Vanity Fair + LACMA = Dull*

Times art critic Christopher Knight is taking the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to task for its newest exhibit -- a collection of Vanity Fair magazine portraits, including this photo,  above, of Hilary Swank. (*Update: We goofed. An earlier version of this post said the above photo was of Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson.)

Says Knight:

"Vanity Fair Portraits" is a vanity exhibition, plain and simple. And that's precisely what our historic moment needs least right now, especially from a major civic art museum. .... Conceived by the magazine's editor, Graydon Carter, it was co-curated by the publication's editor of creative development -- a masthead title that accrues new meaning in this disappointing context. Contributing editor and columnist Christopher Hitchens, a historian and political polemicist unknown as a photographic scholar before now, wrote the chatty lead essay, mostly a chronicle of his employer's brilliance. The entire undertaking is a sort of sequel to "Vanity Fair's Hollywood," a coffee-table tome published with much the same cast of characters (and many of the same pictures) in 2000. Apparently a decent interval has passed.

Read the rest of Knight's piece here .

Photo: Hilary Swank by Norman Jean Roy