The Fame Monsters

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.