In February 2007 Britney Spears entered Esther Tognozzi’s salon in Tarzana in Los Angeles, grabbed a pair of clippers and shaved her head, citing the waiting paparazzi as motivation. Four months later the iPhone launched. The following month the first episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians aired on US TV.
There is no doubt it was a Damascene year for celebrities and social media, and while these three events might seem unrelated, they mark the starting point for an exhibition at the Saatchi gallery in London over the past two days to mark 10 years of the Kardashians’ reality TV show. “If Britney can get through 2007, you can get through anything!” read the opening text of the exhibition in neon, as if to acknowledge the baton.
Like everything else about the Kardashians, E! Entertainment Television’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians: 10th Anniversary exhibition was anything but modest. Occupying two rooms at London’s Saatchi’s gallery it was an immersive experience rather than artistic celebration and gave a clear narrative of how the family have played the media.
In the last decade, KUWTK (an acronym coined by fans on social media) has evolved into a compelling, high-profile, high-concept document of what makes someone famous. It is aired in 160 countries, is the longest running docusoap in the history of television and has become a blueprint for reality TV. E4’s Made in Chelsea and ITV’s The Only Way is Essex were born in its wake.
Like its most famous byproduct, Kim Kardashian, the show has become masterful in its reinvention. For every resolved drama – the family always hug at the end of an episode – a new one is teased out of the mundane reality of ordinary life.
Celebrity reporter Olivia Foster cites the Kim Kardashian rule – that if you compare pictures of Kim taken two weeks apart, there would always be something different. “There is always Kim Kardashian ‘news’,” she says. “Even if it’s just about different coloured hair.”
The Saatchi gallery might have seemed an unusual place to chronicle this anniversary – on Wednesday it hosts a retrospective of the American sculptor Alexander Calder – but the two are behemoths within their respective industries. And in recent years the art world has found commercial success celebrating the careers of cultural figureheads.
In 2013 the V&A’s David Bowie Is became its fastest selling exhibition, and the museum is currently near the end of a similar homage to Pink Floyd. Which suggests that the world is keen to explore what – or rather who – constitutes art?
At the Kardashian exhibition the answer was “contouring booths”, a white rose backdrop for re-enacting Kim and Kanye’s wedding photo, and a wall of Kardashian selfies. Most curious was a neon timeline of the show’s ascent, modestly contextualised within major world events, pasted across one wall.
Regardless of where you stand on the Kardashian phenomenon it is simply that, and the exhibition was testament to it – tickets sold out almost as soon as they went on sale. To understand the success of the show is to understand the Kardashian-Jenner family.
KUWTK follows the lives of the Kardashian-Jenner family – Kim, Kourtney, Kylie, Kendall, Khloe, Rob, their mother Kris and a rotation of partners and parents – news of Kylie’s pregnancy has just broken on TMZ – as they buy, shop, overdose, divorce and, most compellingly in the case of one family member, transition. It has been met with a wall of criticism. Derided for monetising their babies – and promoting conspicuous consumption, the series has arguably shifted the concept of what reality TV can do within the confines of its genre.
“The Hills and The Osbournes always seemed stilted and set up,” says Issy Sampson, the former news editor of Heat magazine. KUWTK, by comparison, is hyper-reality television. There is nothing you don’t see.
The family first entered the cultural psyche after Robert Kardashian, the former husband of matriarch Kris, gained notoriety for defending OJ Simpson in his murder trial, turning his family into “Calabasas celebrities”, named after the suburb of Los Angeles they called home. But it wasn’t until Kim Kardashian, then a 26-year-old stylist, found herself embroiled in a sex tape scandal that conversations about the TV series started.
Psychologist Susie Orbach is among those wary of this culture. “[The Kardashians] seem to be an example of the dangers of the self-representing the body,” she says. “Observing oneself being observed – that is a tragic diminishment. But it also the commentary of our society right now and she [Kim], and they, are perpetuating that.”
But all this isn’t new. Historian Stephen Greenblatt describes this as “self-fashioning”, a way of composing one’s public persona according to a set of socially acceptable standards.
At Grazia magazine, about five years ago, there was an initial reluctance to put Kim Kardashian on the cover. But the magazine took a risk and found her image sold issues. “We were surprised because she seemed a bit low-rent at the time,” says one former employee. “But back then people seemed to care about Kim’s life, her marriage, her babies, and obviously her bum, and regardless of what we thought, she was like media glue. Once she was in, it was impossible to look beyond her.”
Kim Kardashian’s success came from her selfies. “She was putting out the image she wanted to put out. Everything else just followed,” says the employee.
Sampson agrees: “Magazines are still obsessed. [The Kardashians] still shift copies in a rapidly declining market. I don’t think there was one day in my entire Heat career I didn’t talk about Kim or her family – and I can only remember one issue that she didn’t appear in.”
But the sticking point with the exhibition was that it was about television, a medium that could be considered outdated in our social media world. KUWTK TV viewing figures have been largely in decline since 2014, including a controversial episode that followed a “badly shaken” Kim after thieves had tied her up and held her at gunpoint in her Paris apartment before making off with her jewellery. The issue is, one TV editor said, “that the media had been so oversaturated with the minutiae of this event that by the time we watched Kim on screen, we felt like we had already gone through it all already”.
Britney Spears is currently on a multimillion dollar residency in Las Vegas so it seems reinvention truly is the answer to longevity. In that spirit, it is unlikely the Kardashians will be going anywhere soon.
