Performance Art by the Hyper-Rich

First I caught up with a "food installation" by Jennifer Rubell, of the real estate family, for New York's Performa, a three-week performance-art festival, reviewed last fall in the Talk of the Town section of an old New Yorker. It featured a dessert course consisting of "three large apple trees, which will be chopped down, brought to the gallery, and laid out on the floor, so that guests can eat fruit from the branches." (October 26, 2009)

Now I find another Talk of the Town piece from the November 30 issue, on a benefit for MOCA in LA featuring Lady Gaga in a Frank Gehry hat, a Steinway decorated with butterflies by Damien Hirst (auctioned and sold to Hirst's dealer, Larry Gagosian, for $450,000), and three heiresses "in matching gold diadems" doing a "visual art act." “We’re a cross between the Spice Girls and Burning Man,” [Margherita] Missoni said, dissolving in giggles." Etc. All presided over by the Russian art promoter and billionaire's daughter Dasha Zhukova.

It's about time real idiots got in on the scene. Maybe now art can move on to something else.