Lime Aid

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Charity creates a multitude of sins."  One of these charity-created sins happened on Twitter this past week, when Gwyneth Paltrow showed off her expertise at being poor in order to win a contest to raise awareness on how much money and smarts it takes to be a gourmand using a SNAP card.  Turns out, Gwyneth wasn't as snappy as she'd thought she could be (she wound up being three days short on her week of kindness), but the snarling trolling masses sure gave it to her and then some.  I happen to be one of the snarling trolls, so this post isn't going to be about how "we should give sweet Gwyneth a break!  I mean, even when she's trying to do something good people destroy her!"

I'm thinking the "doing good" part is exactly what she needs to be snarled at for.

The decorous, glamorous charity industry for which Gwyneth might be the poster child is a machine like any other machine, and while it is obviously necessary it usually (like Gwyneth) does not get the job done, "the job" being solving problems like poverty, hunger, fill in the blank.  It's an ongoing  saga.  We raise awareness, get aware, have a charity ball, do a charity stunt, raise some cash, and it's all still there, right?  Poverty, disease, hunger.  Charity becomes a part of the process, not a solution, just another box to check, and part of that sense of complacency is only aided and abetted by the Paltrows of the world, who seem to think a glossy take on something as serious as not having enough to eat is a sort of tricky little parlor game to play, to Instagram, to tweet, and then  now move on to the next issue, next trend, next product. 

I know it's like I'm gluttonously unloading on Gwyneth but I'm pretty sure she doesn't give a shit.    And I'm also pretty sure that she's genuinely decent, but also impossibly arrogant and privileged to the point she felt she could shed light on a big problem by doing something stupidly small and then taking a picture of it with her I-Phone.  Look at that mess up there, those goddamn limes.  It just infuriates me because even if she did get the hunger thing right, what would that do?  Would the food-stamp issue be solved?  Would we be closer to Utopia?

What that silly cornucopia up there is about is Gwyneth, not hunger, not awareness.  At the end of the day it's just another form of her ongoing branding campaign.  Gwyneth as green goddess.  Gwyneth, Queen of the Limes.  Her esoteric take on something as bluntly obvious as not having enough food-stamps is so horrible because it perverts the situation to the point that you stop giving a shit about the whole thing.  She has done the exact opposite of raising awareness.  She raised a big stink and now nobody wants to know.      

Ain't America Beautiful?

Artist Danny Evans photoshops the hell out of famous celebrities, turning them into people just like us.  It's an amazing and beautiful metamorphosis, each photo poignant in a way short stories in little magazines are poignant.  It's as if Bobbie Ann Mason and Andy Warhol had a baby.  There's a meditation in here somewhere about beauty/ugliness, but what the real kick is:  each celeb's "look," even when brought back down to earth, has a strange and hypnotic power because someone took an ugly stick to them.  Call it the Charlize Theron Monster Factor.  Evans isn't just making  superstars look like "regular people" here -- he's foregrounding class, and showing how we somehow "see" people in whole new ways when the context shifts and the joke melts away.  Its a gallery of grotesques he's made, but the grotesquery is ours, and ain't America beautiful?  

These stars now have majestic lower-middle-class others enjoying themselves at gun-and-knife shows, clocking in at their dead-end jobs, standing in line at Chick-Fil-A on Hate-the-Faggots Day.  But also look at their faces:  they're the same people before, during and after.  The transformation is fleeting; they morph in and out like strobe-lights. 

My fave is Gwyneth Paltrow.  I think she would be my friend.

I'm also thinking about Antonio Adams, my favorite artist, and his new show coming up at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Antonio is doing the same cultural and aesthetic work Evans is doing, only instead of accessing software, he uses magic marker and a more authentic and spiritualized philosophy.  In "Unrealized and Unforeseen:  New Works," opening August 24, 2012 at Thunder-Sky, Antonio is showing a portfolio of extremely beautiful and eerily provocative paintings, photos and drawings about flipping the world of celebrity on its fucked-up head, and creating a sort of William-Blake-like paradise where all the stars slip through blackholes, and all the "regular people" he knows (folks Antonio works with at Frisch's Restaurant, family and other friends) go through customs and become Super Stars. 

Evans' photos are creepy, hilarious and stone-cold great, but there's also a sort of celebrity-crush still going on.  The anonymity of the people they become is just another way to glamorize what's been taken away.  Antonio does Evans one better in my book:  he's on the other side of celebrity, telling all of us there's no need for it.