Go to SoHo, where there was a legitimate “art scene” once upon a time, and today you’ll see a world arranged around white-girl models under the age of 23. Models are the Advertised Woman, As Seen On TV, and SoHo is basically a big strip mall, featuring the same stores as any mall in Omaha: J. Crew, Banana Republic, the Gap. All the models this year wear tiny, tight capri pants from one of these three stores and smaller tube tops that show off their five-inch diameters all the way down, and little triangular head-kerchiefs, and tiny, feathery, insignificant shoes with such lacy soles as to suggest that the model is carried by loin-clothed ebony eunuchs from jet to hotel to posh brunchery. Models pose on cardboard in SoHo window displays, models roam around inside the same stores and sit in restaurants with their heads together like tent poles, smoking. And the world around them, while pretending to act nonchalant, can’t keep its eyes away and trips over itself and slobbers all over them like they’re Cleopatra. As soon as one strides blithely and round-eyed out the door, the shop-girl/waitress/peon gushes “Oh, she’s such a special girl. And her friend? With the long, blond hair? So beautiful. And so sweet. Such a special girl. I love her.”

If a chick is trying to become a super-popular visual artist, it helps a lot if she’s a model, or just looks like one, and gets a lot of helpful mainstream advertising. I visited two art shows this week, both of which gave me that feeling I rarely get: that I dislike women so much I want to bore out my own reproductive system.

Japanese Wunderkind Mariko Mori’s aptly titled show “Empty Dream” is at the Brooklyn Art Museum. Mori, whose publicity material says that she used to be a model, attended fashion design school before becoming a huge and ubiquitous face on the international art scene. When you see her stuff in magazines — photo stills from her heavily effects-enhanced 3-D video works — it looks super cool, very now and wow. Mori utilizes a Cindy Shermanesque technique of filming herself made up to be various fantasy people, in fantasy environments: She is dressed like a futuristic Japanimation character in some mundane shopping environment; she is a beautiful, hovering lotus spirit in a kimono, distributing rose petals over a pink and orange science-fiction lake; she is a Buddhist goddess in the desert, a Shinto goddess in the woods, a mermaid at a manmade beach, a 3-D teenage comic-book heroine. All very cute and fetching, with no boobies or crassness of any kind. The Japanese, when they want to be, are wonderfully fey and self-reflective about sending up their own sing-song, commercialized galaxy, and bands like the Pizzicato Five are great at concocting loungey lullabies to breakfast cereal and the like. However, when you actually see the very pop-culty Mariko Mori exhibit, and it dawns on you how Lite it really is, and what a fucking behemoth pile of raw unfiltered cash was sunk into every piece, it makes you kind of sick inside, like you’ve just eaten the four-by-eight-foot head of a marshmallow Hello Kitty.

All of the photo pieces are large and elegant, and the 3-D short movie is perfectly realized. Then, the credits roll and roll and roll and you witness the cavalcade of tech boys and genius cameramen and top lighting designers who made it all happen with that unstopping bounty of money, and you realize that Mori really is mostly a model; she may have some cute ideas, but she’s hardly the crafty genius making her vision unfold. Later, I found out that Mori belongs to one of the richest families in the world, her father being a leading Japanese industrialist, and that she’s always been able to realize any fancy that popped into her pretty little head. It is cool stuff, for an MTV video. When it’s sitting in beautiful, huge, pristine white rooms and treated with the reverence normally afforded artists like Robert Irwin or Ellsworth Kelly, it makes you feel like you’ve just had your spiritual wallet stolen.

Meanwhile, British pop-icon-art-star Tracey Emin, whose show “Every Part of Me’s Bleeding” is in SoHo at the Lehmann/Maupin gallery, has made a name for herself in the art world, it seems, largely by showing up on British TV screaming and belligerently drunk. Also, for talking a whole lot about all the men she fucked after she was raped at 13. Also, for being naked a lot, and sexy in a trashy, exotic kind of way. It’s hard to dislike someone who appears to be so fundamentally “honest,” but I’ll do my best: It’s not really Tracey Emin who needs her ass kicked, it’s the people who make her Tracey Emin.

Emin is an artist who is doing what Courtney Love used to be doing, which is being an empoweredly revolting, fucked-up slag. This isn’t entirely a bad thing: Women need more negative role models. Too many girls are hung up on being perfect and pliable and thin and desirable; we need more rude, polluted, unsocialized harpies around to maintain some kind of civilized balance between “real” women and the ones my mother always referred to as “Uncle Toms” (i.e. models, or those demure zombies who aspire to look like models in order to hunt rich gentlemen in the Hamptons). I find Tracey Emin kind of nervy yet dull in the same way that all neurotic, autobiographical, tabloid shite is nervy yet dull, but pro-Tracey critics seem to think that her reckless, alcoholic exhibitionism is some kind of breakthrough in human vulnerability.

She is a painful sex object, indulging a taste for what Courtney Love once dubbed “angry vagina” art: “My cunt is wet with fear” reads one of Emin’s neon signs, posted over a filthy bed. I can think of a lot of unfamous people who’ve beaten the grotesque personal-disclosure horse for years (myself, even!), who are lots more interesting and tortured and outlandish than Emin and who merit no more than avoidance in public circumstances, but then again, those people weren’t as photogenic as anorexic hottie-scamp Emin. They never got a big, leggy, pouty photo of themselves in a black slip and heels in the New Yorker.

Besides a bunch of skill-free watercolors, Emin’s super-confessional one-woman exhibit consists of strange, niggardly little quilts on which she’s sewn cryptic and outrageously misspelled statements, and video of herself and more video of herself talking about herself, claiming and demanding respect and attention for the fact that she used to fuck a lot of people, she was raped, she was treated poorly by men she fucked, she was anorexic and so on. Oh, and lotsa bloody tampons lying around. For Christ’s sake. Why old tampons? Why the browned and clotted old plugs? We really need to see this? The cheapest chick-trick in the old art book? Why not a white-on-white canvas or a spray-painted mannequin, if we’re going for all the dumbest art clichis? Emin’s contributions to the world of visual culture are very thin gruel. Anorexic gruel, even.

One of the most annoying things in the Emin exhibit is the framed pages from a London Times interview of herself, all dolled up in a little designer dress and big makeup, coyly smoking and acting the sexy enfant terrible, next to which she has framed a scrawled, semi-illiterate notebook entry about how shitty she felt the day of the photo shoot, how she hadn’t eaten in days, how she trudged home in the rain, etc. Emin is trying to get over with Jackson Pollock behavior, but with no actual daring painting innovation; Jeanette Winterson’s drunken, sexual dysfunction without any lyrical writing style. Emin’s art is really just the viewer’s totally indulged, prurient interest in her personal life, which is worn on her pretty face and black sleeve, and jets poisonously out of her mouth like the tequila heaves.

The only beauty Emin brings to the table, besides the ugly truth about the squalid way she chooses to live, is whatever there is on her own body that she hasn’t yet destroyed. I don’t find Emin’s pitiful, psychology-of-the-oppressed-female stance heroic; I think it’s shallow in the same way Mariko Mori is shallow. She’s just the dirty side of the same Mori-model coin. Real self-destroying nihilistic cult art victim/heroes all hit their glories and died in the ’80s, for good, stupid reasons. Emin is too little too late. Besides, an exhibition for an exhibitionist is redundant.

Art-star Tracey’s being raped a different way here in America: Doesn’t she realize that American galleries only say they love her because they want to get into her popularity pants? They don’t want to know her as an “artist,” they want her to be famous here like she is in the U.K., a model for Bombay Gin ads. I can see it now, Absolut Emin: an empty bottle with a brownish tampon inside next to a dirty bed. Soon to be a billboard over a Banana Republic near you. Swanky.

Granted, Ms. Love has never been the traditional SUV-driving, cookie-baking kind of mom who posts incredibly detailed stuff about her baby’s poops.  But her recent slew of attention-getting Twitter insanity — and her 19-year-old daughter Frances Bean’s mortified response – suggests we are entering a new era of fail, one in which a parent’s awkward behavior isn’t of the adorable “What’s this button do?” variety. Instead, it may be more like “S#&% My Dad Said At Burning Man.”

Love, always a reliable train wreck and nowhere more in her wheelhouse of crazy than on Twitter, ramped it up last week when she accused Dave Grohl of hitting on her daughter in a lengthy series of tweets on her private account. She ranted freely about how angry she’d be “if frances slept with” him, going on about whether “the actual sex” was a rumor and adding that “dave tried to fuck me alot.” It was a display that Grohl’s publicist described as “Crazy Woman Says Insane Shit No One In Their Right Mind Would Believe.” And the young Miss Cobain, unsurprisingly, felt compelled to retort with her own variation on the classic, “Stop it, Mom, you’re embarrassing me.” Cobain issued a tart statement about “my biological mother,” saying that “her recent tirade has taken a gross turn” and adding, “Twitter should ban my mother.” She may be the most high-profile person to say it, but I’d wager Cobain is far from the only teenager who wishes Twitter could block her parents.

If you’ve never Tweeted your conviction that one of the Foo Fighters banged your teenager, congratulations, you’re not Courtney Love. But her tirade does represent an emerging dynamic that plays out in subtler ways across social media platforms. I’ve seen it with my own wincing eyes from parents who include their teenagers among their Facebook friends – and who post freely of their hangovers, their dating disasters, and their overall rock ‘n’ roll excesses. Those incriminating, spring break-like photos of the half-drunk lady from the party? Yeah, college kid, that’s YOUR MOM. It’s not that children are likely to be blithely unaware of their hipster parents’ lifestyles. But there’s a new blurring of the once easy-to-maintain tactful distance between parents and their young adult offspring, one complicated by the fact that many of us are cavorting on the road of excess a mere few steps ahead of our children.

Love has, in her typical fashion, attempted to kiss and make up with her daughter in the same format in which she originally speculated about her sex life – on Twitter. On Saturday, she posted, “Bean, sorry I believed the gossip. Mommy loves you.”

Mommy no doubt does. But the Gen-X parents who never quite settled down, who grapple with their own varying levels of maturity, now share the Internet with their teenagers. And the children whose shaky first steps and lost teeth have been documented all over Flickr and Twitter and Facebook are now turning into grown-ups themselves, with their own online lives. And while it’s our right as adults to party and to have sex and enjoy life, it’s also our job as parents to not be stupid. If your kid is old enough to read, your kid is old enough to be embarrassed by your Twitter stream. That’s why Love’s meltdown is a cautionary – if extreme – reminder that a typical Old Person Fail may no longer be an adorable “reply all” goof. Instead, it’s something that involves more ranting and thoughtlessness and way too much information. In other words, it looks an awful lot like a Young Person Fail.

just like to come here, my checks are on a wierd sahcedule so bear with, per paypal plus my paypal account has had wierd stuff happen eg salaries and theft, so im very persnickity about it, but if i really like it youll get paid , my cpa hates the word”etsy: ” but theres vendors on here i adore nd i al;ways discover new inspiring stuff.

Well, that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in a seller, does it? Nor should it: Courtney was already sued by Etsy user Dawn Simorangkir, an Austin, Texas, resident who runs a fashion line called Boudoir Queen. In 2009, Dawn sued Courtney after the singer went on a smear campaign, attacking the designer on Twitter, MySpace and the Etsy forums. The lawsuit filed by Simorangkir claimed that Love went into a rage when she was sent a $4K bill for a dress designed for her by the Boudoir label. Among other choice phrases Courtney employed in her Internet rant, “nasty lying hosebag thief,” and “cocaine dealer, thief, embezzler, racist and a homophobe,” were enough to warrant a libel suit. Of course, there was a ton more that Courtney said, but as you might expect, it’s pretty incoherent. From a MySpace post in 2009:

my aassnt cals me cos etsy vendors have called her cryong fpr usingthe owrd “flapper” sje says its everyday and i dont like a BULLY and noone else in the fashion industry does either shes a geniunly nasty person so i dont kow what makinh her “fakous ” willactuaLLY DO FOR HER AT SOME POINT SHELL HAVE TO SHOW SHER FACT AND THAT BLACK CLPUD OF VAMPITIC ENERGY THAT IS AROUND PEOPLE WHO SOLD DRUGS OR WERE MOLESTED OR its that grey and biyts of black in the aura, im toomuch of aa apussy about people withthis enercy nd the thing i have GIT to learnis this UNLESS THY A HAVE SOME INSANELY BRILLIANT INFRASTRUCTURE AND THEY DONT EVER SOEAK EVER. those people NEVER MAKE IT IN THEREAL WORLD EVER>

ive beeen assured from etsy she’ll be removed and banished but its not enough , we had a dal i gave her a VAST amount of money

clothes id been collecting for 8 years and 40,000$

Now, it would be one thing if Courtney’s recently discovered profile had been on Etsy since before the lawsuit (there’s no news of her ever being specifically banned from the site), but her account says she’s only been a member since 2010. The case was only settled out of court in February of this year (which is probably why Courtney says her cpa “hates the word ‘etsy:”).

But I wonder: Has anyone verified the account to make sure it’s not a fake? And if it is Courtney, why hasn’t Etsy taken down her profile? She has clearly violated the site’s terms of service, which states that a user can be terminated or suspended for actions including:

Be(ing) defamatory, trade libelous, unlawfully threatening, unlawfully harassing, impersonate or intimidate any person (including Etsy staff or other users), or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with any person, through for example, the use of similar email address, nicknames, or creation of false account(s) or any other method or device

Real or fake, that account needs to be taken down by Etsy mods ASAP.

“She may be doing fine at the moment, but I’m worried about her future. She’s very young, and she’s very talented, but she doesn’t seem to have any female friends. Or any straight guy friends for that matter. Instead, she surrounds herself with this coterie of gay stylists and advisors who’ve turned her into this weird, sexless Barbie doll. I was raised by gay guys myself, and I turned out all right in the end. But you know, you can only pull off this meat-dress act for so long. If she doesn’t watch out she’ll turn into a lonely drag queen. Straight guys just aren’t in to that kind of thing. “

It’s true that Gaga’s main difference from Madonna is her desexualization; she does resemble a drag queen onstage more than a female pop star. And that’s a large part of her appeal among her young gay fan base, who look to her as a sign that anyone can be “born this way” and still loved for who they are.

But anyone who knows Gaga’s history also knows she’s admitted to being bisexual and was, up until recently, dating a bartender/diet book author named Luc Carl. She’s admitted to working out her issues with her relationship through song, and there is a rejection of our culturally accepted ideas of femininity in that. But she’s in no way “sexless,” and as was evidenced in last week’s “Saturday Night Live” short “3-Way,” Gaga has no problem taking off the makeup and being a girl.

I doubt she’ll end up a “lonely drag queen” just because she’s a gay male icon. What do you think?

See, celebrities have a difficult time with Twitter. On the one hand, it gives them direct access to their fans in a way that was previously impossible, allowing them to promote the very best version of themselves while giving the illusion that they are letting people into their private thoughts and lives. On the other hand, sometimes famous people — like the rest of us — forget that there is a difference between thinking something and tweeting it, and end up oversharing some thought or private picture.

Since celebrities for the most part chose this profession because they wanted people to pay attention to them, they are caught at odds with revealing too much and revealing nothing at all. On the one end of the spectrum you have people like Tori Spelling and Snooki, who takes pictures of their family and friends and update every two seconds, and on the other you have people like Charlie Sheen and (previously) 50 Cent, who don’t actually reveal anything about themselves because they have someone managing their account for them. Franco fell more in the middle, and was actually pretty good at using the service to show people some new and interesting things instead of writing about what he ate that day or how his fans can get a 15 percent discount off Armani Exchange by clicking a link.

I have hope that James Franco isn’t off Twitter for good. After all, there is already a set precedent for the “I wish I could quit you” celebrity tweeter, wherein a short hiatus is taken from the micro-blogging service before fans revolt (or lose interest), causing the person to sign up again and announce their triumphant return against all the “haters.” Here are just five examples of this behavior, which I call “The Twit it and Quit it effect”:

1. Courtney Love

How long she quit for: Who can keep count? She’s quit three times.

Why she quit: To reform her image after posting racy pics, and also because she lost a lawsuit for $430,000 for writing mean things about a designer.

Why she rejoined: To post more racy pics (and then quit again).

2. Miley Cyrus

How long she quit for: A year and a half.

Why she quit: Her “Last Song” co-star for Liam Hemsworth convinced her it was a good idea. Then she rapped about it.

Why she rejoined: Technically she hasn’t, but as of last week she’s been posting under her producer Rock Mafia’s page http://twitter.com/#!/rock_mafia, saying ” When I need to speak out I will tweet from @Rock_Mafia ROCK MAFIA FOREVER xMC.” She’s already started posting sexy photos from the account. 

3. LeAnn Rimes

How long she quit for: Six days.

Why she quit: Didn’t like the haters who talked smack after she started seeing Eddie Cibrian while they were both married to other people.  “It’s unhealthy for me and my family to have to read negative comments from people [whose] opinions have no bearing on my life,” said Rimes.

Why she rejoined: Apparently out of boredom. She managed to take a break for almost a week, before signing on and writing to her fans ” “Hi twitter land! Miss u all and thought I’d just say hello! I have so many darling fans and want you all to know how much u r appreciated… Hugs to all! Can’t stay away for too long.” That’s how you know you’re dealing with a true addict.

4. Trent Reznor

How long he quit for: Unclear, but announced change in Twitter account in July, 2009.

Why he quit: Fed up with lack of privacy, and the trolls. Promised to only tweet about band stuff until Twitter gets better at blocking.

Why he rejoined: It’s unclear if Trent ever officially made a change back over, since he definitely is more reserved on Twitter than he used to be. Still, he’s been using the account to post pics of himself and Christian Bale, so that’s better than nothing.

5. Amanda Bynes

How long she quit for: Four months

Why she quit: No explanation given, she just shut down her account.

Why she rejoined: Apparently the hiatus was to build buzz for her new and improved Twitter account that she started four months later. It was kind of like when she “retired” from acting and then “unretired” a month later. Who knows.

Corgan vs. Love round 859 started Monday, when the Great Pumpkin (whose Twitter contributions usually have more to do with praising God and capitalizing words like “star” and “sky,” Emily Dickinson-style) tweeted a six-point list of his “thoughts” about the Hole singer. Making reference to her recent custody troubles, Corgan wrote, “the world is aware of your lack of responsibility, as seen in the gov’t taking away your parental right … Only u could abandon such a beautiful, incredible child who is smarter than u, cooler than u, and better than u. Oops, did I say too much?” He also suggested that he deserved more credit than he was given for co-writing songs on Hole’s new album, “Nobody’s Daughter,” twisting the knife with a particularly cruel jab: “maybe you should go someone [sic] nice+live off your husband’s money, u know the money he made for writing all those great songs.” In conclusion, Corgan opined (in words that wouldn’t be out of place in a Smashing Pumpkins song), “so have your moment, burn up in the sun that laughs at u as equally as it appears to celebrate u+sleep knowing u have no honor.”

Corgan, it seems, was responding not only to Love’s chat with Howard Stern Monday (in which she may have made some disparaging comments about Corgan’s sexual prowess) but also to a public apology she offered him last month on Facebook. (Sample sentence: “We have again created beauty from the agony between us, all the buried and unburied anguish, all that is true, that is gold, that is meant to be is within this endless and somehow eternal cycle of Billy & Courtney.”) So, shouldn’t Courtney — who, God bless her, has never been known for her Twitter restraint — be responding with some kind of angry/sad/insane meltdown about now?

As it turns out, Ms. Love may really be making a sincere effort to get a handle on the “Courtney monster” Amy Benfer describes in her review of “Nobody’s Daughter.” She isn’t ignoring Corgan’s comments or keeping mum about a supposed affair with former Bush frontman/current Gwen Stefani husband Gavin Rossdale (and I, for one, am glad she hasn’t changed that much), but she is certainly doing some self-policing. On Twitter Tuesday afternoon, Love fired off a few quips wondering why Corgan was so obsessed with her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, and agreeing that she really is an awesome kid. Then there was the following laugh-out-loud funny tweet: ”@Billy you remind me of Bette Davis in ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.’” Minutes after her initial messages, she started retweeting fans’ suggestions that she ignore Billy or that they take their argument out of the public eye. (Let it never be said that Love doesn’t interact with or appreciate her fans.) Soon after, she reeled herself in and addressed her followers: ”thank you so much for the support and my apologies for even responding a little bit i deleted most of it but the kid? my kid? really? creepy.”

I don’t want to debate Love’s parenting ability or who actually wrote most of “Nobody’s Daughter.” Perhaps Corgan really does have a reasonable complaint (although I have to wonder: If he can write a great album for Hole, why haven’t we seen any compelling Smashing Pumpkins material since the mid-’90s?). But for now, I just want to celebrate Love’s newfound self-control and retain my hope — for her and her fans alike — that it lasts long enough for her to give some career-defining performances and promote the hell out of the hard-won success that is “Nobody’s Daughter.”