The title of Deborah Kass’s exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, “MORE Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times,” is enough to clue the viewer into her glib brand of post-everything art. Really. You don’t need to see the accompanying pictures—text-based canvases rendered in a Pop palette and delineated with can’t-be-bothered-with-this brevity—to glean an ironic sensibility pleased with itself and working overtime. The things are stand-ins for an artist who has made a substantial career from exalting her own narcissism.
Then again, that’s pretty much the case for any artist who can be pegged with the prefix “post-.” It doesn’t matter if she hews to a feminist reading of history, self-consciously apes historical modes of abstraction, or engages in Warholian strategies, the “post-” artist will happily jettison aesthetic engagement for the opportunity to pontificate in the service of self.
Kass’s “Warhol Series,” probably her best-known body of work, poached upon the platinum-haired master’s pictorial formulas in the cause of ethnic and gender parity. Kass substituted Barbra Streisand for Elvis Presley in My Elvis, a satire/homage to Warhol’s famous image of the King of rock ’n roll. That it was a picture of Streisand culled from Yentl, the film where the actress disguised herself as a male yeshiva student, garnered significant extra-aesthetic traction—at least for those who keep tabs on these sort of things.
The Kasmin exhibition is a sequel to “Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times,” mounted at the same venue three years back.