“Nyx,” 8 x 8 inches, layered resin in wood panel with selenite crystals, acrylic paint, wood and crystal beads, sequins, glitter, metal findings.

Nyx & the Currency of Beauty

This artwork comes with a warning: consumption may leave you emptier than before.

Why I Made This

The current moment feels shaped by the assumptions and appetites of the generation in power. In many ways, it reflects the long arc of my own generation —Baby Boomers — and its embarrassing comfort with image, acquisition, and display. I recognize that world. I worked within it and it seemed normal and unquestionable at the time. But looking back, I see where it has led us.

My career in media — often art directing fashion, glamour and celebrity — included  constructing images that were meant to persuade, attract and hold attention. It is discomforting to realizing how easily artifice became normalized, desired and personified.

This art piece is a response to that awareness. It is not meant to illustrate a story, but to editorialize how surface has overtaken substance, and where what we elevate reveals more about us than the object itself.

The materials — thick resin, fake and real crystals, sparkly glitter — carry the language of allure. Here, they are used to excess to the point where attraction begins to feel suspect. The composition is punctuated with X’s and exclamation points, and with multiple, fractured gazes — sets of eyes that both look out and reflect back. They suggest a culture caught in a loop of seeing and being seen, where perception itself becomes unstable.

The artwork asks whether what we value is something we have truly chosen or simply magnify what we have inherited.

This artwork is a little window through which we can peer beneath the shiny surface to behold the modern day Nyx, the first lady of the night. Born of Chaos, she cuts a crisp, Natasha-like figure in her pointy hat. Coated with official regalia, she is ornate, vacant, embalmed in polish, and alarmingly detached. We see only what we are meant to see — the glamour, the style, the cover story.

In the absence of a real face — only a strange eye that looks back at us and a blurred mouth with nothing to say — we see right through her, to the glittering colors of the Russian flag. Off to the side, an eagle has been knocked from its perch, hopefully biding its time while watching the lady guarded by a swamp creature.

Two hundred and fifty years of tradition have given us practiced expectations. But now value has been traded for display; allure stands in for worth. Elevated by acquisition, not essence, this lady of darkness drifts through her borrowed role. Night sanctifies the transaction, where beauty is currency and emptiness wears the mask of power.

Could this possibly Be the “Best” we can offer the world? And if this is what we choose to elevate, what exactly do we value?