It’s a much hackneyed cliché that in Warhol’s world everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. What Warhol couldn’t have imagined that back in the 80s/70s was the power of the internet and its ability to create an endless pool of celebrity wannabes. Cory Kennedy, internet it girl and LA club urchin is currently in the midst of hers. The 17 year-old was first discovered in the summer of 2005 when she met party photographer Mark Hunter (aka the Cobrasnake) when he took pictures of her at a Blood Brothers concert in Los Angeles. They exchanged numbers and she began working for the 20 year-old as an intern.
While working as a photographic assistant, Kennedy wound up dating Hunter (now 22) and becoming his muse. Before long, the internet was riddled with pictures of Kennedy posing, scowling, eating, dancing, shopping, looking grown up, smoking a cigarette, holding a beer, all shot through the love struck eyes of a man who couldn’t stop looking at her.
Hunter noticed that traffic would skyrocket anytime pictures of her were posted on the site under the intentionally ambiguous title ‘JFK Cory Kennedy’. Before long people-watchers were speculating on her provenance (junkie? Poor little rich girl?). Fashion bloggers were critiquing her signature style of dishevelled hair combined with high fashion logos, frumpy vintage and graphic logo T-shirts, giving the overall effect of a high-fashion orphan girl.
Opinion on Kennedy ranges from sublime idolatry to impassioned character assassination. Her appeal according to Scott Jarrett from nylon is the ‘ingredient x’ that she has where she is ‘almost oblivious to the camera’. She has generated over three hundred pages of forum comments on the Netherlands elle girl website. New York scandal site gawker .com describes her as ‘a malnourished teenager who dresses like she raided her retarded grandma’s basement and does nothing with her wasted life but pose for pictures on a Web site and hang out and live off her parents while waiting to get famous for some as-yet-unrevealed talent.’
She had designers queuing up wanting her to wear their clothes, club owners offering her money to appear in their clubs (despite only being fifteen years old), while she was partying with the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.
The most incredible part of all this is that occurred without her parent’s knowledge. She kept telling her mother Jinx, ‘Mum you don’t know how big I’m getting. I’m famous’. It wasn’t until she was featured in the myspace- music issue of Nylon in June last year that her parents became aware of the degree of her ubiquity.
After this realisation her parents attempted to pull Cory back from the current that was dragging her into the underbelly of LA nightlife, putting her into a residential, therapeutic placement for kids with various learning and behavioural difficulties. However the success of this has been questionable with the appearance of a somewhat uncomfortable video on youtube. Verging on kiddie porn it depicts Cory massaging lotion into her legs with the camera remaining focused around her crotch for the entire one and a half minutes.
Edie Sedgewick was the queen of Warhol’s factory, where the art, club and hipster scenes converged. Kennedy seems set to be the current incarnation of Sedgewick for the internet age. Let’s hope they don’t suffer the same fate.