"There's nothing intrinsically wrong about looking at pictures of Lindsay Lohan. In fact, there’s something aberrantly fascinating about their slickness and vacuity, and about Lohan as a self-destructive sympathetic figure. Yet, to like Phillips's pictures of Lindsay Lohan is to give oneself over to post-irony and its problematic doublespeak. Populist and positionless, the post-ironic attitude hovers between cool detachment and innocent enjoyment...."

Richard Phillips is known for his large-scale glossy hyper-realistic paintings, recalling the pictorial style of magazines from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and reflecting traditions of popular image culture. His paintings represent close-up portraits, predominantly of women from fashion and soft porno magazines, but also persons from the fields of pop music and politics. He says "My Pictures involve a kind of wasted beauty-that's always been a thread in my work."

Richard Phillips has a trend buidling. First a "Lindsay Lohan" short film,  now "Sasha Grey." This, along with Phillip’s first short film, “Lindsay Lohan,” will be included in "Commercial Break," presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 - 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

Sometimes you just have to look past the subject matter and enjoy the concept. Gagosian Gallery just announced Richard Phillips first short film, "Lindsay Lohan." Phillips takes the perpetual mess and explores "the legacies of classical portraiture in relation to the mediated representations of contemporary popular culture."

I attended the opening of Black Swan: An exhibit inspired by the film curated by Dominic Sidhu. Photos and more after the jump…