LA CIENEGA AREA

Just when you thought that the art world had plumbed the depths of cynical opportunism, of propagating “art for profit’s sake,” along comes Mark Kostabi to give new meaning to the word mercenary. Born in Whittier, the 27-year-old “painter” is the latest art star to roll off New York’s hype assembly line, appropriating and exploiting the cliched fodder of a media-glutted society to create empty paeans to superficiality and consumer gullibility.

Neither Kostabi’s strategy nor his aesthetic is anything new. The former is updated Warhol, the latter is Times Literary Supplement graphics blown up to billboard proportions. Kostabi seems to be saying that even illustration is marketable provided one meets the exigencies of current collectibility: namely scale and a self-aware historical hipness. Thus “The Last Supper,” transforms Leonardo’s masterpiece into a mural-size public relations board meeting, where faceless automatons with toilet bowl or dunce heads are surrounded by TV monitors, calculators and cash registers. Christ is noticeable for his absence, his place waiting to be filled for the next 15 minutes by the latest simulation of the talking (or painting?) head.

While these gray, everyman figures represent Kostabi’s “signature,” they are used in largely banal and meaningless contexts. Soaked in streamlined chiaroscuro, they remind us of design school Surrealism, the dream imagery of Ernst or Arp stripped of its psychological overtones. This work celebrates the notion of artist as entrepreneur. Because its bottom line is sales, it is the perfect art for the yuppie mentality of the ‘80s. The only viable antidote is to ignore it and leave it to its inevitable resting place in the garbage bin of worthless product. (Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to May 30.)