Vezzoli could not have asked for better timing. The week before his piece premiered, an unrelated essay on movie stars by David Denby appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Celebrities, Denby elaborates, are omnipresent in our lives, caught in their sunniest as well as their most dismal moments. They are, he points out, “just like US” as US magazine would have us believe in its feature of that title, in which celebs are pictured grocery shopping, getting manicures, and engaging in other quotidian banalities. “The premise behind it is that every part of a star’s existence belongs to the media—and to the public,” Denby writes. Who are celebrities? They are exactly what Blanchett’s character says—that is, whatever we need them to be at any given moment. Perhaps, watching ourselves watching them, we further identify with them.

Ostensibly, Vezzoli has hijacked Pirandello’s play to illustrate the same point. His actors—barely costumed, barely staged, barely acting—are reduced to their naked essential selves, which is to say to their empty celebrity, to the blank-screen cipher at the core of their identity. And while the audience likely never learns the names of the characters (Ponza, Laudisi, and Sirelli), the names of the actors who play them are on the tips of every tongue.

Need further evidence of Vezzoli’s reductio ad absurdum of celebrity culture? A heavily made-up, sour-faced Anita Ekberg, known to the world as the buxom blonde starlet who cavorts in the Fontana di Trevi in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (itself a comment on celebrity), also played a central part in the piece, as an audience member (Get it?). She was perched under harsh spotlight that only accentuated the creases around her eyelined eyes on Salvador Dali’s Mae West lips sofa (another ode to celebrity), a glass of white wine next to her. And she clearly wasn’t enjoying the show, occasionally complaining as she was to an acquaintance and seeming to nod off. But was that, er, part of the show? Was she just playing her part? Or was she really bored? Did it matter?

The art world is full of bold-faced names these days—this is the condition that makes Vezzoli's art possible, if not good or relevant. (Not on hand for Right You Are were Kanye West, Christina Ricci, Ellen DeGeneres, Linda Evangelista, Marc Jacobs, Cindy Crawford, Ryan Seacrest, Serena Williams, Anjelica Huston, Naomi Campbell, Pharrell Williams, Rachel Zoe, and Tom Ford, but they did show up the next day at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for the Louis Vuitton Gala celebrating Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's exhibition there.) But here Vezzoli takes this point one step further, showing that the art world itself is governed by the same cult of celebrity as the wider culture. After all, the bored spectator, armed with binoculars, could barely help but let his mind and eyes wander—from the stage to the VIP audience members, privileged enough to be seated on the rotunda floor, who were lit by the stage: Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramovic, Marian Goodman, curator Germano Celant, curator Ali Subotnik, Gagosian director Ealan Wingate, and other art world nobility. It was practically a civic event. All the local lords were present.

What the VIPs might not have realized was that below the performance stage, in the Guggenheim theater, was the overflow of plebians, those unable to find a spot along the ramps. Two giant screens filled the stage, each divided into four components, broadcasting the actors reading their parts, or, when one of them was off stage, Anita Ekberg or a wider shot of the rotunda. Before the screens sat Cate Blanchett on an ottoman, her back to the theater audience, reacting with silent gestures to all those lines that mused on her character, and prepping herself for her dramatic entry. What to make of this play within a play? Well, cynics might suggest that an 8-channel Vezzoli video will soon be available through Gagosian Gallery, which helped to produce the event.

Right You Are puts the lie to the claim that the art world is something elite, something apart. Art purports to be culture that rises above the commonplace—culture, in today’s parlance, not defined by celebrity. But while the art of today may start at the heights, it consistently moves toward the base bottom, just as Blanchett, upon leaving the theater, descended the Guggenheim spiral. And when she got to the bottom and declared, “I am whoever you want me to be,” no doubt some in the audience heard an unlikely echo of the anything-goes claims of today’s hyper-eclectic art world, where art is whatever you, or rather the art-world tastemakers sitting on the rotunda floor, want it to be.