Steve Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty, is a true delight if you’re into Sex and the City, art world scandal, and coming-of-age stories. As with his first book, Shopgirl, Steve Martin continues to amaze me for his effortless impersonation of a twenty-two-year-old girl. Sometimes I feel like he has employed a ghost writer who fits my exact profile. Maybe he hired a young woman my age to sit next to him in his LA mansion while he writes. Sounds like my dream job.

The new book is all about Lacey Yeager whose first job out of college is in the bowels of Sotheby’s. She moves up in the ranks and becomes a player in the contemporary art market. The novel follows Lacey through the extreme ups and downs of the stock market from 1990 until the recent crash (and the corresponding art world bubbles and bursts).

I think that Steve Martin writes books that can be deeply appreciated by girls just like me. He’s a great writer, but perhaps my vision is skewed by the fact that I relate to his subject matter firsthand. Why do you think that a famous sixty-six year-old comedian and banjo player writes books for and about depressive WASPy young women? Perhaps it’s for dating purposes. But writing a series of well-received novels seems like a lot of trouble to go to to get a young woman into bed. That being said, I’m definitely intrigued.

- Haley Hogan

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By now this is old news and you are probably tired of hearing about the performance artist who gave birth in a Brooklyn gallery, but I just wanted to make sure you got the memo. Marni Kotak believes that giving birth is “the highest form of art.” She created an art piece out of it, entitled “The Birth of Baby X.”

The  next stage of the performance is “Raising Baby X.” It’s total bullshit under the guise of pretentious pseudo-feminism. Well, I am writing about it, so I suppose as far as performance art goes, it’s getting the word out. “If a baby is born in an art gallery and lots of art people are around to see it, does it count as art?”

- Haley Hogan

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‘Please Rape Me,’ my performance art piece at the MoMA was one of the colder experiences of my life, mostly because it was 20 degrees and windy, but also because I was wearing cellophane. But more importantly, it was cold because the art world guests attending the Armory Show Opening Night Benefit Party were so anxious to down a glass of champagne and schmooze that they couldn’t be bothered to examine what was going on with my blasting pop music and seasonally inappropriate outfit. But at least I made the herds of Prada-clad gallery girls, Wall Street collectors, and pseudo-British art dealers dreadfully uncomfortable for a few seconds as they hurried to the glass doors of the museum.

The most disappointing thing about the experience was that the overall female reaction to my piece was dismissive and derogatory. Perhaps it’s because the site of a semi-naked dancing girl in front of a museum was just too indecorous for their refined art-themed evening. Since the message of my piece was subversive and not immediately apparent, they wrote it off and moved on with their evening. Or maybe it’s just too taboo to bring up the word “rape” (unless it’s framed in a serious way).

There were obviously some creepers who peered into the mirror underneath my skirt, along with one fellow who placed a Sugarfree Red Bull in my rape evidence box, and another man who gave me a five-dollar bill. One guy responded to the piece via Twitter with an expectedly immature comment: “hey I thought your performance last night was really hot, or did I miss the point?”

Even though many men took the time to read my artist’s statement and contemplate the performance, almost all the women simply turned their noses and walked away. It reaffirmed my earlier impression that the majority of women would rather suppress any degrading sexual experiences than talk openly about them.

Was the word “rape” just too offensive for them to stare in the face?

- Haley Hogan

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Soon after I graduated from Yale in 2009, I was drugged, cut up, and violently raped by my ex-boyfriend, but at the time I didn’t realize it was rape. I called my sister from the hotel room in which the incident had taken place: I told her that I had the worst headache of my entire life; that I had no idea how blood got all over the bathroom door; that there were black-and-blues on my arms and cuts crisscrossed up my back. I dismissed it as just a little S&M sex that had gotten out of hand. My sister had to say, “This is rape,” for me to understand that something serious had happened to me. I went to the Rape Crisis Center at Beth Israel Hospital where they examined me to make sure that I didn’t have any internal damage or a concussion. They made a rape evidence box that they would keep on file in case I decided to press charges.

There is nothing unique about my experience with sexual assault. My feeling of shame followed by denial followed by a desire to resist taking action is a typical progression of thoughts for those who have experienced some form of sexual violation. Whether it be a stranger rubbing up against them inappropriately in a subway train or a first-date watching as they get drunk, taking them home, and then having sex with them even after they say, “No, I don’t want to have sex,” women have a hard time recognizing when something is inappropriate and standing up against their aggressors. After discussing this issue with my female friends, it became evident that most of them have had an experience where they felt forced into sex against their will and didn’t struggle physically because they wanted to avoid making the situation more traumatic. Moreover, my friends with past histories of sexual violence frequently considered the situations fundamentally harmless. It’s important to note that all of these girls are well educated and come from stable families.

There are many explanations for this mental disconnect between experience and realization. The one I want to focus on is the fact that we live in a rape culture that not only anesthetizes us against sexual violation toward women but also holds women responsible for and glamorizes rape. This rape culture, and more specifically, the songs of Lady Gaga and Kanye West, both entitled “Monster,” is the inspiration for my performance art piece, “Please Rape Me,” in front of the MoMA during the opening night benefit for the Armory Show 2011.

I’ll be standing next to a sign that is covered in generic nightclub party flyers, all of which display the promise of semi-naked women and alcohol to lure men. Mixed in with the nightclub posters are my own posters advertising the performance, with the words “Please Rape Me” across them and my legs splayed out in a provocative pose and my face in a hysterical scream of drunken excitement. I will be wearing a skimpy tube top and mini skirt made out of translucent red cellophane and clear duct tape, along with high heels, to emphasize the message that I am “asking for it” by wearing a revealing outfit. I’ll be standing directly over a mirror with my legs spread, thereby showing off the area between my legs to any onlookers who come close enough to peer into the mirror. This sensationalism of my own sexuality is yet another part of the “Please Rape Me” ploy, along with the writing across my body with expressions like “Asking for it” and “No means yes.”

The Lady Gaga and Kanye West songs, “Monster,” will be playing on loop in the background, representing the glamorization and popularization of rape and violence against women. While Lady Gaga’s “Monster” plays like an upbeat trance soundtrack for a dance club and the words are hard to discern unless you pay close attention, the song is about a girl who is at a nightclub and just wants to keep dancing. But she sees a guy who’s like “a wolf in disguise” and even though she wants to just dance, the guy takes her home instead and  “Uh oh! There was a monster in [her] bed…He tore [her] clothes right off/He ate [her] heart and then he ate [her] brain.”

The music accompanying these lyrics is monotonous, trance inducing, and de-sensitizing, as though Lady Gaga wants to conceal the meaning of the lyrics or thinks that they are negligible, in spite of their disturbing and violent nature. This is a song about date rape: girl is intrigued by boy, boy “licked his lips” and said to girl, “you look good enough to eat,” boy “put his arms around [girl],” and girl said, “Boy now get your paws right off me,” but boy ends up taking girl home against her will and “eating her brain” anyway.

In Charlotte Hilton Andersen’s article for the Huffington Post, “Lady Gaga and The Glamorous Rape,” she speaks to these issues, explaining, “thanks to examples ranging from the mostly innocuous Edward ‘Do I kiss you or kill you?’ Cullen in Twilight, to the twisted media coverage of the Chris Brown-Rihanna debacle to the galling rape-fantasy video game genre, the media is selling us an image of rape and domestic violence as being artistic, dramatic, the result of misguided love and — most terrifying – wanted.” Andersen also references Lady Gaga’s music video, “Paparazzi,” in which Lady Gaga gets thrown off a balcony by her boyfriend and is forced into a Louis Vuitton wheelchair with Chanel wheels. The most upsetting part of this video is the seemingly arbitrary incorporation of images of beautiful female corpses strewn about Gaga’s mansion. They have all been brutally murdered, but their images read more like casual quotations from a high-end fashion magazine than part of the story, and if they are part of the story, then they are merely casual references to Gaga’s rapist/killer boyfriend.

Cut to Kanye West. While many people give Lady Gaga some grossly undeserved “but she’s a feminist” free card and dismiss her violent and degrading images toward women as merely subverting stereotypes (saying ridiculous things like, “since she’s a woman, it doesn’t count”), Kanye West is a straight-up misogynistic man. He starts off his song, “Monster,” by addressing someone, “Bitch.” The song is directed at this “bitch” in his life, and some of the most telling phrases include his command for “Less talk more head right now,” and his question, “Have ever had sex with a pharaoh?/I put the pussy in a sarcophagus/Now she claiming I bruise her esophagus.” Kanye’s music video for “Monster” is a horrifying hodgepodge of images of dead women who have been violently murdered. At one point he holds a modelesque woman’s severed head in his hands while he raps. One recurring shot is of Kanye in a luxurious bed with two gorgeous women, who appear to be sleeping, but then he starts rearranging their limbs and it’s clear that Kanye raped and murdered them and is merely savoring the moment in a throwback to American Psycho.

But this is popular American culture. Rape is hot, and dead raped women are even hotter. If you start to look for them, the images are everywhere. The problem with this cultural phenomenon is that it’s a symptom and perhaps even an instigator of the actual social problem of sexual violence against women. I was appalled to hear about the DKE fraternity at Yale that forced their new pledges to march around the Freshman campus (where almost all the Freshman girls live) at night chanting the words “No means yes, yes means anal” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women, and fill them with my semen.” If a throng of some of the best-educated male college students in the country accepted this mission, then maybe rape culture in America has reached a point of crisis. Even worse, almost one-third of the Yale population responded to a poll by saying that they weren’t offended by the rape chant.

Perhaps Lady Gaga and Kanye West have succeeded in anesthetizing us against rape, and it hasn’t just affected young teenagers in mediocre public school system who struggle to find valuable role models. It is affecting the so-called mature and intelligent future leaders of America. Of course, it’s not just Lady Gaga and Kanye West who are the problem. They are merely selling records and trying to give the American public what they want. So why do we want to look at mutilated and raped women and sing along to dance tracks about date rape? The scary result is that even I, a “Yale feminist,” didn’t realize when I had been violently raped.

In my piece, “Please Rape Me,” while I seem to be begging to be raped, by re-contextualizing these sexualized images that have come to seem second-nature to us, I am inviting the question, “Why do we accept the sexualization and degradation of women so easily and readily in our culture and personal lives?” Furthermore, I am implying that there is no such thing as “no means yes” (beyond the sheer linguistic absurdity of the phrase) and that no one is “asking for it.” The very phrase “Please rape me” is supposed to shock and disturb, because it cuts to the quick of so many images in popular music, fashion, advertising, and the media, but by distilling it to its essence (“Please rape me”), its sinister ideology is revealed.

- Haley Hogan

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I attended the Kiehl’s Holiday Party in Manhattan and had the chance to stalk two of my all-time favorite celebrities: Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Koons. I love Kyle because he is responsible for the Twin Peaks TV icon Agent Cooper; I love Jeff Koons because he is responsible for installing large pink poodles at Versailles Palace. These two cultural tycoons just so happened to be chatting in a corner when I sprung myself on them. I had been lurking in the darkness nearby when I almost bumped into the Showtime star of Dexter. I apologized and he pervily responded, “Don’t be sorry.”

But I plowed through to Kyle and Jeff and told them I was a journalist (not completely false — though definitely a good line to use if you are ever wondering how best to approach a famous stranger). They answered my inane questions and I even snuck my video camera under their chins to get some slammin’ footage of their nostrils. All in all, it was a very good holiday party.

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & read my other blog about WASP culture]

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There is a billionaire in Russia named Roman Abramovich whose girlfriend is into the arts, so naturally he has decided to drop $400 million to make his own museum on an island near St. Petersburg. Roman already has a significant contemporary art collection to install in his museum, and he hopes that others will have the chance to enjoy his vanity project.

The island/museum is really just an excuse for Roman’s hot girlfriend to become a curator of a big museum. I think it’s one of the sweetest things a rich pimp could do to spread romantic cheer one Francis Bacon at a time.

- Haley Hogan [Follow me on Twitter & read my other blog about WASP culture]

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I saw the new Basquiat show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and it made me think about celebrity. A Brooklyn-born boy of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent, Jean-Michel Basquiat became a star in the art world because he was a talented graffiti artist who caught the attention of some gallery owners.

His work is intentionally juvenile, charged with symbolism about slavery, racism, downtown New York, art, and identity. I enjoyed a lot of it, but then I just looked at an old white refrigerator, scribbled with a few of Basquiat’s signature markings, and I thought to myself, “Basquiat is famous for the same reason any contemporary artist is famous–because he has a distinctive look (or “brand,” as you could call it), and because he was lucky enough to get discovered by the right gallery owner (who probably had a crush on him).”

At the end of the day, Basquiat’s story is a tragic one (he died of a drug overdose at age 28), but it represents the rise of celebrity in America. If you can act like a hot icon who has something that no one else does, then you can schmooze your way to the top. More likely than not, Basquiat just rode his way to the top, on the way of commercialism that had become the 1980s art market.

- Haley Hogan

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Last night I went to see a Broadway play, mostly because my sister said that the theme was prostitution and that it was written in the Victorian Era. Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw tells the story of an uptight , straight-laced young woman who reads law books and does actuarial calculations in her free time.

And then there is her mother, Mrs. Warren, who is a vivacious and brazen woman of means who earned her fortune from hooking and from managing a lucrative brothel. One of my favorite lines that Mrs. Warren said in closing was, “Lord help the world if everybody took to doing the right thing!” Her theory was that a woman had to break a few rules in order to have a existence. Luckily it’s no longer the 1890s, but I’m pretty sure most current-day politicians would agree with Mrs. Warren’s liberal attitudes on playing by the rules.

- Haley Hogan

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Christie’s is one of the oldest and most prestigious fine art auction houses in the world — ostensibly, a place where one might meet a cultivated and interesting man.

I recently popped into their Rockefeller Center headquarters to say hello to a friend during her lunch hour. As I lounged in lobby, I watched an attractive man in a navy suit sauntering back and forth on the sidewalk by the entrance. He would occasionally smirk at his reflection in the building’s glass windowed façade. Obviously, he’s a contemporary art specialist who has bid upwards of thirty million dollars on a Jasper Johns and is rumored to be quite a devil on the croquet courts as well.

I was intrigued to ride the elevator with him back up to the 8^th floor. He smiled seductively before chugging a bottle of acai berry juice, choking, and then spilling his afternoon energy elixir. I suppose this kind of clumsiness can be endearing, but it more or less confirms he’s just another mimbo-disguised-as-a-prince.

- Lizzie Crocker

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At the club in my neighborhood on Thursday nights it is a scene of extreme dance-offs involving large, gay break-dancing men. I felt a bit eclipsed by their skills, but once I broke out my girlish jump split, I felt I had something to add to the evening.

Speaking of feats of dexterity, my new kitten has taken to arranging cherry tomatoes into beautiful contemporary art tableaus. Check out the video footage here.

- Haley Hogan

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