The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Be My, Be My, Be My Yoko Ono

Hmmm. What must Yoko Ono, herself a formidable artist and media force, think about her de facto daughter-in-law's performance art in New York magazine this week?

Charlotte Kemp Muhl, apparently Sean Lennon’s girlfriend and Sarabeth DeLeury (a "philosopher and actress"), Charlotte’s "best friend," are pictured in the magazine’s weekly portrait essay called "Look Book." The best friends are "trying to create a new way of moving forward as a collective." How? "We eat watermelon and make art."

There was no age listed for them in the piece, but they appear to be teenagers pictured provocatively touching tongues and spouting inanities ("We're friends with Sean Parker, who invented Napster, who just sold his business for, like, a billion dollars and always carries around a syringe full of antidote"). The “best friends” met at a party, where someone noted to Charlotte, "Hey your breast is hanging out." When Sarabeth heard her reply, "That's OK, I have another," the two became soul sisters. The two later “went to Europe and L.A., where … we both had mental breakdowns.”

I suspect the women are not total nitwits (despite one blogger calling them "culturally parasitic members of the human race") and were instead engaging in high-octane preciousness and self-parody. After all, Ono's art usually contained a deep bed of irony.

Even if it was a satire, two gratuitous mentions of the iconoclastic artist struck me as odd. Isn’t there some code among Gen Y not to discuss friends in the context of their well-known forebears? Perhaps the iconoclastic Yoko is in on the joke  (it's not clear whether NY mag is ... ), or maybe young Charlotte represents some kind of cosmic karma messing with the older artist's oeuvre.