As followers of Britney Spears’ Instagram account continue to take her repetitious postings with a grain of salt, apart from the growing concern for her mental health, one can’t help but feel a certain easy comparison to Spears’ “pop artability” within the context of her posting the same image over and over again. While, in her mind (and those of devoted fans), there are many nuances and differentiations to be made in each one (including filter selection and slightly more tilted head pose), her decision to essentially put up the same photo almost every day speaks not only to a strange existential crisis specific to the era of social media, but also to Andy Warhol likely splooging himself from beyond the grave.
Having perfected the skill of screen printing for use in the pop art movement he became the face of, Warhol wouldn’t have even needed to bother with this type of mass production had Spears been around to serve as one of his muses while he was still alive. Or better yet, if he had stayed alive to see her in the present (one still laments that, out of everything that could have caused his death, it was a botched gallbladder operation). All he would have needed to do was print out the image Spears offers almost daily. Of late, it’s been a floral crop top and puka shell necklace (she is, after all, an icon of the 00s). Never showing anything below the torso (unless in video format), which would be Warhol’s preference anyway as he didn’t fuck much with people’s bodies (the exception being if they were muscular men’s), Spears effortlessly fits the mold of Warhol’s style–a repeated series of one’s face.
While Spears might be more likely to know Guy Hepner’s work (thanks to Kylie Jenner) over Warhol’s, it feels as though she’s mugging for the camera expressly with his art in mind, or at least buried somewhere within her fraught subconscious–as though trying to offer up her own equally as immortal Jackie or Marilyn image to ensure her perpetuity. Jackie and Marilyn, too, were their own women, both strong and vulnerable, durable and fragile. It was what made them into gay icons–hence Warhol glomming onto them in his lifetime. Rendering them into floating heads forever memorexed by a gay man (again, this is already the exact narrative of Spears’ life). The feeling of Britney being detached from her body in these photos–offering a vacant look of tainted innocence (as though the 1998-era Britney is still trapped inside)–also lends not only a psychological analysis field day, but the ideal subject for which Warhol might have wielded his process.
The symbolism of Warhol’s Factory, churning out products for mass consumption, also applies to Spears’ own Factory. While she might be the one with her name attached to the Product of Britney Spears, it is the work of many others who have transferred her image (most especially when it was at its most “wholesome” with just the “slightest” wink and nod of sexuality) to the public. So overwrought, overused and oversold that it’s no wonder she needs to photograph herself every day to see if she’s still even there after having given so many pieces up for profit over these past decades.
Warhol’s attraction to Spears would also inevitably have stemmed from his hard-on for the damaged woman, hence his love of muses like Edie Sedgwick and Candy Darling. So, in another sense, maybe it’s better the two never orbited one another in the same lifetime. For how much more could Spears really endure in terms of being commodified?
