What is art, right now? You get one answer from a museum such as Tate Modern and another from looking across the vast buzzing panorama of contemporary news media. Everyone agrees that art can, today, be practically anything. Yet while the official art world takes that to mean, say, an installation of the lights going off, popular culture is full of stuff from sand sculptures to portraits made of bacteria that get labelled as art. The latest example of such globally celebrated instant culture is a collection of anatomical models based on Barbie dolls and other famous toys.
New York-based artist Jason Freeny makes sculptures of Barbie that have their insides exposed to reveal – so goes the hype – the anatomic impossibility of this wasp-waisted doll. With her internal organs crushed together, Barbie is shown to be a dangerously impossible role model.
There are two things very wrong with this "art". First, anatomical Barbie is not art in any interesting way but merely a glib, one-take gimmick. A prop, a toy, a joke, a stunt – any of those words would say more about it than the wildly inflated claim that it is "art". But what's the point in arguing? Today the word "art" is liberally applied to anything and everything from violent video games to selfies. Of course, you can call anything art, including anatomical Barbie, but the result is to rob this once-grand idea of all meaning.
But even more obvious, and ugly, is the fact that far from being some kind of male feminist art, the evisceration of Barbie is blatantly a violent misogynist attack. It is unsettling to see such a grisly act of symbolic destruction on a representation of the female body, however idealised, fictional and commodified we think Barbie is. Showing Barbie inside out is like sticking pins in a voodoo doll or throwing darts at a portrait.
The medical waxworks that anatomical Barbie resembles are today rightly seen as shudder-inducing freakshow exhibits. The cold objectification of womens' bodies by Victorian anatomy models seems to most people to belong to the world of Jack the Ripper. So why on earth give cultural space to anatomical Barbie?
The word "art" used to make people nervous. It implied something difficult to understand. Today, it means a groovy quick fix of post-aesthetic entertainment. As for the difficult stuff, that can conveniently be dismissed with the kinds of political criticism no one thinks to apply to anatomical Barbie. Thus it is easy to dismiss Picasso's complex relationship with women as "misogynist". But when it comes to something as crass and reductive as an anatomically exposed plastic doll, the obviously vicious assault it inflicts on an – albeit imaginary – body goes unchallenged.
In today's mass media, "art" is taken to mean any eye-catching nonsense, and once something gets that designation it is assumed to be cool, clever and in some sense beyond criticism. Even when it is nothing more than a tacky piece of woman-hating nonsense.
