Elizabeth Peyton, Kurt (1995) © Elizabeth Peyton/ courtesy New Museum

The forty-three-year-old artist Elizabeth Peyton, now the subject of Live Forever, a mid-career retrospective at The New Museum, gained notoriety for her portraits of friends, fellow artists, movie stars, and rock musicians. Her paintings are small—about the scale of a coffee table book. They’re scrubby; Peyton uses more turp than oil, working on a garish and oddly dirtied palette. The brushwork is cursory, and the compositions—well, what compositions? Pictorial invention consists of replicating snapshot likenesses. Peyton primes each canvas with broad swipes of gesso applied with a palette knife. Surface physicality is guaranteed, not achieved. This is a lazy painter.

Peyton’s cast of celebrities—Matthew Barney and Georgia O’Keeffe, no less than Johnny Depp and Leonardo di Caprio— accounts for a degree of accessibility, but the work comments on very little. The insights of an Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein look positively Tocquevillian in comparison. Instead, Peyton blankets her subjects in soppy adolescent longing. A brittle veneer of hipster pretension prevents honest emotion from emerging. The rock star marginalia in a high school student’s notebook may be truer and better crafted.

Peyton doesn’t embody teendom—she paints about it. Similarly, the dashed-off brush-handling looks like it should be painting. Artifice is Peyton’s all. Given her non-existent drawing skills—this is an artist who can’t trace—she’s yet to earn the right to attempt