"I didn’t think I’d live to see a more repellent piece of ‘performance art’ than Shia LaBeouf’s #IAmSorry stunt where he invited fans to do what they liked to him then cried rape when a woman took him at his word.
"I was wrong. Kanye West’s new music video ‘Famous’ is worse. Far worse.
It features him and his wife Kim Kardashian sprawled naked on a giant bed with a bunch of other naked celebrities.
These include alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby; woman-beater Chris Brown lying next to Rihanna, the woman he savagely beat; and rapper Ray J who made the notorious sex tape with Kanye’s wife Kim Kardashian, lying next to his former co-star.
Alongside them are Donald Trump, George W Bush, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Taylor Swift, Kanye’s ex lover Amber Rose and Caitlyn Jenner.
Or rather it’s not actually them but high-tech waxwork models, so realistic that you can barely tell the difference.
Some, chief suspects being Kanye and Kim themselves, may be genuinely posing, we don’t know yet. Frankly, who cares?
The whole thing is so disgusting it made me want to vomit, especially as the leering camera slowly moves across each famous face and body, pausing over various parts of their anatomies.
Actress Lena Dunham branded the video ‘sickening’, and ‘one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory.'
She also said it was emblematic of ‘rape culture.’
In a ferocious post, she wrote: “Let’s break it down: at the same time Brock Turner [former Stanford University student, convicted of sexual assault] is getting off with a light tap for raping an unconscious woman and photographing her breasts for a group chat, as assaults are Periscoped across the web and girls commit suicide after being exposed in ways they never imagined ... While Bill Cosby’s crimes are still being uncovered and understood as traumas for the women he assaulted but also massive bruises to our national consciousness ... Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager? It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.'
I heartily concur.
I don’t give a damn what kind of sexual depravity Kanye and Kim get up to behind closed doors, that’s their business.
But I do give a damn when they drag their twisted fantasies into the public domain like this purely to make money and promote Brand Kimye. Imagine how poor Taylor Swift feels?
This is a talented young 25-year-old woman with a hard-earned wholesome reputation who’s already been cruelly belittled by Kanye’s lyric in the song: ‘I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that b**ch famous.’
Now she has to put up with him faking a naked waxwork dummy of her lying next to his nude torso.
This is abuse, pure and simple; an older man exposing a younger woman to public sexual humiliation.
Taylor’s said to be ‘hurt and angry’ by the video, and who can blame her?
If it was my daughter Kanye was violating in this disgraceful way, I’d be round his house now with the L.A.P.D. (Perhaps Taylor’s new boyfriend Tom Hiddleston will have his own way of dealing with such a revolting slur?)
As the furore raged, Vincent Desiderio, the visual artist whose work inspired this debacle, described the video as ‘a feat of magic.’
He explained: ‘What was demonstrated was the power of the artistic imagination to transcend categorical expectations, and the fluidity of the transfer of codes deeply embedded within the apparatus of our preferred mediums.’
What a load of utter, incomprehensible twaddle. It’s not art at all, it’s just a click-baiting piece of crude-cynical marketing.
The creator, of course, has got exactly the reaction he hoped: the whole world’s agog with gossip about his so-called ‘art’.
So, congratulations, Kanye. We’re all talking about you again.
And you’ll love that, given you’re the living, breathing embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s maxim ‘If there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it is not being talked about.’
But this time, most of us are talking about you in undisguised disgust.
Your Famous video is a shockingly tacky, hideously distasteful, darkly sinister porn movie, nothing more and nothing less. Shame on you for making it and shame on your wife for so enthusiastically endorsing it.
‘She’s talented at being beautiful’, you recently claimed about Kim.
Only none of this is ‘beautiful’. It’s ugly; very, very ugly.
And it makes yet further mockery of Kim’s claims to be some sort of feminist icon.
