everywhere, everywhere many a contemporary Marie Antoinette
mould-making, cake, couture and how the archetypal girl lasts.
On any occasion I might open the comment section of some bit of content and see the declaration “We made the right one famous.” Usually under a video depicting a girl. Actually, a woman, young, but fashioned in the image of girl, shilling beauty products or wellness routine or snappy anecdotes plucked allegedly from their lives as if this were the expository narration from a rom-com. British sculptor Antony Mark David Gormley, whose practice moves from a view of art as a transformative social process interrogates bodily boundaries and space through installation and public art, speculates in a missive for ArtReview on the significance of public art within the city confines. In earlier works he often utilized plaster moulds to bring forward conversations of a “first body” (what we walk around in) and a “second body” (where we walk around). “Sculpture rather than making a picture of a thing, is the thing,” Gormley writes. “In that respect it is a more powerful agent for change …It can act as a powerful anecdote to the allure of the virtual.”
The screen has rendered “the girl online” as two-dimensional pictures no more than alluring representations of their girlness, an image of the thing and not wholly real. Or worst yet, a hyper-real in the eyes of her audience as to supersede any sense of IRL phenomenon. That Victoria and Albert Museum South Kensington would be presenting ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ (now on view through March 2026) in this midst is especially apt. The exhibition and programming which assembles a Manolo Blahnik capsule collection, Dior gowns by John Galliano, belongings like slippers and perfume flasks, alongside a programming schedule of workshops and talks, together explores the “complex fashion icon” for her “timeless appeal.” That is youth, notoriety, doomed fate, over some 250 years of design, fashion, film and art touched in one way or another by the dauphine. Set apart in the far away station of a French aristocrat (cultivated gardens the barrier here in liu of Apple or Google hardware) today’s darling, digital ingénue du jour, similarly exists more in the imaginary than the public space.
With that representational visibility—a here but not here quality—their gathered audiences engage in a misplaced autonomy exercise. We made the right one famous. The over-inflated morality attached to the purse becomes an ideal vehicle for the online ownership this parasocial dynamic flourishes within: the less control and sovereignty a public perceives as wielding in their actual and most often political spaces the more fuel to utilize these powers in the digital through and against the ingénue du jour. Not unlike a cam girl with a menu for viewers to engage with but unlike the clarity of transaction between client and professional, here the trades are swathed and shrouded in the obscuring, lofty language of “community” “platform” “creativity.” Pick your kink. We still want a girl to dance for us, put on a show, and we’re willing to pay so long as the vulgarity is never bare. And why shouldn’t the many-faced, many-named apparently omniscient multitudes have the final say in whether she lives or dies online? We made the right one famous! which is to say some exchange has occurred, some conversation between audience, algorithm and ingénue—and each well orchestrated rise must offer promise of an even more spectacular fall.
Where there was once privacy—the remove of nobility or yesteryear’s Internet, pre-algorithmically driven social media—now privacy only exists so far as it heightens the viewing experience. Where do you stay? Why would you do that? What do you eat? Where are you from? Who do you fuck? What do you like? Who do you think you are? With the disillusioned sense that elected officials and the like are not beholden to their demands as the people and the inflated “power of the dollar” giving the false sense collective action pales before the vote of capital, our ingénue du jour is showered in brand partnerships, collaborations, activations, simulations of how simple one might wish civic life to be. Cast your vote in the comment section ballot box and within a reasonably short time frame your desire is fed back to you just about as well as you’d dreamed. It is misplaced but it is by design to reroute collective passions stoked and played to the worst common denominator: the allure and revulsion for the girl, the ease of misogyny; don’t let her occupy some additional marginalized identity marker, the frenzy to skip to the end might be too great. The miasma in the air requires us not to look at the sorry state of the roads, just keep our eyes trained to the billboards. Therefore there is always a new sacrifice—lamb, fodder, influencer—served to the public apparently by her own hand for this tradition.
The present effort to further give context to Marie Antoinette only reveals the sophistication with which we execute the same fantasies. Refining this source material, a blueprint to ensure the mould’s continued longevity. Among the commissions for the V&A Museum’s exhibition, ‘Marie Antoinette Style,’ is Brooklyn-based ceramic artist Beth Katleman’s Marie Antoinette’s Folly, a 20-foot sweeping stretch of ornate toile de jouy tableau dense with waves of thousands of porcelain-white miniatures that pool into floating islands depicting two poles of the doomed dauphine’s life. Shelves and shelves of moulds and teensy figures line the walls of her studio. Bins full of buttercream bisque roses, babies, fruit, flower girls. Neighboring shelves stack with the mould counterparts each boasting sharpied on labels. Girl w/basket, soccer girl, tennis girl, ballet girl, kneeling girl, bride. A veritable library of characters. Here the wallpaper the dauphine herself apparently so adored for the pastoral scenes of romanticised peasant life, moves into sculpture and thus becomes the thing as Gormley implores, rather than remain depiction alone, decorative.
The use of moulds as a key tenant of her practice adds additional heft to her work’s inclusion. This process aestheticizes the rituals our many Marie’s today will undergo: from mundane perhaps overlooked to one of the greatest forms afforded girls. Archetype. Katleman not only utilises found objects either gifted by loved ones familiar with her humor (“I have a little bit of a twisted, weird, dark sense of humor that comes out because I’m sitting here playing with dolls all day,” she says) or even gleaned from a toy box, (“I will find stuff in kids’ toy boxes. A lot of times I’ll say, ‘Hey, are you done playing with that? How about if I give you five bucks?’”), but handmakes moulds while fashioning her original objects with costumes that better doctor the images necessary to fit particular works. “I do think because they’re coming off the wall and they create this shadow that I’m inviting you into a world,” Katleman explains during our studio visit this summer, pointing out just one character in the tableau of bursting white porcelain scenes, the eyeful garden.
“When people see that it’s not made by 3D printing that it’s made by hand, and the time that I spend is so evident when you look at it, they will stop and slow down, and they will spend more time with it and ask questions and look more carefully. These are all things that have another life, and that they’re bringing this other life into this, and they’re transforming here and playing a certain role, and they come with the scale that they are.” A section of the tableau references Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s oil painting The Swing, complete with a bachelorette party beefcake figure from Katleman’s collection, “I dressed him up in a wig and put these little ruffles in his collar so that he would look like an 18th century aristocrat.” Characters leap from moulds until the tool falls apart and must be remade in the original image, the original intent, but updated or tweaked ever so lightly from the last so as to ensure specificity, longevity and impact. Utilising a mould demands upkeep and returns to source material. This engenders curious thoughts of truth and our dedication to repurposing, and therefore ensuring a place in the future for, ultimately, more of the same.
In her 2023 collection, Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999-2023 when speaking about the making of her historical drama, Marie Antoinette (2006), director Sofia Coppola notes that through the narrative points styling for her Marie Antoinette’s hair tracks a certain trajectory starting “little when she’s young and gets bigger and bigger as her story unfolds. The older she is, the larger the hair.” This maps onto the gradual ascent of a girl online from “relatable” to the echelons of “aspirational content.” Onlookers and supporters grapple with sentiments of “I want to be like you/I want to carve you in my (idealised) image/I want to more readily consume that life I, We have given you rather than live it.” See the slew of “I did X so you don’t have to” videos coupled with audience admissions the online recommendations for food, clothes, activities, locations which they passionately spam demands for, only collect dust rarely integrated into any lived experience. Or bean soup. Content is meant to comfort the atrophied, desensitized as they are to life and living.
Coppola reminisces on figurative painter John Currin’s reaction to the 2006 film: “John said, ‘Oh god—you did a self-portrait as Marie Antoinette’ I thought ‘Someone gets it’ …I can identity with her role coming from a strong family and fighting for her own identity.” Then Bling Ring, my first experience of Coppola’s repertoire, was a cautionary tale in retrospect for the director of the coming dominance of hyper-visibility, “What I didn’t know then was that it wasn’t a phase, that it was such a big shift in our culture. I grew up with privacy being coveted.” Her latest title Priscilla (2023) brings audiences back again to Marie Antoinette this instance awash with the hazy glamour of 60s and 70s nostalgia.“I am always fascinated by transformation and Elvis gave Priscilla a complete makeover,” Coppola recounts in the volume. “A Catholic schoolgirl by day and his beautiful creation by night …She talked about his style, which is legendary and how he loved to dress up and loved to dress her up” Therein mould making occurs in domesticity, rather than the studio.
“There is always a world and there is always a girl trying to navigate it,” Coppola muses.
Is it possible to effectively appropriate the aesthetics of this archetype and her many eras particularly as we’ve so deftly updated our traditions of killing darling to more sophisticated outcomes? The 90s popstar now the disgraced influencers. We remain in the muck of the issue with no roadmap to get through given our most egregious truth: there’s no desire to see it, let alone put it to rest.
The difference of course between her contemporary copies and the actual Marie Antoinette is she was in fact a member of the power structure which directly stood between the people and a vision for another future. Even if her part to play has been aggrandized with the swell of history, her contemporary counterpart engenders much the same impulses of adoration, obsession, consumption which girl-ness in its more public spectacle inspires, with little of the reality of structural impact. Unless clout is counted on the same level of policy.
The cycle goes: disillusionment and lacking sense of autonomy and ownership over one’s life, political, social and financial life (festering ground for entropy/wanderlust) → fixation on an ingénue du jour → false achievement high of “moulding” someone → narrativization of actual life and a misogynistic impulse to destroy women coupled with a false sense of superior moral clarity → destruction of ingénue, “justified” or otherwise → brief revelry → then we begin trolling for the next (or building back up the last ingénue for her grand “renaissance”). Whole while you still can’t afford rent, healthcare, wages stagnate and eggs are signaling class status. This is by design, a public has been convinced the highest moral act is their curated conscious consumption, rampant, in the private sectors rather than collective action, engagement with local organizing and well-cultivated rage.
When met then with the genuine artifact, our elected officials, the public servants tasked with addressing our lived concerns, audiences are well versed most significantly in being only that: an audience. Pageantry metrics, groupthink, surface feelings that hit like gut instincts become benchmarks because they play to our desire for the image of beautiful life over a real one.
In letters home, the teenage Marie complained of the French aristocratic custom of watching the dauphine rouge and prepare for the day — ‘GRWM’ and ‘GuRWM’ videos revel in that very spectacle of mundane cosmetic ritual. “Marie-Antoinette continues to fascinate our guests, many of whom ask to stay in the suite where she once practiced the piano,” Hôtel de Crillon’s General Manager Vincent Billiard explains over email, describing on site programming in tandem with the V&A exhibition, extending the locus into the liminal domesticity of the hotel. “This season, her story comes to life in new ways—through Manolo Blahnik’s installation, the Marie-Antoinette Afternoon Tea, and curated experiences that let guests walk in her footsteps.” Here is the greatest gift we might offer a girl, a mould for her to fill bodily and with that become an archetype. Greater than human, blank vessels. Minimal and ideal. Then when that has run its course she can pay back what is owed to the adoring, salivating masses: A life.