I was onto the emptiness aesthetic back in ’79 when I tried to raise funding for a monthly magazine called Nothing. It was supposed to be like Interview only more so. The Nothing idea didn’t fly because celebrities of a certain stripe or calibre who had agreed to give interviews would’ve had to be in on the joke — “I’m basically an empty vessel with nothing much to say, but then again we’re all ‘nothing’ in a certain sense…all of us just atomic molecular matter, passing through for 75 or 80 years and then whooshing into the void.” Five years later along came the emptiest famous person in world history — Angelyne — and the rest is history.
Now the world is full of empty coke bottles, all clamoring for our attention on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter and Facebook. The Kardashians took Angelyne’s vacant aesthetic and ran with it in a much more profitable way.