Scout Willis Considers Miley and Rihanna 'Performance Artists'

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The tabloids are right! Celebs really are just like us—at least when it comes to stalking their kids online. “My dad [Bruce Willis] doesn’t have any social media presence, and my mom [Demi Moore] doesn’t any more, either,” Scout Willis said this weekend at Art Basel. “But they’ve figured out how to follow me anyway. They know what I’m doing,” she confirms, referring to her topless #FreeTheNipple photos on Twitter. “Believe me,” she said with a laugh, “they know!”
Okay. But what do they think? “They’re totally behind me,” she said. “They support me 100% in whatever I do, which is such a gift. But I’d be lying if I said they didn’t question my methods sometimes.”
23-year-old Willis was visiting the week long art festival to help Glenn O’Brien host his famous TV Party, a annual ritual that began a decade before she was even born. “When he asked me to come, I didn’t really know what ‘TV Party’ meant,” she admitted, “so I started researching it. And the more I discovered, how Debbie Harry and The Ramones were part of it, but so were modern artists and random people off the street, the more I loved it. It was an honor to be part of something so historical and also so punk rock—but still something so rooted in art.”
Willis also considers megacelebrity to be a kind of art, especially when it defies social norms. “I grew up in the [Hollywood] culture, and it’s always been weird. But lately, celebrity has gotten pushed to a place of such absurdity because of the way we can consume images 24/7. So the cool thing is that now it’s become a kind of performance art, where certain celebrities—especially young women—are taking ownership of the invasiveness that comes with fame, and they’re turning it on its head. Rihanna’s a good example. She’s like, 'I’m gonna do whatever I want,' and that’s cool. People like her, and like Miley Cyrus, they’ve been told they have to play into this role of being a ‘glamorous’ young woman, and they get shit on with this madonna-whore complex. And if they refuse to play the game—be a perfect, prim, good girl and have your shit together and wear what your stylist tells you—then you’re labeled crazy, like Miley.”
“So this reaction against looking perfect, wearing perfect runway looks on the red carpet—there’s obviously a hunger to push against that ideal in a public, visual way. And so Miley and Rihanna have become performance artists, they’ve become surrealist artists, they’ve taken ownership of their own image back. In a much smaller way, I guess, that’s what happened with me and #FreeTheNipple. I made my Instagram public because I wanted to have a little ownership of my public image. Other people had been writing about me and my family for my whole life. And the stories out there—they didn’t sound like me. That moment on social media was the first time I ever made myself public about something I believed in. And I’m really impressed by celebrities like Rihanna and Miley because they’re doing that on a much bigger scale.”
Someone else who impresses Willis: Kim Kardashian. “I admire her a lot,” Willis said earnestly. “Not necessarily from an art perspective, but definitely as a businesswoman. I really do. To parlay being friends with Paris Hilton into making every single member of her family individually famous for basically nothing—you can’t knock that hustle even if you want to.”