Kanye West's CD release bash in October featured a human installation piece by Vanessa Beecroft. West is known to have a penchant for contemporary art, exemplified by his long collaboration with Takashi Murakami. The show was at a warehouse on La Brea Avenue, and there were the assorted guest list types — mostly Kanye's it seemed from the fly gear, not your usual art opening crowd — lining up for some multi-tiered check-in ceremony. We were boozed and canapéed while we waited for the Big Event. I had been rather skeptical of the whole evening; I'm not a huge West fan, and have been even less open to Ms. Beecroft's work, but, well, I'm not dead yet, so I went to see if they could get a rise out of me.

The show was a typical VB setup, with about a score of naked-except-for-matching-stiletto models, some with Afro wigs, backlit with bright lights against a screen, standing around to a recording of the new KW songs. At first the audience was seemingly tantalized by the promise of a close-up of all that lanky flesh, but we were teased by the backlighting, which rendered the models as graceful, glamorous silhouettes. Imagine a '70s funk album cover, if you like, repeated. I expected this scenario, even as I hoped something more would happen. Song after song went on, and we were all standing there, the models shifting a little to new poses with the changing songs, and all of us getting tired on our feet (many of us not even in stilettos). I started to try to think about the concept here (VB is marketed as a Conceptual artist after all); what was it with the black and white Afros covering up many of the faces? She must be messing with us, playing ambiguously with racial, gender and exotic stereotypes, and suckering us as unthinking gawkers. There was that, ho hum. How about art historical and theoretical issues of reproduction with a twist? As I checked in with my thoughts and my emotional and aesthetic responses, I just became outraged. Soon the uninitiated (who weren't bothered with this generous interpretation of the artist's intentional torture) began pulling out their BlackBerries, in clusters, texting and shrugging shoulders. I wandered around, annoyed and sickened, yet still curious to get a look from the back, and discovered that the "ladies" were arranged chromatically: black in front, white in back, with a couple of less identifiable ethnicities in between. Perhaps I was simply falling into a well-laid conceptual trap. But the cavalier way in which Vanessa entered into the Faustian selling of her living tableau to the pop music industry, and the ephemeral aspect of her events, made this commercial booty call lay itself bare to such criticisms.

From Kanye's point of view, and that of Art Commerce, this was just a fancy-ass go-go show. As such, it still dissatisfied. We were ultimately bored, and that was the worst insult yet to the women who had stripped down and taken standing orders from an Artiste working with notions of Classicism. At least on raunchy rap videos the hos have faces and attitude, there's an honesty and sassiness. No, this was lean cold cuts. Served up prettily in a theater of cruelty ill conceived by its creator's grandiosity, garnish to a valuable pop franchise, and empty calories for someone looking for a little conceptual meat. In these times when Americans are assumed, by those who study such things, to be a bunch of tabloid-consuming idiots who can mistake a Fascist pig in lipstick for a bona fide female politician with brains and leadership skills, a little food for thought and digestion is our last best hope in a culture of cheap thrills and "art" for feel-good junkies.

In the big finale that I missed (I had evacuated by then), V and K yukked it up about their last-minute collaboration. According to an L.A. Times review of the event Beecroft purred, " When Kanye contacted me a week ago there were a few things about this album that touched my personal life ... '" And Kanye quipped in response, "'As you can see, there's a few things about Vanessa's work that touched my personal life, too.' He laughed, and so did the crowd." Right. It's just good, naughty fun, with a little sparkle, and a wink. Hopefully, at least in politics, we have seen the last of that cynical tactic until the next election cycle. ■