Daily Pic: I never thought Googling the words “Blake Gopnik” and “Lindsay Lohan” could return any hits. Thanks, however, to a work the starlet is in at the Basel art fair (and to this little note about it), my Google dreams could come true. The artist Richard Phillips has done a six-minute video projection of this blond bombshell surfing, and suntanning, and then in flight on the beach at night. The cynical take would be that the entire artwork is riding Lohan’s fame, just because it can.

On the other hand … the cliches in the video are so overloaded, it seems safer to read it as some kind of commentary on them. Lohan is so clearly Marilyn-ish in this piece, that there’s a sense of her deliberately inhabiting the role of  star-crossed blonde, so as to take control of it. And after Warhol, can any artist’s encounter with a starlet be read as entirely straight? There’s a sense that it’s not only Lohan who is on display in Phillips’s work; it’s also us, in the audience, and our insane and inane fascination with her.

Read a much longer version of this post at TheDailyBeast.com/Daily-Pic.