Cyber Celebrity Skin

Jack Skelley reports from a star-struck showcase of cyborg feminists, futuristic fetishists, and booty mutants: Jeffrey Deitch’s “Post Human” revival.

By Jack SkelleyDecember 4, 2024

POST HUMAN, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, September 12, 2024–January 18, 2025.

The distance between Whitney Houston and Kim Kardashian equals the distance between Galileo and Neil Armstrong—that is to say, exponential. This calculation I deduced from a Jeffrey Deitch gallery talk with essayist Philippa Snow and painter Sam McKinniss. The context, too, was epoch-spanning: Deitch has futurized its 1992 Post Human exhibit (which pioneered Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, and Charles Ray), adding McKinniss and more pop art cosmonauts. These include Takashi Murakami, Alex Da Corte, Pippa Garner, and Chris Cunningham’s freaky AI video of a “polymorphic cam-girl who performs an ASMR shapeshifting routine for […] futuristic fetishists who get off on the close-up sounds of her bodily transformations.” (I couldn’t have put this better!)

Who knew in ’92—besides Deitch—that the term “posthuman” would subsume today’s infinite choices of body/brain augmentation? Cyborg feminism, autoeroticism, gender flexing, neurodiversity, furry fetishes, booty mutation, and a trillion and one sex-positive blows against lizard-brain Cartesian binaries are now on the evolution menu. (These are issues that artist Samantha Sutcliffe pondered in a recent Dirty Magazine interview about my newly published novel Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love.)

Today’s iteration of Post Human is pop star–focused. It includes McKinniss’s 2017 portrait of Whitney Houston performing “Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl. This painting graces the cover of Snow’s latest culture-crit mindblower, Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object (MACK, 2024). In Trophy Lives, Snow posits the hyperevolution of celebrityhood into global performance art, à la the Kardashian.

“Kim K. is beyond human-scaled,” Snow said at Deitch. McKinniss concurred: “The Kardashian show is crafted to overshadow your own human life. It pushes the volume to replace life.” The celebrity, transcending her own skin, embodies the posthuman.

The implications are vast. They include politics: Houston’s lip-synched Gulf War Super Bowl performance was “soft-power propaganda,” said McKinniss. And the algorithms of hypercapitalism: “Celebrity image-making sells ourselves back to ourselves.” And the personal impacts are even more powerful.

Snow sees stars—like their celestial namesakes—scale both up and down astronomically. As attention spans shrink in proportion to screens, we enter the era of micro-niche celebrity (McKinniss’s phrasing). For instance, plastic-positive e-girls (and boys and post-binaries … more and more of them AI) now TikTok and gram themselves into sexy insta-icons, with the accelerationist concrescence of what futurists term “the singularity”—that fateful fusing of consciousness with technology. 

Sparking today’s evolution of the species are not Darwin’s glacially slow alterations in DNA but, rather, human-created epigenetic mutations—speeding us toward some eschatological climax.

The famous prophecy often miscredited to Andy Warhol mutates too: It’s not simply that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” It’s also that 15 minutes from now, everyone will be world-famous.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.