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Sep. 1--I have nothing against superficiality. Surfaces have much to teach us, if we pay close attention, and there's no better evidence of that than the history of art. "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances," wrote Oscar Wilde.
Occasionally, though, what you see is only what you see. Two complementary shows at Guild Hall take viewers to the limit of shallowness. One is devoted to Andy Warhol's portraits of celebrities, the other to the more recent work of Elizabeth Peyton. Both offer odes to glamour for its own sake, something glossy magazines do better and less pretentiously.
For most of his life, Warhol was fascinated and repelled by celebrity, and he effectively deployed the camera to undermine it. He flipped the studio style upside-down, using close-ups to reveal the everyday tricks with which people sell themselves to the world.
In "film stills" from the mid-1960s, he trained a 16mm movie camera on his chic young subjects for four agonizingly long minutes and chronicled the dissolution of each carefully crafted persona into tears and tics. Guild Hall has some of these, and they're worth watching in all their eventless length.
The rest of the show traces Warhol's diminishment from gadfly to sycophant. Where the early pictures of commodities and people allowed for double readings, by the '70s and '80s he had lost his ironic edge. His portraits of the Shah of Iran and his comely wife, Farah Diba, of Giorgio Armani and Liza Minnelli, no longer question fame; they reinforce it.
A 1963 portrait of Marilyn Monroe has a tragic dimension, hinting at mourning and nostalgia, perhaps even a deadpan rage at Hollywood's penchant for turning people into things. But by the time he immortalized the glitterati whose images hang at Guild Hall, he was partying with them at Studio 54 by night and painting their reverent portraits by day.
It's likewise difficult to read anything more than sheer adulation into Peyton's facile portraits of attenuated, epicene bohemians and latter-day celebs. Like Warhol, she works from photographs, and her pictures have the lifelessness and rigidity of mechanical reproductions, despite their brushy surfaces.
She revisits many of Warhol's subjects, such as Jackie O. and Georgia O'Keeffe, and updates his cast of characters with Nicole Kidman and The Strokes' lead singer, Julian Casablancas. Like Warhol, too, she trades on the public's fascination with celebrity, but without the critical edge of his early years. She offers plenty of pastels and rococo flourishes, but the pretty surfaces veil no depth.
Peyton has nothing to say about the people she paints, who share a blank, wan beauty. Neither does her depressingly banal work have any bearing on contemporary culture except as a mute, thoughtless celebration.
ELIZABETH PEYTON and ANDY WARHOL. Through Oct. 22 at Guild Hall, 158 Main St., East Hampton. For hours and admission prices, call 631-324-0806 or visit guildhall.org.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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