Let us compare and contrast.¹ Karen Kilimnik's succinctly named mixed-media 'scatter piece' Drugs, appears to be no more nor less than its title indicates: a studiedly artless arrangement of mounds of dubious looking pills, sachets and assorted drug paraphernalia (a stray spoon, a cigarette lighter, an empty hypodermic syringe) accompanied by a party-sized mirror bearing a generous heap of white powder and a razor blade.

The not-quite-so-succinctly titled installation Fountain of Youth (Cleanliness is next to Godliness) is a more obviously artful display. It features an assortment of soaps and beauty products arrayed around a makeshift plastic fountain, garnished by a few plants in tinfoil pots and a variety of crudely decorative fabric cut-outs. Drugs was made in 1991 and Fountain of Youth a year later. One work suggests the prospect of a fast life and an early grave, while the other holds the promise of a pampered life and eternal youth. The choice would seem to be between the beauty of narcotics and the narcotic of beauty. But of course this is not a real choice, any more than a contrast between the drug business and the cosmetics industry is a genuine contrast. The fact of the matter is that most of the cast of characters who flit in and out of the works of Karen Kilimnik - the hard-living supermodels and fashion queens, the larger-than-life TV personalities and big-screen heart-throbs, the elegantly wasted rock stars - prefer to choose both: badness and beauty, high-living and everlasting life. In Kilimnik's world the archetypal bad girl (or bad boy, for that matter) and the goody-two-shoes - those opposing stereotypes whose bedroom dressing-tables might