GODDESSES IN THE SPIRIT OF THEIR DAY

Baudelaire + The Kardashians

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”

-Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Keeping Up With The Kardashians is a near imperfect blend of the permanent and the ephemeral. As Baudelaire writes in the quotation above, this fusion is indicative of the cultural products of modernity. The reality television show, that runs on the cable television network E!, produced by the media titan behind American Idol Ryan Seacrest, documents the extravagant, fascinating life of a nouveau riche blended family. The Kardashians gained notoriety and wealth through their late patriarch Robert Kardashian Sr’s involvement with the epic saga of the 1994 OJ Simpson trial. The television show presents a spectacular blend of the classic and the novel. I approach the series, now in its sixth season with three spin-offs, as a living cultural artifact, continually attempting to build monumentalize itself. Is it Art? Probably not, though there is an undeniable art to the cultivation of the Kardashian empire, a kind of perpetually unfurling public narrative that livestreams on most every surface of our media and cultural landscape. If you truly commit to Keeping Up With The Kardashians, you join the family, entering a fantastical world where the line between performance and reality is nearly disappeared. The Kardashians beg the question: is it performance art if the performers don’t know they’re doing it? And that’s to take a pessimistic perspective on the extent to which the Kardashians understand the their extreme form of televised performativity.  

Through their performance, on and off the screen, as both reality stars and iconic mainstays in the pop media circuit with a seemingly endless stream of promotion of consumer goods, The Kardashians present an adherence, in an interesting pairing of contexts, to what Baudelaire would call the “eternal and invariable” of beauty (392). He mentions this quality again, as an “eternal” and “immovable” aspect of art (403). On one hand, the Kardashians are classic in the most basic of senses. From the perspective of the art historian, one attuned to the canon Western iconography, the television show, and surrounding imagery (related to advertisements, promotional materials, press, and product endorsements), embodies a kind of compositional orthodoxy. The trifecta of the three oldest Kardashian sisters- NBA superwife Khloe, mother Kourtney, and recently married megawatt Kim- have an almost statuesque quality to their sartorial and cosmetic aesthetic. Kim, in particular, the largest earner and arguably most famous of the family, looks like Cleopatra, a Grecian caryatid, La Virgen, almost Armenian-American royalty. In a spread for Harper’s Weekly, Kim posed as Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, dressing in the vintage original wardrobe, embodying a kind of meta-performance: reality megastar as Hollywood icon as iconic historical royalty as told through a dramatic account. The feature, entitled Kim Kardashian: Cleopatra with a ‘K’, molds Kim into a kind of goddess-like figure, placed in front of gleaming golden backgrounds reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. When either mother Kourtney or aunties Kim and Khloe hold the young Mason Kardashian Disick, their composition always form a kind of inflated Madonna and Child, recast with an Armenian Barbie mother and darling, though homunculus, child.

 
Beyond an aesthetic formalism, and tendency to invoke classical composition and iconography, the Kardashians adhere to a kind of socio-political conservatism that is not classic per say, but traditional. While the Kardashian children are a fantastical sexualized, hedonistic spectacle in one moment, they simultaneously embody the most basic of American values. Fundamentally, Keeping Up With The Kardashians is wildly successful tale of the American dream, a pimped out and sexed up tabloid version of Horatio Alger. The values Kardashians does promote- family, labour, capital accumulation- fall perfectly in line with the “eternal and immovable” of the context from which they spring. At the core of American modernity’s most contemporary moment, the standard which many political and economic forces, and often artistic or cultural, seem to be parading forward is one of consumption and the sanctity of the family unit. The Kardashians live in Calabasas, an incredibly wealthy neighborhood outside of LA, an iconic American urban center.
 
 

When Baudelaire defends the necessity of sporting the day’s fashion, in combination with elements of tradition, he mentions the example of “the goddesses, the nymphs, and sultanas” that “are portraits in the spirit of their day,” (403). As capitalist goddesses, the closest thing to American royalty, the Kardashians embody the “spirit of their day.” The Kardashians are a kind of nouveau elite championing a populist consumerism. In that sense, they are the quintessential “transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” the other component of Baudelaire’s rederning of modernity (403). The Kardashians are newness machines, perpetually cranking out fragrances, clothing lines, new television shows, music, images and media. They maintain a cross-cutting celebrity presence, equally dominating the spheres of reality television, pop music, professional athletics, fashion, politics, contemporary art, and philanthropy. Robert Kardashian Jr. is participating in this season of Dancing With The Stars. Kim Kardashian shared her views about the Troy Davis execution in a tweet. The whole family was present for several shows and parties this past fashion week in New York. Last year, Kim was featured on the cover of W Magazine wearing only a cover design by Barbara Kruger. Each family member maintains an incredibly active Twitter and digital presence, consistently updating their followers with their whereabouts, activities, and mundane thoughts. The Kardashian empire is rapidly and persistently expanding, at a neck-breaking pace that makes keeping up quite the task.
 
 

In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire praises the dandy for his commitment to being in and of the world, if from the periphery position of cultural observer. “He has gone everywhere,” he writes, “in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of what…we have called ‘modernity’,” (435). While a Kardashian is no dandy, the family-franchise is unflinching in its pursuit of “the ephemeral, the fleeting.” Simultaneously, the most familiar of aesthetic and moralistic classicism structures the public presentation of the Kardashians. By Baudelaire’s dualistic definition, The Kardashians are fundamentally modern, exhibiting a spectacular fusion of the classic and novel, constantly performing as goddesses in the spirit of their day.