Rx 46 / Kim Kardashian is Dead!

Jun 7

Jun 7 Rx 46 / Kim Kardashian is Dead!

Kim Kardashian. Photo by Markus + Indrani. Producer GK Reid. For Keep A Child Alive, TBWA/Chiat/Day NY. Courtesy of Slought.

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings—act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

In the fall of 2019, Slought and the Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania presented Kim Kardashian is Dead! And Other Stories, an exhibition of photographic and filmic works by artist-activist Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri engaging issues of social justice and human rights. The exhibition featured Indrani’s work made in collaboration with foundations, community activists, artists, and celebrities such as David Bowie, Serena Williams, and Alicia Keys, among others. The title derives from the 2010 Digital Death campaign in which Indrani photographed Kim Kardashian in a coffin with the words “Kim Kardashian is Dead!” printed on it. Other celebrities, posed similarly, also participated in the campaign, their abstention from social media constituting their fictional death. The campaign asked for donations to ‘revive’ Kim Kardashian and these other celebrities—or, return them to social media. In six days, the campaign raised $6 million dollars for families with AIDS in Africa and India. It inspired massive media and public discussion about the mobilization of celebrity in the direction of fundraising and social justice activism. Daphne Guinness—herself a celebrity and heir to the Guinness fortune—noted, “This campaign is so striking and draws attention not only to the AIDS disaster in Africa but also to how we have lost our way in what we care about.”

Serena Williams. Photo by Markus + Indrani. Producer GK Reid. For Keep A Child Alive, TBWA/Chiat/Day NY. Courtesy of Slought.

Taken together, all of the works in the exhibition provoked questions about how we can utilize strategies of fame and fantasy to encourage ethical awareness and inspire social change. Other projects included David Bowie’s music video Valentine's Day starring the musician exploring the mind of a high school mass shooter; the short film Girl Epidemic, featuring media hysteria as men in hazmat suits quarantine girls in a pandemic metaphor for the millions of girls disappearing because of sex slavery, child labor, and infanticide; and a conventional public service announcement Crisis in the Central African Republic, featuring Mandy Moore advocating more equitable health care and distributing mosquito nets against malaria.

These diverse and experimental approaches to raising awareness of social justice issues in Indrani’s work focus on three main strategies: the mobilization of fame, fantasy, and ethical imperatives. In addressing the efficiency, advantages, complexities, and at times complicities that these strategies involve, the exhibition also provides an opportunity for measuring the relative success of such endeavors in reaching their intended audiences and achieving their desired impact, while at the same time discussing the risks involved in such projects.

Mandy Moore & Malaria Survivors, Central African Republic. Photo by Indrani. PSI, UN’s Nothing But Nets. Courtesy of Slought.

reflections…

Doctors have taken on a kind of transient celebrity status during the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci has assumed a degree of cultural iconicity rarely occupied by public health experts while at the same time, many epidemiologists, vaccine researchers, health officials, and clinicians remain anonymous and underrecognized. How has the pandemic illuminated or exacerbated an already existing hierarchy of prestige within medicine? Whose work has been publicly praised and whose work goes unacknowledged?

We recently asked Indrani for her thoughts on the Fauci phenomenon, his role as a leading voice in the pandemic, and how to appeal to the vaccine-hesitant among us. Indrani said, “Celebrity is a way of symbolizing something. As a person becomes an icon, they become a text that speaks to all the things they’ve done. Celebrities are not people anymore. They’re representations or even fetishes in a way.” How can we harness the power of celebrity-as-symbol not just to fundraise but to positively impact health equity and motivate people to uphold the social contract itself? How might health systems, medical organizations, and local governments further and creatively leverage celebrity to tackle vaccination hesitancy?

The strategy of Indrani’s project was two-fold: the spectacle of Kardashian’s ‘death’ from AIDS and her disappearance from social media, and the implicit assertion that the arts are an indispensable means of advocating for social change. In effect, Indrani’s photographs wryly gamified the aesthetic of celebrity and cultural capital to support an unglamorous and dire humanitarian crisis. Kim Kardiashian is Dead! then begs the question: is spectacle necessary to incentivize people to act and care about precarity, suffering, and death? How did Indrani’s gesture in this project expose our desire to be seen and have proximity to power within an economy of prestige—which is to say, our expectation of reciprocity in giving and the limits of our own altruism?

Consider crowdfunding efforts or mass philanthropy campaigns for other medical causes, such as the viral 2014 ALS ice bucket challenge, which similarly relied on social media spectacle to quickly generate millions of dollars for research. Despite this unprecedented success, it ultimately short-circuited and failed to reproduce comparable results the following year. How do such fundraising tactics reflect the outsized role of impactful, efficient visuals to appeal to people’s attention span and willingness to engage (and donate)? How might the arts facilitate emotional connection and convey the urgency of sustainably supporting social and medical causes? In other words, how can the arts universalize the human experience and inspire us to care and love more for one another, however distanced we may initially feel from the cause? If the arts produce spectacle, how can we forge a commitment to giving beyond transient moments of entertainment? How can we make meaningful space in our lives to help others in subtle, unacknowledged, or less spectacular ways?