As if it's not easy enough to despise either half of the organism known as "Brangelina," Florida-based artist Kate Kretz has made the task even simpler.
In Blessed Art Thou, a painting more horrifying than Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Angelina Jolie is rendered in the robes of the Virgin and surrounded by her putti-children, hovering ephemerally like a Jeff Koons balloon deity over a crowded-with-obese-people Wal-Mart.
Kretz, unhappily an art professor, explains her process as follows: "[Supermarkets are]where the cycle begins. Psychologically oppressive environments like this one are one of the feeding sources for the consumer, hungry for 'information' about the celebrity's private life."
The scare quotes around the word "information," typical of the modern art critic, for whom everything is unstable, are intriguing, as Blessed Art Thou, with its utter lack of irony, whimsy or social critique (beyond "fat poor people view Angelina Jolie as an idol!"), would fit right into the supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer's aesthetic -- right beside its advertisements for "My Granddaughter, My Shining Star" necklaces or Franklin Mint sculptures of yelping, swaddled babies.
The Enquirer -- the last of the working-class tabloids -- revels in pure kitsch; that is, the kind of folk art that adorns the homes of people blessed with the inability to be cynical about how sweet angels are; how amazing puppies look on decorative plates; how cool a buck knife is when emblazoned with a Confederate flag.
Yet even this tabloid would find this painting risible: Taken literally (and I'm not sure how else to interpret it), it suggests a grotesque divide between the lives of stars and those of us who feed on their celestial effluvium. The divide is true enough, but Kretz's terms are repulsive: Jolie is painted as the Madonna, Kretz blasphemes, because of her "unattainable beauty." I had forgotten the litany apparently, that ends, "Holy Mary, Hot Ass, pray for us sinners."
In the 1980s, kitsch painting was everywhere, a cynical byproduct of pop culture's microscopic and scary scrutiny of the commonplace.
The end of this trend is best expressed in the private art collection of Michael Jackson, who commissioned a number of works featuring himself, as a seraph, surrounded by the little children he loves. I can't see the difference between Jackson's Arcadian porn and Kretz's vulgar interpretation of the Mother of God's divine search for Rollback savings.
It must be noted that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are rich dilettantes who collect modern art; that their attention is, in other words, being solicited by an artist who is at best a Tom's Art Wholesale copy of portraitist Tamara de Lempicka. To the Brangelina-monster's credit, however, they have yet to purchase the painting: Kretz must be, to them, reminiscent of the lunatic in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, who spends her days painting Barbra Streisand on black velvet in an act of derelict ambition.
What is most disquieting about Kretz's work is its claim of intellectual sincerity: If a true fan had painted this, she or he would have, wisely, dropped the Wal-Mart background and, ultimately, produced an utterly sincere statement about how pretty Angelina is, how unattainable, indeed.
All that Blessed Art Thou does is purloin the genuine hunger of her Wal-Mart shoppers, despite Kretz's gesture to "the good that [Jolie]does in the world," which adds "another layer to the already complicated questions surrounding her status."
While a psychically fragile Hollywood's millionaire decision to impersonate such divinities as Sally Field, Audrey Hepburn and Mia Farrow is genuinely complicated, the grace inherent in Jolie's goodwill rampage is difficult to isolate among her many other complex postures.
While Jolie's humanitarian work is laudable, one wonders what will happen when the easily bored actress tires of it? Last week, Lindsay Lohan, after boasting for weeks about her close alliance with Al Gore, stood him up at his awards gala for the winners of his Seeds of Tolerance documentary contest to attend a party at the nightclub Area. Unlike Lohan, however, Jolie at least appears to be as truly committed to global politics as she is to acquiring a racially harmonious family. (Her "I'll take one Indonesian male child" approach to parenting is, to Kretz's credit, evocative of a stringent cart-shopper.)
This week, Jolie copycats are all over the wire, including, wretchedly, Jennifer Aniston, who is rumoured to be considering an overseas adoption. This trend, like handbag dogs, promises sheer disaster: Celebrities live only in the moment, and when trends collapse, living, breathing things are consigned to the closet like last year's now-hideous Fendi bag.
Kretz's painting makes me nostalgic for Andy Warhol's explication of celebrity, as something so precisely executed it repels any interpretation of its observers' desires. If Kretz had painted the Wal-Mart shoppers with any compassion, we might have been able to distinguish in them how hard it is to have and raise children when not blessed with Jolie's good luck.
Oscar Wilde once deemed all art to be "useless." With Blessed Art Thou, we see, unfortunately, how useful art can be, how venally it can further an artist's intolerance. I can only add as an appendix to Wilde's great The Picture of Dorian Gray the following fragment: There is no chimp stupid or mean enough to paint like Kate Kretz, and I hate art.