Oh, the glamor and sophistication of the Barbenheimer advisor! Magnificent creatures who grace the art scene like peacocks on parade. Draped in designer attire, they strut through art fairs, clutching their Prada bags and a web of social connections that rivals a spider’s silk. With perfectly coiffed hair, they sashay up to gallery booths, dropping the names of their clients like secret treasures. ‘I represent a wealthy Middle Eastern client.’
Half material girl, half apocalyptic art thot, the Barbenheimer advisor is someone who strolls through art fairs like a heat sinking Missile. A polymath with a PhD in International Relations with a minor in Art History, the Barbenheimer advisor is a whiplash of polar opposites, converging into a grand Salon of toxicity and wellness. Their presence is vulgar and annoying in a bazaar kind of way, always pitching something — another artist, show, or great new space — tied only to the ludicrously complex, Nolan-esque narratives that govern Barbenheimer’s work.
According to Maria Arbramenko, a recent RCA graduate and curator based in London, these advisors are as common as overpriced lattes at a hipster café. They feed on chauvinistic gallery owners and bask in a mixture of personal and professional relations. They are the oil that keeps the art advisory machine running, using their youthful allure for dinner dates and trading innuendos for personal gain.
‘Every normcore gallery in London is overpopulated with mostly female advisors who prey on the sexism of the male gallery owners,’ says Arbramenko. ‘From the art they show, to the fools that frequent them, we can see the “Barbenheimer advisor” as the lubricant to which art advisory ebbs and flows, beautiful young showpieces used for dinner dates to work fair floors and trade in sexual innuendo for art and personal benefit.’
Their presence is as subtle as a bullhorn in a library. The Barbenheimer advisor is passé, ‘but so too is Ken, her client,’ Abramenko says, ‘services tended to by the Barbenheimer advisor include tending to Ken’s whimsical tastes, but also acting as a buffer to his frequent outbursts, which are often sexual in nature.’
With a MacBook in one hand and a glass of free Chardonnay in the other, the Barbenheimer advisor embodies a surrealist artpocalypse, a byproduct of an art world where Barbie and Ken explore self-discovery through excess and depravity. Yet, their lives seem devoid of any cultural revelation, trapped in a vapid realm of global culture tainted by money and male dominance.
‘They’ve lost touch with the complexity of life’s role reversals, instead dancing to the tune of a woke folk song infused with post-colonial and feminist theory,’ Abramenko concludes, ‘all while savoring the oysters and sins of their random Ken-of-the-month.’
In the grand tragedy that is the Barbenheimer advisor’s life, the third act, or the catastasis, begins with a Ryanair flight home, or, if they’re lucky — another fair, another biennale. If they’re extremely lucky, it’s a yacht where more deals can be spun. But reality soon sinks in, a nuclear dawn of deals obliterated by innuendos and shattered expectations. Turning to Hinduism and Communism, they recite the Bhagavad Gita for solace, pondering the radiance of a thousand suns, followed by a TikTok video of DJ Khaled looking pensively into the screen: ‘Keep grinding. Keep hustling.’
In the world of the Barbenheimer advisor, ideology becomes a paranoid mirage, the Real, an unreachable limit, where any notion of pure art, untainted by the patriarchal whims of Ken, a futile endeavor. It’s a tragi-comedy where Barbenheimer is the protagonist, and we’re all just players in a twisted bewildering narrative. In the end, we discover that Barbenheimer is a construct that lives, at least a little bit, within all of us.
Written by Dorian Batycka
