In a post last week I argued that argued that the best work in the Hirshhorn's just-closed "The Cinema Effect: Realism" show worked because it was the video equivalent of trompe l'oeil.

Part of why trompe l'oeil painting is beloved is because it acknowledges that the viewer understands the difference between reality and un-reality and then plays with that dichotomy. Painters such as Peto and Harnett only try to fool the eye enough to establish the type.

That's why Francesco Vezzoli's Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story [a still is above] is so good.

Vezzoli's Marlene (which received its first U.S. presentation at the Hirshhorn) is an over-the-top send-up of the vacuous, trashy celebrity-documentaries that fill cable television, a post-Warholian examination of our fixation with the rise and fall of stardom. Of course the 'star' that is the subject of Vezzoli's documentary is not Marlene, it's Vezzoli himself. (And Vezzoli is as much a celebrity likely to be profiled by E! as, well, you are.) In Marlene we see Vezzoli's rise, we see Vezzoli's fall, and each anecdote is more seriously-told and more preposterous than the last. "He was only four or five and they were already calling him 'Director,'" says one of Marlene's faux commentator. "His needle-works are nothing but decorative," says one 'museum curator,' a self-reflexive dig that recycles one of the oldest art world insults. Adds a "damage control expert": "Francesco is a pushy little sh*t, but I consider that a positive, not a negative."

Vezzoli's use of the 'celebrity documentary' follows in the footsteps of the 19th-century trompe l'oeil painters in that he riffs off of an established format that is familiar to his audience. For example: In their trompe l'oeil paintings, artists such as George Cope riffed on Civil War 'regalia' paintings frequently commissioned by politicians on the make in the years after the Civil War as an advertisement of their war-era heroism. Similarly, Vezzoli takes a medium plenty familiar to anyone who's watched E! at their gym (because no one would watch that tripe at home, right?) and tweaks it forward. It's less fool-the-eye than it is fool-the-brain, but the mixing of reality, unreality and wit is the same.

To a less-direct extent, Corinna Schnitt's Living a Beautiful Life does the same thing. The Schnitt features a couple of attractive actors (a 'husband and wife') reading from a script based on the answers Schnitt received after asking Los Angeles-area teenagers 'what constitutes a beautiful life?' The nail-with-its-shadow of the Schnitt is a handsome, well-put-together man [above] expressing that his life is a success because, "I enjoy having a hot mistress every two months." Who would say (admit?) that, even to their best friend or therapist? Schnitt doesn't tackle an established format as much as Vezzoli does, but her willingness to smirk at convention and honesty is what makes the piece work. She's not laughing at the actor or at the teens who supplied her with material, she's laughing with us at our ideas of how the other half lives.