Surface tensions ... visitors at the Vanity Fair Portraits exhibition. Photograph: Cate Gillon/Getty
Vanity Fair means glamour, intelligence and sophistication. It's a magazine for grown-ups, dedicated to grown-up pleasures. The best writers and photographers call it home. In its pages you're as likely to read an interview with Paul Wolfowitz or Philip Roth as you are Scarlett Johansson or Tom Cruise. It might carry red-carpet pictures of the latest stars, but one thing's for sure - it's no Heat magazine.
Or is it? You can dress celeb-worship up any way you like, but celeb-worship it remains. No matter that the paparazzi-fodder in question are more likely to be seen in Chelsea (that's Manhattan) than Cheshire. At least Heat is honest. After visiting the Vanity Fair show at the National Portrait Gallery in London this week I couldn't help feeling that something really superficial was being dressed up as something profound.
To be fair, my beef isn't with the first section of the exhibition, which covers images from the magazine's original incarnation, from 1913 to when it folded in 1936. There's a more serious bent to these photographs. They're more direct and don't shy away from exploring the less pleasant side of human nature. Virginia Woolf looks, well, depressed; Gloria Swanson seems frightened, defensive - perhaps she's just realised that fame ain't all it's cracked up to be.
No, it's the magazine's efforts from 1983 onwards that left me cold. It may have been the era of greed, but still, what a charmless parade of playboys, sirens and power brokers. And for some reason, Vanity Fair seems to be permanently stuck in that decade. The photographs are glossy but skin-deep. The production values are high but there's precious little humanity. Unless pouting counts as humanity, since there's a great deal of pouting.
The magazine's called Vanity Fair, so you could argue it's entitled to be a little frivolous. A little, but not overwhelmingly. Annie Leibovitz is the main culprit. She's a Vanity Fair stalwart and there are 22 of her pictures in the exhibition. She's famous for her Hollywood gatefold covers, scroll-like compositions that have showcased the bright young things of film each year since 1995. These are the glossiest, poutiest, and emptiest of them all. They're beautiful to look at, I suppose - nicely arranged, nice looking people, nice, rich colours - but all they say is: surface is what counts. Shouldn't this aesthetic have gone out the window with Gordon Gekko? OK, so there's a smattering of more thoughtful portraits. But for every Nan Goldin there's a Leibovitz (actually the Leibovitzes massively outnumber the Goldins, so there you go).
And then there's my favourite: what might qualify as the least politically correct photograph in recent history. Taken by the Queen's cousin, Lord Snowdon, it shows fellow aristocrat Lord Glenconner, the man who bought Mustique, being shaded with a parasol by "attendants" - black children dressed in bizarre 1,001 nights of Arabia costumes. It's wrong on so many levels. How on Earth did they get away with it? And are we really supposed to admire it?
What Vanity Fair Portraits tells me is that here is just another magazine about wealth, fame and impossible bodies. And as if we don't get enough of that already, it's the subject of a major national exhibition. See you next year at the Heat retrospective?
