{"id":3450,"date":"2015-05-08T21:04:43","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T21:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/home\/?p=3450"},"modified":"2015-05-08T21:04:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T21:04:43","slug":"fifteen-million-minutes-on-kim-kardashians-selfish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/fifteen-million-minutes-on-kim-kardashians-selfish\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifteen Million Minutes: On Kim Kardashian\u2019s Selfish"},"content":{"rendered":"

To say that Kim Kardashian divides the public is both understatement and overstatement. She herself actively does nothing; it\u2019s the public that tears itself apart. The most maddening of conundrums are the ones that don\u2019t have a clear beginning or end. When it comes to the Kardashians, it feels as if we\u2019re stuck in an eternal middle act\u2014I can hardly remember life before they were around; I\u2019m not even quite sure I want to.<\/p>\n

There are two Kardashian narratives often at play. The first belongs to the entire family, with three daughters whose father would go on to serve as the defense attorney in the crime of the century. The OJ Simpson trial is such an effective a place to start a story like the Kardashians\u2019 that it borders on operatic. Father Robert would be forced to defend the man Mother Kris believed murdered her best friend, and the betrayal would tear their family apart while simultaneously readying them for the spotlight. The second narrative belongs strictly to Kim, the face of the millennium\u2019s second decade thanks largely to Paris Hilton serving as the face of the first. She\u2019s also managed to eschew the traditional trajectory of middle children.<\/p>\n

As a shameless advocate for the importance of trash, not only have I never minded the Kardashians, I\u2019ve grown to adore them as they\u2019ve challenged the public\u2019s idea of good taste. Kim\u2019s fame is the result of a sex tape, a betrayal she then turned into a multi-million dollar industry. She is the middle child in a family of fame-hungry Los Angelites, who so clearly identified our appetite for aspiration and mindlessness that they created<\/em> a new type of A-list. They used to not even get invited to fashion shows, and now Kim has been on the cover of Vogue<\/em>. As Sandra Bullock asked the Academy in 2010 as she clutched her Oscar, \u201cdid I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?\u201d<\/p>\n

Who knows now that saturation is the name of the game, but also, like, who cares? I don\u2019t know when the culture decided that the ideal stance to take on all things is \u201cwe\u2019ll allow it so that we can loathe it\u201d, but that kind of schizophrenia can\u2019t be healthy. I\u2019d rather live in a world where I can nod politely to the ten Kardashian magazine covers instead of biting my teeth as I watch someone buy them.<\/p>\n

Kim Kardashian\u2019s Selfish <\/em>clocks in at 448 pages and is roughly the size and weight of The Bible. This is not a coincidence. The title is brilliant, but not quite for the reasons it probably thinks it is. It\u2019s cheekiest as a play on whether we really get a sense of a subject when they\u2019re the one doing the documenting, that it\u2019s an image of the person, but only kind of\u2014not quite the self, but self-ish<\/em>. The less apt pun is one of false modesty, where Kardashian thinks she\u2019s copping to a kind of vanity that comes along with selfies. But to be vein isn\u2019t to be selfish, not exactly. You can be one and not be the other, and more importantly, you can take a photo of yourself and not have your empathy questioned. I\u2019m willing to let Kim Kardashian slide on a lot of things, but the thought that she doesn\u2019t inherently understand the distinctions of selfie-taking terrifies me. My hands are shaking so hard that I can hardly finish this sent<\/p>\n

Yes, I hate that I\u2019m writing this while there is a general election going on in the United Kingdom, something that has more far-reaching consequences than whether or not this (absolutely incredible) photo album is going to sell well. Yet believe it or not, the end of western civilization is more likely to be the result of people that actively hate Kardashian than it is Kardashian herself. People connect Kim with the selfie not because she is particularly notable for taking them, but rather because many consider both to operate on the same frequency of vapidity and desperation. Someone who hates Kim Kardashian on principle most likely hates selfies too.<\/p>\n

\"kim-kardashian-shares-cover-new-book-selfish\"<\/p>\n

This is a great example of the strange discrepancy in the labor economy of modern celebrity and layman finger-wagging, which is that it often takes more time and energy to write a thinkpiece slamming the notion of a selfie than it does to actually take one<\/em>. So what ends up happening is that the people putting in effort to deconstruct these \u201ccultural forces\u201d actually breathe life into them, because a selfie is a just a literal fucking photograph until someone starts screaming that it\u2019s more. Similarly, Kim Kardashian, a homosapien whose identity is largely defined by the fact that she is projected upon. Her blankness thus becomes her biggest asset, as does her fast and loose definition of \u201cbusiness.\u201d Imagine the end of Soylent Green<\/em>, but instead of being dragged away while screaming, \u201cit\u2019s people! It\u2019s people!\u201d Charlton Heston screams while actually cooking the next batch. That\u2019s what the Internet is like in 2015\u2014a weird reimagining of the ending to Soylent Green<\/em>, I guess.<\/p>\n

This is the interesting thing about Kardashian, however, that she challenges our idea of what it means to \u201cdo something.\u201d Think of someone like Beyonc\u00e9, who is actually an incredibly apt comparison for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that she\u2019s married to Jay-Z, Kanye West\u2019s mentor. In that way, Bey and Kim stand in the same orbital sphere, if not the same platform. Secondly, their reach is extraordinary and they\u2019re able to be recognized internationally\u2014in that way, they\u2019re both currently the most famous faces in popular culture. The difference is that Beyonc\u00e9 has branded herself largely through work ethic. Her demand to be perfect is transparent\u2014she is always working<\/em> and striving for some unattainable type of perfection, but the work is in and of itself part of the brand, so even though perfection is impossible, her tireless attempt is so admirable that we call her flawless, and dub her a \u201cqueen\u201d increasingly non-ironically.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the biggest complaint lobbied against Kim is that she doesn\u2019t do anything<\/em>. Thus, her work and output are constantly under suspicion. The question most commonly asked is \u201cwhy is she famous?\u201d In terms of what fame means, Kardashian embodies it more inherently than Beyonc\u00e9, because whereas Bey works for it, it seems to come naturally to Kardashian. Normally this would be called it-factor, as Kardashian is best viewed as a supermodel with better business savvy\u2014think Cindy Crawford meets Donald Trump. So why is she so often denied any semblance of respect? Shouldn\u2019t her ability to maintain our attention so naturally and without flavor prove that there is something inherently entrancing about her? I suspect slut shaming and sexism go a long way in preserving wide-distaste for Kim in rude-ass amber. That sex tape will never be something she can fully shake off, and Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s quiet Christian sheen (not to mention her superficial dabbling in feminism) make her something diametrically opposed to whatever it is that Kim stands for\u2014which is nothing<\/em>, and that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

[blockquote]\u201cSomeone who hates Kim Kardashian on principle most likely hates selfies too.\u201d[\/blockquote]<\/p>\n

The Beyonc\u00e9 brand is infallible because it is suffocating curated, while Kardashian\u2019s is all about transparency. I don\u2019t believe in pitting women against each other, so this isn\u2019t actually about Beyonc\u00e9 vs. Kim, but rather it\u2019s about us, right? These two empires are probably the best example of just how split we are in what we want from celebrity, which is something both mystical and unattainable, yet relatable and immediate.<\/p>\n

And so isn\u2019t a book of just Kardashian\u2019s face staring blankly back at you for page after page after page the most succinct product she could release, in that it trolls you and serves you at the same time? Isn\u2019t the fact that it\u2019s released by legendary publishing house Rizzoli head-searchingly brilliant? The fact that the book bears no title on its cover\u2014just Kim\u2019s face, her famous cleavage, and the Rizzoli logo\u2014the tell-tale sign that distinctions between high and low are not only antiquated, but unseemly? Susan Sontag would have loved the Kardashians. Doesn\u2019t that just fuck you up?<\/p>\n

So much ink has been spilled on the topic. Kim\u2019s rebuttal is a literal picture book<\/em>. Of course the Kardashian empire hasn\u2019t collapsed yet, but in a certain way this is the final word on what it is that makes her her<\/em>. I think it\u2019s safe to say that everybody has just sort of been waiting out the Kardashian moment, and growing more confused as each passing year cements them further and further into the zeitgeist. Now, Kim is married to the biggest rapper in the world, and has unwittingly become the face of a certain type of progressive family unit: bi-racial marriage, mixed race daughter, transsexual stepfather. I thought the twist was that the Kardashian Klan still hadn\u2019t disappeared, but the bigger surprise is that they ended up mattering at all. Kim has taken a series of images that are meant to be uploaded into the cloud for momentary consumption and then promptly forgotten about, and she\u2019s turned them into a coffee table book. You\u2019re left holding something you were sure would disappear. There is no ephemera in the Kardashian world. Just cold hard cache.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To say that Kim Kardashian divides the public is both understatement and overstatement. She herself actively does nothing; it\u2019s the public that tears itself apart. The most maddening of conundrums are the ones that don\u2019t have a clear beginning or end. When it comes to the Kardashians, it feels as if we\u2019re stuck in an eternal middle act\u2014I can hardly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":3462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[202],"class_list":["post-3450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-kim-kardashian"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paoQFa-TE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}