![]() ![]() ( Maybe she's born with it … maybe it's Maybelline!) Makeup and hair dye and hair relaxers and hair extensions and false lashes and curling irons and nail polish and skin darkeners and skin lighteners and teeth bleaches and chemical peels and microdermabrasion and eye creams and liposuction and fillers and lip plumpers-their tacit promise is that one can buy one's way into the illusion of natural beauty. So beauty becomes, like so much else in life, a complex negotiation between good luck and hard work, with the work-and here’s the real rub-meant to give the illusion of the luck. On the other hand, no woman, naturally, is as beautiful as she could be. On the one hand, the logic goes, women should, if at all possible, be naturally beautiful. Beauty, probably since the dawn of time and definitely since Cleopatra began experimenting with the smoky-eye look, has involved a kind of wide-scale deception. Because Kim is, with her preening mirror selfies, calling the culture’s bluff. There is, say what else you will about it, something admirable, and refreshing, in that. Kim's face is a like a Duchamp urinal: In declaring itself as a kind of public art, it mocks and dares and provokes. Kim is inventing, in her way, a new strain of capitalism. (Bedroom selfies: " Right before bed but you know your makeup looks good so you have to take a pic.") This is industrial production, applied to one’s appearance. The selfies compiled in her book may be harbingers of arrogance, or of insecurity, or of some combination of the two what they also are, however, is evidence of an insistent materialism, of the conviction that one’s "look" is not a fleeting thing, but rather a thing that can be made into media. ![]() "I have become family with my glam teams." Kim is naturally beautiful-she is gorgeous, pretty much empirically-but she is repeatedly unsatisfied with the methodical madness of chromosomes. Kim repeatedly mentions, and praises, the team of people required to give her her "glam." (In Kardashianspeak, "glam" is most commonly used as a noun.) "Getting my hair and makeup done has become a daily routine," she writes in an early caption in Selfish. She is blunt, and entirely unapologetic, about all of that. In Selfish, you see a woman experimenting with new hair colors and new hairstyles (nb: she advises against bangs), with outfits tight and then tighter and then even tighter, with lips from the siren-red to the vixen-nude. Which means that they don't just capture what Kim Kardashian looked like on a particular day, at a particular event, with a particular sibling or friend or fellow-celebrity they also capture her evolution-and not just from the arm candy of Paris Hilton to the arm candy of Kanye West. The photos are presented year by year, chronologically. ![]() But what Selfish also amounts to, in its flip book-on-amphetamines framing, is a kind of diary. You could see it as further proof that our media have coaxed us into living within the context of no context (or, in this case, the Kontext of no Kontext). You could see all that-the book's, and its author's, nihilism-via-vacuity-as a profound commentary on our times, or as yet another of Kardashian's canny acts of capitalism, or as a succinct reply to Daniel Boorstin. ![]()
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