WHO WANTS TO BE PARIS HILTON'S BEST FRIEND? EMMA BEATREZ LIZA JO EILERS CATHERINE MULLIGAN PRECIOUS ESEOSA STAR RUBY ZARSKY PARTY BUS EXHIBITION + COMPLIMENTARY INTER-FAIR SHUTTLE SERVICE | MAY 8TH AND 9TH OPENING CEREMONY: MAY 10, 9:00P–1:00A Why not embrace the surgically enhanced, algorithmically consecrated, UberBlack-chauffeured procession of desirability that snakes through the high-gloss arteries right to the pace-made heart of globalized cultural production? A deconstructed promotional campaign masquerading as an exhibition masquerading as a friend request, WHO WANTS TO BE PARIS HILTON’S BEST FRIEND? responds to this Debordian dilemma with a lifesaving call: a lubricated invocation toward total aesthetic immersion, where the curatorial gesture becomes indistinguishable from the branded encounter, and Paris herself—specter, siren, socialite—is re-ascended as the unacknowledged legislatrix of a post-critical ontology. Yet, the true bodypolitical architecture of WHO WANTS TO BE PARIS HILTON’S BEST FRIEND? lies not in the static confines of a hagiographic, object-oriented spectatorship but in the performative matrix constituted by the Queen Isabella—a peripatetic apparatus (party bus) that traverses art-world topographies like a glamorized Trojan Horse. It is an affective exoskeleton, a deconstructed dispositif of mobility-as-spectacle, a vehicular machinery of aestheticized acceleration, invoking Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics while metabolizing its convivial pretensions into a distinct political message: the plastic commonwealth. The names of the artists, the figureheads of this new form of coöperism, read like a whispered login to an OnlyFans page that never launched but somehow raised $3 million in pre-seed funding: Liza Jo Eilers, Catherine Mulligan, Ruby Zarsky, Emma Beatrez, and Precious Eseosa Star. Their practices—luxuriously oblique, erotically recursive, structurally unserious in the most rigorous of ways—do not merely reference the commodity form; they alchemically inhabit it, marinated in the visual vernacular of prestige television, high-end nail art, deleted Instagram stories, and minor scandals at Basel Miami VIP brunches. The canvases shimmer with the blasé double-helix of a luxury serum adrift in a surreal algorithm—never quite dry, never quite still, always on the verge of being added to cart. They don’t critique desire—they simulate it, multiply it, weaponize it, and rub it into your pores like Dior’s discontinued L'Or de Vie. These works are horny and simultaneously so very patrician. Think Walter Benjamin with a bottle-service tab. Think a Foucauldian bathhouse run by skinny Balenciaga interns. Think Freud’s Dream of the Butcher’s Wife annotated in Swarovski. This exhibition is a hyper-staged meta-activation wherein the party bus replaces the plinth and the afterparty becomes the auratic site of art’s most libidinal operations in the age of non-cellular reproduction. Here, the economies of viewership collapse into the economies of exploitive gossip and gloss. To ask, “Who wants to be Paris Hilton’s best friend?” is not a question—it is a self-deconstructing utterance, a mimetic transduction of clout into cognition, of imposed sacrifice into pseudo-communal currency. In the speculative syntax of Deleuze (as filtered through a net-a-porter checkout cart), it is not the object of desire that is aestheticized, but the desiring-machine itself. Hilton, here, is both sign and syntax, operating as a recombinant semiotic engine whose flows of attention, aspiration, and artificiality produce not meaning, but passing momentum. To desire inclusion into a world that excludes you is not pathology—it is praxis, tactical hauntology, a kind of spectral networking where the self is simultaneously a node, a brand, and a residue. What if we embrace the gallery as club, the artist as influencer, the work as objectified affect? What if the curatorial gesture was just one more aspirational reach toward an ideal of immaculate desirability, executed in acrylic, hydrochromic ink, and oil on panel? The mechanical answer to these queries must arrive pre-styled and ambiently ironic—uttered with the uncanny sonic frequency of the plastic commonwealth’s Leviathan, with the exact tonal modulation of the concierge at the Four Seasons who has already Googled your name. You already know the answer is not yes. It is avec plaisir.