corporations and public figures, which will of course challenge our notion of authenticity altogether.