Lindsay Lohan is A Serious Art Star
Serious art isn't supposed to make sense anyway, right?
There's room to argue that Lindsay Lohan's role as an example of what the 21st Century (and crazy parents) can do to a young starlet doesn't preclude her ability to be a serious art star but facilitates it. Okay, fine, there isn't - but that's precisely the point of pop artist Richard Phillips' first foray into filmmaking. Phillips has always been enticed by celebrity, his last major exhibition featuring huge portraits of famous faces belong to celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and Dakota Fanning.
The 90-second short film in question, aptly titled "Lindsay Lohan" is supposed to follow in the same vein. The film aims, through a series of shots showing Lohan alternating between a sober black turtleneck and a revealing white bikini, to "get beyond a public image widely exploited, or ridiculed, in the media, and past the celebrity endorsements and luxury-goods sponsorships that are what herald serious art projects today". AKA it tries to pretend that its star's embarrassing range of leggings never existed - something we are okay with.
It's a little hard to take any serious art project starring Lohan, well, seriously. Indeed, the film is really weird and whether "acting" is an appropriate term for whatever Phillips' new star is doing is open for debate. But it's actually not that painful to watch ? besides being only 90 seconds long, it appropriates alluring attitudes from Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman's 1960s classics starring Brigitte Bardot and Liv Ullmann, respectively. What's more, Lohan has no lines (though she probably had a few before the cameras started rolling).
Words: Hannah Ongley
