Megan Fox, Still Life
A few months back I was at an unofficial premiere—maybe a press screening, I’m not entirely sure—for the new Turtles film. Pizza, beer, and Megan Fox was there. Obviously I find her attractive. I also left with my enthusiasm for her slightly recalibrated.
She was onstage for maybe two minutes. Either drunk, high, or simply elsewhere in her head—hard to tell from the back of the room. She said something I’ve since forgotten, because it was instantly forgettable, then disappeared out the door. There’s something both clarifying and slightly sad about meeting someone like that in person. The image survives the person only as long as you’re willing to let it.
Easier, then, to encounter her as a painting. French artist Bénédicte Lacroix has been putting celebrities into classical portraits—Megan Fox rendered as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, which is either a perfect fit or the most ironic casting in art history, and possibly both. His Tumblr runs the same treatment on Emma Watson, Miley Cyrus, Rihanna—each dropped into the pose and lighting of an Old Master. The effect is strange in a way that works. Strip away the apparatus of celebrity—the premieres, the endorsements, the controlled image—and something simpler is left.
The Megan Fox one is the best of them. The pearl earring, the slight turn of the head, that painted calm. Silent for once. It suits her.