'New York' Art Critic Clarifies Britney Spears' Intent
Well, you know we'd been lying awake at night wondering what Britney's public combustion meant—not just in terms of her status as a simulacrum of our culture, but in terms of the symbolic values she herself is assigning to her subversive actions. Umm, yes, that's what we were thinking. Today, thank heavens, New York magazine's art critic, Mark Stevens, has explained it all.
He wasn't always an expert on Britney, though. "All I knew was that she sang music for 12-year-olds, was nicknamed 'Pop Tart,' and lived in Paris at the Hilton, or something like that." But Stevens is a quick study!
[Spears] seemed to be trying, with befuddled brilliance, to tell the truth. She recoiled from celebrity culture by mortifying her own flesh. She stripped herself, publicly, of her sexuality. She presented herself as a grotesque. Few gestures are as symbolically rich as the shaving of a head. That's what monastics do when they reject the flesh to dedicate themselves to the spirit. In boot camp, soldiers lose their individuality with their hair. Delilah cut off Samson's to make him defenseless. The French, after the liberation, shaved the heads of collaborators.
That's it! Right. Or, as Us Weekly put it (via a quote attributed to a "Spears pal,") "The haircut was symbolic of a new beginning, but I don't know if she particularly likes the way it looks."
