Cultural capital is not convertible into economic capital on demand. Taste, distinction, the embodied feel for a field: these are accumulated over a lifetime of attention, not bought the week of an event. Hito Steyerl, in her essay āIn Defense of the Poor Image,ā wrote that the low-resolution copy, the watermarked rip, the JPEG passed around until its compression artifacts have become its own aesthetic, is itself a political object, a record of how an image circulates among the dispossessed. The Temu knockoff Madame X is, in a way, the inverse problem: a poor image worn by someone who could afford the original a thousand times over. It is wealth performing the aesthetic of the dispossessed without any of its meaning. Madame X is one of the most famous paintings in art history. I feel like most people who have gone to the Met, or had a tour by one of the curators (and Iām sure they have), understand that that work was seen as shocking in its time. But here is one of the things about art: you cannot shock in the same way someone was shocked before, because itās no longer a shock. The artwork at the moment proved that you cannot do that. The avant-garde, as Peter Bürger argued, has a one-shot historical structure; once it has done its work, repetition becomes academicism, or worse, kitsch. Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay āAvant Garde and Kitsch,ā went further: kitsch is what culture produces when industrial reproduction meets a public that has been trained to want pre-digested feeling. It is the aesthetic of efficiency, the feeling without the work. A Temu Madame X on a billionaire is kitsch in the purest Greenbergian sense. To be basically strapless in a society where half the women in the room are already strapless is already foolish. Second, to imply that you can replicate the shocking nature of a historical moment is ridiculous. And then, finally, to be at a museum event where you didnāt understand the art is ridiculous. She serves as a cautionary tale. She canāt buy being thoughtful. She has to build that. And what she implies is that she thinks thereās a shortcut to being an intellectual. Borrowing somebody elseās amazing moment doesnāt make you amazing. It just proves how amazing that other person was. The aura, again, refuses the transfer. It always has. It always will.
Artlust, The Met Gala is a Sign Weāre in the Dark Ages









