In Ovid’s “Pygmalion” an artist creates an ivory sculpture of a girl so lovely that he falls in love with it. He kisses his statue, adorns it with jewels and finery, and prays to Venus for a bride identical to her. Venus solutions his prayer. She grants the statue life, turning ivory to flesh. Pygmalion marries his ultimate creation, later often known as “Galatea.”
Artists have reimagined the story of Pygmalion (written in 8 A.D.) for hundreds of years, in numerous tales of alluring dolls or automatons who both come to life or hover between seeming absolutely alive and being inanimate objects, from the ballet “Coppélia” to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” the 1987 movie “Model” (starring Kim Cattrall), the Spike Jonze movie “Her,” and even Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” in 2023. In all instances although, “aliveness” is offered as the specified possibility.
However in our new, synthetic intelligence-driven world, the place human actuality recedes ever farther from our grasp, the Pygmalion paradigm is altering.
As an alternative of transcending from inanimate substance to human flesh, in the present day’s Galateas go the alternative manner, morphing into artists’ creations and subjecting their residing flesh to tinkering and inanimate substances — gleefully saying all of it on social media, itself yet one more type of irreality.
The mother-daughter duo of Kris and Kylie Jenner are on the forefront of this shift, ushering in a brand new period of magnificence tradition. No longer solely can celebrities acknowledge cosmetic surgery, they may additionally reveal their medical doctors’ names and even drop surgical particulars, basically stamping their aesthetically altered physique elements with a medicalized luxurious emblem. Transfer over Balenciaga and Chanel, the poshest labels now learn “Dr. Steven Levine” or “Dr. Garth Fisher,” the plastic surgeons cited by the Jenners.
Kris Jenner, 69, blew up social media final month when she was photographed in Paris wanting many years youthful, and sporting a coif paying homage to an earlier American movie star in Paris: Josephine Baker. The brand new ’do — ultra-black, brief, shiny and slicked again — uncovered each re-sculpted angle of Ms. Jenner’s face, and was punctuated by an ideal circle of a brow curl. She seemed slightly like a cartoon drawing, and rather a lot like (and barely any older than) her daughter Kim.
Following a lot media hypothesis, a consultant for Ms. Jenner informed Page Six, “We will verify that Dr. Steven Levine did Kris Jenner’s latest work.”
Subsequent, Ms. Jenner’s youngest daughter, Kylie, went a step additional, revealing on TikTok a startling degree of element about her breast augmentation: “445 cc, reasonable profile, half underneath the muscle!!!!! silicone!!! garth fisher!!! hope this helps lol.”
With this, not solely do we all know the physician’s identify, however the dimension of the implants, their fashion, the substance they contained and even the main points of their anatomical placement. We additionally sense that Ms. Jenner finds none of this a very huge deal. Rendered in her TikTok shorthand — no full sentences, exclamation factors galore — main surgical procedure seems like lighthearted enjoyable, no extra severe than a lip kit. Dr. Fisher, relieved of each a medical title and capital letters, appears youthful and approachable. Nothing scary right here, lol.
The elder Ms. Jenner can now put on her face and the youthful Ms. Jenner her breasts as they’d couture robes. Their surgeons’ names anoint their physique elements with the glow of bought exclusivity, metamorphosing flesh into inanimate luxuries, like ivory or jewels, the Pygmalion story in reverse.
Admittedly, there’s something refreshing about such honesty. Harper’s Bazaar praised the Jenners for coming clear about cosmetic surgery which, for all its ubiquity, remains to be shrouded in disgrace, secrecy and prurience. And it’s tedious to learn the rumors and speculations about stars’ procedures, or their coy denials and implausible explanations (“Solely natural meals!”; “I’m in love!”; “I bathe in olive oil!”).
Even celebrities who acknowledge their “work” hardly ever provide particulars and typically appear apologetic. Bella Hadid says she needs she had stored the “nose of her ancestors.” Jane Fonda says she regrets her face-lift. Dolly Parton additionally retains it obscure, although upbeat: “If one thing is bagging, sagging, or dragging, I’ll tuck it, suck it, or pluck it.”
The Jenners solid all disingenuousness apart. In naming their surgeons or detailing procedures, they declare themselves artwork works for public consumption, dropping any pretense {that a} completely “pure” physique is preferable to a perfected model, created by consultants. For them it isn’t. That’s their fact.
And in a manner, it is usually everybody else’s. All of us grapple more and more with figuring out what’s actual. The web bombards us with messages of indeterminate provenance. Is that cute tiger cub actual or A.I.-generated? Was that article written by an skilled or a bot? And, as many professors now marvel: Did my pupil produce this task or did ChatGPT? Or each?
However counting on A.I. is now largely thought-about regular and acceptable, no huge deal, regardless of the intense, inherent issues.
At all times on the vanguard of tradition, the Jenners have added their bodily selves to the listing of issues generated by know-how. In different phrases, they manifest the top of organically “authored” our bodies, merging movie star tradition absolutely with A.I. tradition.
That is maybe the final step in a protracted course of. Cosmetics have been as soon as thought-about misleading or immoral. So too was hair coloring. Such qualms appear quaint in the present day, within the age of movie star make-up artists, stylists, health gurus and all the pc magic shaping our perceptions.
Including physicians’ names and surgical specs is the ultimate frontier, crossing the road from acknowledgment of non permanent, superficial adornment into admission of everlasting, technological reconfiguring, with proud shout-outs to the Pygmalions answerable for it: the doctor-sculptors who can now “signal” their work.
However this phenomenon shouldn’t be confined to the Jenners. On Sunday evening, the Tony Awards confirmed that Broadway, too, has entered reverse-Pygmalion mode: Sarah Snook and Nicole Scherzinger received awards for his or her performances in “The Image of Dorian Grey” and “Sundown Boulevard,” respectively.
Each performs are about folks determined to disclaim age and protect magnificence. And each productions make revolutionary use of know-how, similar to streaming video pictures of the actors, to blur the excellence between human beings and digital simulacra. (That is particularly attention-grabbing within the case of “Dorian Grey,” which is a couple of man merging along with his personal portrait — a painted simulacrum.)
In “Dorian Grey,” Ms. Snook portrays an astonishing 26 characters, a lot of whom seem solely as filmed pictures, but one way or the other, by means of stage trickery, can appear to be seated all collectively onstage, round a dinner desk. Equally, in “Sundown Boulevard,” solid members are seen each as actual folks onstage and as video projections. Usually, the identical actor seems in each types concurrently, forcing the viewers to toggle forwards and backwards between the realms of flesh and movie.
Each performs power us to query the standing of the our bodies we’re watching. To marvel which to react to — the flesh-and-blood variations or the oversize ones, made of sunshine beams. Each make reside theater really feel like cinema, and other people really feel like holograms.
This could be new on Broadway, however the Kardashian-Jenner clan has ready us for it. It does really feel good to acknowledge the apparent, to simply accept our reverse- Pygmalion, post-human world. To cease shaming private selections or condemning know-how. However outfoxing or denying time, flesh, nature, and particularly actuality, is a harmful proposition. Dorian Grey and Norma Desmond each realized that the exhausting manner.
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