The just-issued restraining order prohibits Love from having any contact with her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. And after Frances chose to live with her grandmother rather than her mom, Perez Hilton says Love ranted about her on Facebook, writing,

i dont care really i hate to spund cold but any kid of mine who pulls this shit has lost her position and friends in nyc they will pretend to like her, but ill go teach at bard before she gets in,she was deceptive she lied and shes lying to herself, she sits on her facebook adding yet more books and films and frankly the whole thing disgusts my daihgter is not always honest and ive alliwed her to visit with these assholes i support to the tune of houses horses and monthly annuities and cars, well the good news is now that frances is clearly deluded that she can buy her grandmaother a "small house in la" id love to see how that works.

And, even more confusingly,

have fun on your covers of the tabs, thats what your wonder bread side likes, you couldve asked for emanicaption youc ouldve gone to simons rock, but you have to get involved with that terrifying not to me, to you witch who keeps britney spars in jail?

It's not clear who the "witch who keeps britney spars in jail" represents in Love's cosmology, but the reference to Frances's "wonder bread side" suggests that maybe the child of this oft-drugged-out rock chick craves a little squareness. Love disputes Perez's account of her Facebook activities, writing last night,

you lying queen youve just lied and defamed me and my child for the last time i fucking HATE YOU you fat ass piece of bully shit PART of that... was from a personal letter and PART of that YOU made up, and thats ILLEGAL.

But still up on her page is a comment that captures the spirit if not the substance of the longer rant: "shes clueless and in some wierd isolation tank about what that nasty crews gone and done, they have appealed to proetct PROPERTY not her, granny wants a check thats all." And this wouldn't be the first time Frances has apparently wanted out — in September she tweeted, "someone adopt me please." And back in April, she wrote two tweets possibly directed at Love: "I love you... but your fucking crazy and irresponsible!" and "damn it I'm on my own.." From everything Frances has said publicly — which is not much — and everything Love has said — which is a lot — the picture that emerges is one of a daughter who wants to live a normal life, and a mother who basically can't.

The British fashion magazine Dazed & Confused will feature Love on its cover in January, and while the accompanying story (not online) fawns all over Hole's upcoming album (the infelicitiously named Nobody's Daughter, out in early 2010), it also depicts Love as pretty lacking in self-awareness. The story opens with Frances trying to make burritos in a kitchen her mom has stained purple by dyeing clothes. And Love tells writer Karley Sciortino,

My Twitter was a failed social experiment. People have misinterpreted it as a fame thing, but I really don't understand that stuff. I don't have any concept of the celebrity part of my life. When I see myself on TV, I'm like, ‘Why am I on the news? I didn't make a record.' [...] I see that 45,000 people are following me on Twitter, and I don't think twice about it. I just don't care.

When Sciortino suggests that Love "realises that these kooky antics are all part of the reason why the world is so infatuated with her," Love responds,

I disagree completely. I think people like my music and that's it. I don't make a very good celebrity, and nor do I want to. If I was a good celebrity I'd be really enigmatic and contrived. I think I make a really decent rock musician, and I'm good with crowds, but that's it. Look... some people can step outside themselves and view themselves how others do. I just can't.

This last seems like a strikingly accurate self-assessment. Maybe Love is a fame-whore, incoherently Tweeting and Facebooking so that people pay attention to her. But her public statements are so logorrheic, imprudent, and unedited (one charitable fan writes, "she's pretty much always 'typed' this 'way' I think it is because her brilliant thoughts move faster than her fingers") that it's clear she either doesn't understand how she comes off, doesn't give a shit, or, most likely, both. Love isn't a bad celebrity, as she claims — she's a fascinating one, taking the now-popular art form of the overshare to heights unmatched by the far less interesting pseudo-celebs (Speidi et al) who have tried it. But it's probably a lot less fascinating if you're her kid.

Lots of Nirvana fans still hate Courtney Love, but if you (like me) maintain a certain fangirlish affection for both Cobain's widow and his child, it's hard to know how to feel. On the one hand, Love's sheer sloppy weirdness is appealing, and since her last stint in rehab it has sometimes impossible to hope that she and her daughter could make a happy if slightly bizarre life together. On the other, there's Frances Bean, who retains an eerie physical resemblance to her father but seems to have her head screwed on straighter than either of her parents. Frances once told Harper's Bazaar, "if you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life." She also said, "we've moved so much, and my life has been so inconsistent." The latter is a pretty big understatement. No matter what it means for her mom, the girl has earned some Wonder Bread.

Courtney Love Bashes Frances Bean On Facebook [Perez Hilton]
Frances Bean Cobain Wants To Live With Grandmother [People]
Courtney Love Cobain [Facebook]
Frances Bean Cobain Has Steered Clear Of Her Parents' Spotlight [MTV]
Dazed & Confused January Issue [Official Site]
Court to Courtney: Stay Away From Frances [TMZ]

Earlier: Court-Ordered

• You may want to just give up on life: Kristin Cavallari is getting $63,000 per episode to "play" a "villain" on The Hills. [PopCrunch]

• A hotel employee on Madonna's backup dancers: "Horrible." "Notoriously difficult… rude… presumptuous and cheap." [Page Six]
• Breaking: Uncle Jesse John Stamos is "conceptualizing" a Full House feature film! The Tanners' triumphant return! [Gatecrasher]
• David Carradine's death is still a mystery — he was found in a sitting position, but with a yellow rope attached to a closet bar around his neck. "We believe that Mr. David committed suicide but it is suspicious," says a police official in Bangkok. [People]
• Further details show that David Carradine may have died "from "auto-erotic accident." [Yahoo News via AFP]
• David Carradine will be seen on his Tuesday's episode of Mental. [E!]
• "Britney Jean Spears was not born into a stable home. She was born into a dysfunctional disordered one because of her father's alcoholic rages… She was on Prozac at 18… Britney was prescribed Prozac but she treated it like headache tablets, taking a pill only on the days she awoke depressed. This seemed to make her more manic…" [Mirror]
• While Britney's in London, she'd like to drop in on the Queen. [Mirror]
• Susan Boyle is out of the hospital and already has an offer to perform for Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher — for £30,000. Also, the portrayal of her as a crazy cat lady persists, since this paper claims she left the clinic because "she could no longer bear to be parted from her family, friends and beloved cat Pebbles." [Daily Mail]
• Krist Novoselic, former bassist for Nirvana, is running for clerk of Wahkiakum County in western Washington. Apparently he is running under the "Grange Party" banner, even though the Grange isn't a political party; it's a protest of the state's system that lets candidates say what party they prefer when running for office. [USA Today]
• The Slumdog kids are in Hong Kong today, where they will sing and dance (?) at a charity event. [AP]
• Lance Armstrong Tweeted in the voice of his new baby boy, writing: "Wassup, world? My name is Max Armstrong and I just arrived. My Mommy is healthy and so am I!" [E!]
• The woman who claims she was assaulted by Sacha Baron Cohen while he was filming Bruno says her injuries are "life-altering," as she suffered brain bleeds and sometimes requires assistance walking. [TMZ]
• Jennifer Lopez was "really nervous" before working on her new flick, the Back-Up Plan, because, she says, "What if I forgot how to act?" Or! What if you were never really good at it in the first place??? [National Enquirer]
• Jay-Z will release his Blueprint 3 album on Sept. 11. Interesting choice of date. [Billboard]
• Living on St. Lucia has had an affect on Amy Winehouse's sound and she is recording with "local musicians" who play traditional island instruments. Sounds… awesome? Whatever, just release some new music! [The Sun]
• Kelly Bensimon — seen here in a rather see-through dress — says of Real Housewives: "I think it was not exactly me just because I was incredibly guarded. I was a nervous wreck! Like after the show, Jill said to me, 'You're such a nice person, why weren't you like that on the show?' I felt badly too because I didn't get to see the real me." So you were being fake then? Interesting. Oh, she also says: "On Planet Kelly, everything is happy, the grass is really green, people are really really nice .... There's, like, fun everywhere and there's excitement and new opportunities all around. It's a really great place - you should come!" [NY Mag]
• Amanda Seyfried's latest film, Letters To Julliet, starts shooting soon, but her leading man hasn't been cast yet. Who would you like to see Amanda fall in love with? [Telegraph]
• Wait! Gael Garcia Bernal has signed on to star with Amanda Seyfried in Letters To Juliet. [Variety]
• Sienna Miller and some other celebs wrote a letter to Nobu restaurant in London which reads: "We feel strongly that blue fin tuna must be completely removed from your menu as it is an extremely endangered animal." [The Sun]
• Other celebs protesting the use of blue fin tuna: Woody Harrelson, Elle Macpherson, Sting, Trudie Styler, Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Alicia Silverstone. [Page Six]
• "Agency Feeding Frenzy Over Ice Cube." The actor/rapper, not the unit of frozen water. [Deadline Hollywood]
• Kate Beckinsale was supposed to play Barbarella in the remake? But lost out to Rose McGowan? Hmm. We'd always heard it was Rose. [Daily Express]
• This review of a recent Mandy Moore show claims that she was "strangely tentative onstage" until the last song, a "rootsy" cover of her pop hit, "Candy," which she "seemed to enjoy more than anything else in the set." [NY Times]
• Shannen Doherty is selling her Malibu home, which has interesting contemporary architecture and a pretty nice pool. Also dig the exposed beams in the living room. [CasaSugar]
• In other 90210 news, Jason Priestley will direct and online series called The Lake. [Reuters]
• Is Jennie Garth a Twihard? She makes husband Peter Facinelli dress up as his Dr. Cullen character all the time, he claims: "She says, 'Put the doctor's coat on!' I'm like, 'Again?'" [Gatecrasher]
• M.I.A. has a record label called N.E.E.T. and this track, "Bang!" is from Rye Rye, the first artist signed. Just the thing to get jumpstarted on a sleepy Friday. [ConcreteLoop]
• "Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal planned to wed in Germany this spring but organisers couldn't arrange the big day in time." [Daily Express]
• Gene Simmons passed a kidney stone and promptly sold it on eBay — for charity. Charming! [Mirror]
• "Boris Becker goes wedding dress shopping with his fiancée Lilly Kerssenberg." She is awfully pretty. Together they certainly cut a figure. [Daily Mail]
• Phil Spector's 28-year-old wife denies she is a gold digger: "I don't take anything from my husband, and I never have. I'm a good person, but people don't see any of that or know how hard I work. I can weed whack. Rip out walls. Lay tile." Also, her pantsuit is 10 years old. "I've had this since high school." She does, however, wear a 9-carat diamond she and 69-year-old Spector "designed together." And now that he is in jail, she always has her hot pink BlackBerry with her: "I never know when he is going to be allowed to call. Whenever he calls, I answer." [LA Times]
• RIP Shih Kien, who played Bruce Lee's enemy in 1973's Enter the Dragon. [AP]
• "Being married is like being on a game show and you're always in the lightning round. I have a podium in my living room, and in the morning I hit the clicker button: 'I'll take Movies That I Think We Saw Together for 200.' The woman is always the returning champion from last week: 'I'll take Details of a 10-Minute Conversation We Had at 3 in the Morning Eight Years Ago...' " — Jerry Seinfeld. [E!]
• "I still can't believe we have a president who is mixed like me. It's one thing that we have a black president but for me it's even crazier because he's mixed. I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I'm African American but that doesn't include the other half of me. I can't believe I'm living in a time where I feel proud of my president where I feel like things are actually positive and people feel good about where our country can be." — Maya Rudolph. [Women & Hollywood]
• "[Nurse Jackie] is physically low maintenance — that was a huge appeal. Very much like I am. I didn't want to spend a lot of time in makeup. On Sopranos, the nails, the hair, the makeup and the jewelry was very not who I am. It was fun, but after eight years I was ready to try something else." — Edie Falco. [Reuters]
• "All directors compare themselves to Orson Welles, who did his masterpiece at 26. So when you start and you're nearly 40, you're like, 'Oh god, I'm so behind.'" — Michel Gondry. [Independent]
• "I have a pretty amazing personality, and I'm pretty intelligent. Don't just write me off as a pinup" — Megan Fox to Elle. [Page Six]
• "A very smart person told me once what other people think of me is none of my business. ... I do not Google myself. I know that's only going to end badly." — Edie Falco. [Reuters]
• "We do not hang out." — Jill Zarin on the Real Housewives Of New Jersey. [Gatecrasher]
• "I don't know why that's either untapped or overlooked or not done well because there is really no excuse for it. This is a perfect example of it [being well done]. It's not as if women don't exist. I will say that in general there is a lot of crap in the world. It wasn't until I was thrown in the water on day 1 of Saturday Night Live where they said you write for yourself. That's what everyone does. I learned the enormous power of writing for yourself, especially now that people seem to be receptive to the fact that women can write." — Maya Rudolph, who stars in Away We Go, on why women are sometimes underwritten or ignored in Hollywood films. [Women & Hollywood]
• "I can't think of anything more horrible than sharing what I'm doing all day" — Renée Zellweger to Glamour on why she won't use Twitter. [Page Six]

• American Idol runner-up Adam Glambert has been vague about his sexuality, but a source says:

He'll come out, officially, on the cover of the next Rolling Stone. [Page Six]

• For the love of Zeus: Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer might be back on. Here is an actual quote from a "source" o the set of The Baster: "[John] wasn't calling her or texting her. But, as she got lonelier and the shoot for her new movie wore on, she started reaching out to him, sometimes very late at night and sometimes after a few too many glasses of wine." Boozy old lonely sad tragic drunk dialing! [MSNBC]
• Jen Aniston's movie is filming near her ex-roommate's restaurant; the roomie is the one who wrote a memoir and depicted Aniston as "weight-obsessed." Unscripted dramz. [Page Six]
• Pierce Brosnan saved Uma Thurman from an out-of-control van on the set of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief! He saw the runaway vehicle "hurtling down a hill" towards Uma and jumped into the drivers' seat and slammed on the brakes. [Daily Express]
• Unsolicited uterus update: Nicole Kidman dyed her hair red and has a "poochy stomach," so clearly she must be pregnant. [Page Six]
• Kate Hudson and Alex Rodriguez have been dating for about a week but she is "already following A-Rod around." [Page Six]
• Order in the court! Al Roker got in big trouble yesterday for snapping pictures while on jury duty. [NY Daily News]
• Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman together on Broadway? Can your ovaries stand it? [NY Daily News]
• The ex-wife of Jon Cryer (aka Duckie Dale) has been arrested for felony child neglect. [TMZ]
• Is Demi Moore going to the UK without Ashton Kutcher? Well that would mean a woman acting independently of her husband! Sound the alarm! [Mirror]
• "Carla Bruni: I feel pain when people criticise my husband... and mock my low-heeled shoes." [Daily Mail]
• Will Susan Boyle bail out of Britain's Got Talent? At this point, she could get a record deal without actually finishing the program. "The producers of the show are going to do everything in their power to make sure she is there on May 30," said a source close to the show. "Whatever Susan wants between now and then, she'll have." [MSNBC Scoop]
• This report says that network bosses will not get rid of Susan Boyle, despite the fears that she's not coping well with her new-found fame. [Mirror]
• Before he joined the cast of SNL, Andy Samberg worked as a writer for the MTV Movie Awards. So the fact that he's hosting Sunday's show means he's coming full circle, in a way. He says: "It's going to be action packed. There's going to be some surprises - nothing I can divulge, but it will involve celebrities. It's going to be great. There's going to be some pre-taped stuff, some digital shorts-style stuff, and a lot of fun collaborations." [AP]
• The rules for I'm A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here state that there is to be "no bullying, nonconsensual touching, racist or homophobic language, romantic advances (at least ones 'which are not desired or returned'), assault or sex in camp." Can Heidi and Spencer abide? [Gatecrasher]
• Four words: Bridget Jones The Musical. [NY Post]
• Is Disney being cheap with Miley Cyrus? She's getting "only" $5,000 for a week of work to guest star on The Suite Life On Deck. [TMZ]
• Jon and Kate Gosselin spent Memorial Day apart: She took the kids on a boat ride in North Carolina; he was seen in an upstate New York bar with two women. [People]
• Here's video of the Gossip Girl cast talking about various things; Blake Lively has been traveled through Asia on her break from the show and is halfway to getting certified for her scuba license. Penn Badgley went with her and grew a beard, saying, "I looked like a homeless person." [E!]
• The Jonas Brothers do not fight, says Nick Jonas. "We get along very well. I think it's just because we have a different kind of respect for one another, being in the band together. We consider each other as equals. There's no picking on the youngest, it's just not that way." Boo. Zzzzz. [Mirror]
• "Her sunglasses gleam. Her skin is scrubbed, her body pneumatic, her vast white teeth dazzling in the sunshine. Meeting Kruger is, in fact, an almost entirely predictable experience. She is pleasant and pretty and punctual […] She looks extraordinary on screen, but disarmingly normal face-to-face. She is not alienatingly gorgeous […] bland, malleable beauty […]" — from a profile on Diane Kruger. [Guardian]
• Lily Allen will have a cameo appearance in the Aussie soap Neighbors. [Independent]
• Cate Blanchett's Sydney Theatre Company is thankful to Tom Stoppard, whose play Rock and Roll sold the largest number of tickets over the last 12 months. [Telegraph]
• So Mayim Bialik is the first celeb on What Not To Wear, but Stacy London and Clinton Kelly had some restrictions: the woman formerly known as Blossom doesn't wear pants or leather. [People]
• Sherri Shepherd will be taking WWE superstar wrestler Montel Vontavious Porter (MVP) to the prom. No, really. [Page Six]
• Dr. Dre appears in a Dr. Pepper ad, and so do eight seconds of his new, long-awaited album, Detox. [LA Times, Reuters]
• Comedian Zach Galifianakis gets a lot of big-screen time in The Hangover, which could make him into a movie star. [WSJ]
• NBC CEO Jeff Zucker says Seinfeld would not make it on TV today, since shows have less time to mature. [CBS News]
• An Australian woman was sentenced to more than two years in prison today for stalking American Idol's Diana DeGarmo over the Internet. [AP]
• Amy Adams will star in Leap, about a very detail-oriented woman who plans to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Day — "and things sort of go off course with the help of a very handsome, roguish Irishman." Matthew Goode is her co-star. [USA Today]
• Break out the jazz flute: Will Ferrell's in talks to do an Anchorman sequel. [NY Daily News]
• Emily Mortimer has purchased a house in Amagansett, Long Island. [Daily Express]
• Chris Martin has lost his voice and Coldplay had to cancel a show in Saratoga Springs, NY. [The Sun]
• Steve Martin's banjo music CD means the actor is on the U.S. pop album chart for the first time since 1981. [Reuters]
• Lucy Gordon, the Spider-Man 3 actress who was found dead in her paris apartment last week, apparently hanged herself, two days before her 29th birthday. She had just finished filming her role as British model-actress Jane Birkin in the biopic of Serge Gainsbourg when she died. [People]
• Phil Spector will be sentenced today. [UPI]
• The Rockabye Baby! CD has hits by Nirvana, Queen, AC/DC, Bob Marley and Pink Floyd — done in lullaby version. With the lights out, it's less dangerous? [The Sun]
• Blind item: "Which former newscaster was so drunk at a recent fete that she could barely remember her own name, never mind what day it was?" [Gatecrasher]
• "There are people who take the quest for youth too far. Madonna – she's from the show-off brigade. She makes my skin crawl. I call her desperate. I know she's got a wonderful willpower and beauty regime but talk about the ‘me' generation wrapped up in one! I think as you get older, you get the face you deserve. I'm hoping that good habits will get me through." — former Dynasty actress Stephanie Beacham. [Daily Express]
• "I tried really hard not to be who I am. I tried super hard. It was a difficult journey for me to come to terms and be whole and happy with who I am." — Kelly McGillis, who says coming out as a lesbian has not been easy, either. [People]
• "It is sad that Linda Hogan continues to attempt to throw her family under the bus to gain publicity. In terms of the ongoing divorce suit, Hulk Hogan and his legal team would gladly take Linda up on her offer to submit to a legally supervised drug test and certainly Terry would do the same. We believe the results would speak for themselves and reveal that Linda's idea of a good time would definitely not be appropriate for Mass or a family restaurant." — An attorney for Hulk Hogan. [Perez]
• "The Tonight Show means everything to me. I'll have good moments and bad, but I'll keep coming at it. At 4 a.m., I do wake up sometimes and go, 'Oh my God, it's The Tonight Show. But nothing funny comes out of reverence. I'll take care of this franchise. The key is to put aside the fear and say, 'Let's just make some people laugh.'" — Conan O'Brien, who plans to host the show "Until I'm 160, because there will be medical advancements. Fallon will take over for me when I retire at 108 to travel with my family. But it won't be Jimmy, it'll be his brain in a jar." [USA Today]
• "As I look around my friends' Tweets I see banality on all sides. I think if people were able to take these 140 characters (allowed in each post) and develop a poetic Western form - a haiku of our own in which all human existence could be compressed into those 140 characters - that would be a satisfying thing, but that's not what I see when I read them." — Hugh Laurie on Twitter. [MSNBC]
• "Tattoos are sexy. I love my name on a woman; it lets me know I'm serious" — Tyrese Gibson to InStyle. [Page Six]
• "I really want to work with Madonna. It doesn't seem a likely pairing, maybe, but I just think that she is so creative and has such vision." — Adam "Glambert" Lambert. [Mirror]

I so wanted to love this exhibit. I'll admit that bias right from the start. I know first-hand what goes into a shoot, and the crucial animating energy of modeling — the performance that is part mute, still-frame acting, part own-stunt cojones (who do you think climbs South American rock faces without ropes, in couture? Lily Donaldson's double?), part pure, inexplicable presence — and I feel, frankly, that our contributions to the fashion industry and the discourse of images that the industry uses to represent itself to the world are often underreported and undersold. Getting up in the morning and transforming, convincingly, into the apotheosis of a photographer, designer, and stylist's only partly shared creative vision isn't easy.

And just now, after season upon season of most designers choosing to make their models look as inconspicuous, anonymous, and blandly interchangeable as possible on the runway and in advertising, after years in which the model has shrunk before our very eyes, the culture seems ripe for some kind of redress: a resurgence of individuality, a reassertion of personality. A return to the days when the casual fashionista — as opposed to only the dedicated indexer of Internet-derived fashion arcana — could at least tell us all apart. The theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's brand-new and infinitely hyped "Model as Muse" exhibit, with its privileged understanding of the lowly clotheshorse's role in advancing fashion, seemed to promise a move in that direction.

What a terrible disappointment, then, to walk through the Tisch gallery on opening day and find an exhibit that was seemingly laid out with the goal of inspiring the utmost tedium in the viewer. I should have known as soon as I passed that terrible bit of tat with creepy Robo-Dovima in the entryway: the first corridor of photographs is lit with softboxes suspended from the ceiling. Softboxes. Photographic equipment illuminating exemplars of fashion photography! The single-entendre curation never lets up; the viewer is also subjected to such cheesy gestures as stepping literally through a velvet rope in order to enter the 1970s gallery. (Done up, naturally, to look like the basement of Studio 54, complete with unlit cigarettes.) It is difficult to concentrate on the beauty that surrounds when your ears are being assaulted with Alicia Bridges' "I Love The Nightlife" and your eyes with a tawdry-looking spread of yet more blank-faced mannequins, all decked out in truly atrocious wigs by fashion hairstylist Julien d'Ys.

I suspect even the curators, led by Costume Institute head Harold Koda, found their vision a little less than compelling: the exhibit often seems like the product of minds that occasionally wandered. In the wall copy, I spied the former model Anjelica Huston's name mis-spelled with a 'g', and I read twice within 30 seconds the phrase "attenuated limbs." (British model Karen Elson, in the 90s room, has "elegantly attenuated limbs," while American Stephanie Seymour, who closes out the 80s gallery, has "gracefully attenuated limbs.")

This Avedon photo of Lauren Hutton is what every American Apparel ad wants to be. And never will.

The exhibit proceeds dully, chronologically, through roughly the past 60 years of fashion history. The galleries dealing with each decade are separated by lines as clear as they are arbitrary; the Fifties, you see, was the decade of the Continent and Dior and Balenciaga, but then once the clock struck 12:01 on January 1, 1960, nobody made couture anymore, and Rudi Gernreich immediately put the obliging Peggy Moffitt in his monokini. Cue mod! (Cue the Who! On repeat!)

Veruschka, shot here for the August, 1968, issue of French Vogue by her then-lover, Franco Rubartelli, played a role in her shoots that today would be highly unusual for a model. She had significant input into, or sometimes even sole control, of the styling, the makeup, and the hair, and the images produced were generally collaborations between herself and the photographer.

It's hard to screw up showing quality fashion photography, framed on a wall. (Even the various viewer-insulting "contextual" gestures, like blaring pop music and the intrusive graffiti in the 90s room — perpetrated by hairdresser d'Ys, at Anna Wintour's instruction, which goes to show just how much control the noted museum patron has over the arts on display — do not entirely manage to quash the timeless beauty of, for example, Irving Penn's June 1950 Vogue cover shot of Jean Patchett. The presentation of the artifacts on the walls is fine. What I am still unclear about is the value of seeing the mannequin'd tableaux-morts featuring the actual designer clothes; if the point of this show is to celebrate models and their animating contributions to fashion and fashion photography, then, after seeing Veruschka in Yves Saint Laurent's safari collection, or Bert Stern's astonishing studio shot of Twiggy in the same designer's beaded midriff-dress, what end is served by seeing these same garments presented in dim exhibition suites, too far away to make out any detail of stitching or cut, on lifeless dummies that bear no resemblance to the women who once illuminated their beauty as articles of clothing? The safari dress as it hangs in the show isn't even styled properly. It lacks, in addition to Veruschka's firepower, its ring belt.

Even back in 1967, sample shoes didn't fit. Twiggy poses here, on her first trip to the U.S., for Vogue photographer Bert Stern.

If "Model as Muse" serves any useful purpose, it is to remind the viewer of fashion's headwaters, and of just how derivative fashion photography has become. In the first hall of the exhibit is Richard Avedon's iconic image of Sunny Harnett at the roulette table; in the last, is Stephen Meisel's 1998 version, with Carolyn Murphy. The elements are so much the same — blonde, cream dress, tuxedo'd gent, roulette — that the latter scrambles to rise to meet the criteria of "homage."

Sunny Harnett by Richard Avedon, for U.S. Harper's Bazaar, September, 1954.

In the 1960s suite, somewhere under the blaring of "My Generation" and the projected Qui Etes-Vous, Polly Magoo clip on repeat that overwhelms the room, there's a single page from the September, 1965 Harper's Bazaar.

Jean Shrimpton, by Richard Avedon.

It served to remind me of nothing so much as this Patrick Demarchelier image from last September's Vogue.

Catherine McNeil, by Patrick Demarchelier.

A picture of Lisa Taylor wearing Calvin Klein, by Helmut Newton for the May, 1975 issue of Vogue, hangs in the 1970s hall, near some mealy wall copy about 1970s gender roles. (A subject which any viewer would learn more about simply by pondering the viewer-viewed dynamic here between the languid, powerful-looking Taylor and the foregrounded male model, whose ass looks so unusually objectified.)

Lisa Taylor, by Helmut Newton.

Of course, as commenter LittleNemo pointed out last year when I posted a spread, Glen Luchford's September, 2008, Harper's Bazaar photo of Freja Beha Erichsen owes a debt to Newton.

Freja Beha Erichsen, by Glen Luchford.

This Demarchelier and the Luchford were not in the Met's show — the post-grunge years seem to be a curatorial afterthought, as they are represented in main by two outfits from a recent Louis Vuitton collection by principal exhibit sponsor Marc Jacobs and a bunch of pictures of Gisele Bundchen. But, whether all these archetypal images' latter-day derivations are physically present or not, you can only wander through these corridors for a matter of seconds before phrases like "anxiety of influence" come irrepressibly to mind.

It is, I am sure, not the reaction Koda, Wintour, Jacobs, and d'Ys would want. But these eminent lightweights, with their spraycans, their predilection for references to fictional movies about the industry, their ugly wigs and their uglier Nirvana soundtrack, their mis-spellings and their children's book fashion history — not to mention their craven elision of designer Azzedine Alaïa — did more than enough to earn it.

Perhaps someday a museum will be equal to mounting an intelligent investigation of the changing roles of fashion models, and fashion photography's relationship to the wider culture — its uneasily shifting placement on the continuum between high art and low commerce, between editorial content in magazines and clothes and makeup as we do them in everyday life. Perhaps someday, we'll see the model as muse. But that museum is not the Met, and that exhibition is not yet come.

The Model As Muse [Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Related: Alaïa Pulls His Dresses From The Met Gala [On The Runway]
Model As Veteran [NY Times]

At the time Cobain died, he was arguably one of the most famous people on the planet; in the weeks following his death, tribute t-shirts popped up all around my middle school, my classmates went into mourning, and photocopies of his suicide note were sent around like priceless documents to be cherished and wept over.

Yet 15 years later, one wonders what Cobain's legacy is; the 7th graders I worked with during my AmeriCorps term two years ago didn't even know who he was (that was the moment I realized how old I was) and preferred to listen to AC/DC and Green Day, with a touch of Pete Wentz thrown in. Nirvana's music is still played on modern rock stations, though it's hard to say if kids listen to it with the same reverence we did, or if they hear it as a relic, a song that is "so 90's," or some such. As for Dave Grohl, they immediately recognized him from the Foo Fighters, and were sort of "Oh, he played the drums? Why didn't he sing?" about his time in Nirvana.

It's strange to think that Nirvana might become (or, perhaps, has already become) one of those bands that is talked about more than listened to: I knew people in college who had Jim Morrison posters on their walls ("he's like, such a poet") but never listened to The Doors; it was more about the image, the encapsulation of a time period, that Morrison provided, rather than the music itself. One wonders if Cobain's iconic image will serve the same purpose. Or, perhaps, Nirvana's music will be there for those who seek it out, for the "real" fans, who appreciate Cobain for his songwriting as much as for his pop culture legacy. And that, perhaps, is the most hopeful scenario.

In any case, as a small tribute, here is one of my favorites: