Does anyone else see a relationship between this Holbein painting ("The Ambassadors," 1533) and Britney Spears? Holbein's use of the vanitas/memento mori is striking it a way that I cannot get over. While one is tempted to dismiss the "anamorphic" rendering as sort of silly, a "vain" technical flourish, it makes the skull completely unintegrable with the aesthetic and narrative space of the painting itself. The vanitas is somehow excessive, scandalous even; or rather it makes the painting itself scandalous, uncomfortable to look at, embarrassing. The work of art is of course always 'calling out' to us, interpellating us as a subject that sees it; yet here there is another layer: it sees us seeing ourselves as called out by it, and it mocks us for it. I think, then, that this is a sort of formal achievement of the representative function of the vanitas in painting. It's not just a question of either the futility of earthly existence or the carpe diem imperative, but a reminder of our position in creating the terms by which such questions arise in the first place (i.e., how our subjectivity is not given, not transcendent, not 'eternal').
Take another look at the Britney video below. Obviously this video is very uncomfortable. There is something about how she sort of stands around with this spectacle whirring along effortlessly around her. When she used to make all of the moves, when her body was 'toned,' more machinelike (a sex robot, both there just for me and totally indifferent to my existence), when her face was more successfully frozen into an expressionless come-hither/I-don't-even-need-you-to-get-off look, she was integrated into this spectacle, it worked with her and around her. Now she is a "stain," as Lacan calls it, in this spectacle: that which destroys the interpellative coherence of the representation. When she moves around awkwardly, it's too human; her body is too voluptuous; her wig reminds us that she has real hair; her off-cue lip-syching makes it too obvious that she actually speaks. Yet we can't help but feel that she is now somehow less real, less human, less "Britney" than she was before. The stain is that unassimilable mark that is both more human (the skull, the fact of death) and less human (it feels less alive, less "full," than the ambassadors standing next to it) And this "stain" calls out to me; in noticing it I have let myself be tricked into acknowledging the fact that it is there for me, that, to the extent that it is a signifying event, it is there in me, and that it is signifying nothing other than 'me'.
So, Holbein. The vanitas reminds us of our frailty, of the essential constructness and humanness (i.e., in the sense that these are the same thing) of aesthetic pleasure, of life as experienced by the subject; with Holbein (as opposed to the traditional use of the vanitas, where it is simply a 'normal' skull placed along with other objects in the picture), it does so in a thoroughgoing way, not just as one more 'motif' in the work; we must experience this constructedness and our own place as the chief (if you'll pardon my reference to Ayn Rand) 'architect' of it. The new Britney, this 'failed' Britney, this 'more real' Britney, is fascinating, horrifying, and most of all uncanny for this same reason: we cannot get over, we cannot 'forget,' her 'actual' presence in this spectacle, which is actually nothing other than a sign for our own presence which her 'absence' would/should otherwise smooth over.
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