NEW YORK— On Saturday night the art world gathered to watch itself watching a performance at the Guggenheim Museum. There were several indications that some such “meta,” as they say, thing was afoot as the audience filed in for the performance of Francesco Vezzoli’s restaging of Luigi Pirandello’s 1917 play Right You Are (If You Think You Are). There was the half-hour-long wait outside, complete with Performa director RoseLee Goldberg swanning by and assuring some folks in line not to worry if they were directed to a second-class standing position high up in the spiral ramp—“that’s where Cate Blanchett will be!”; the color-coded tickets indicating seating, or, in most cases, standing, assignments (for various levels of the ramp, or for the rotunda floor, where the fancier folk occupied chairs); the binoculars handed to those filing up the spiral, presumably for use to zoom in on the aforementioned fanciness below; the mirrored front and back covers of the program notes—you saw your own mug when you opened it, and when you’d finished it.

In the center of the rotunda was a circular stage just large enough to accommodate a ring of eight chairs and corresponding musical stands, each containing a script. It looked as though we were waiting for an orchestral octet to arrive. Instead, there were Natalie Portman (wearing a Sacco and Vanzetti mustache), Peter Sarsgaard, Ellen Burstyn, and several other familiar faces of screen and stage. But of course the audience knew this; their names had been widely advertised. At last auteur Vezzoli’s voice announced the play’s opening: “Ladies and Gentleman, welcome to the Guggenheim Museum for the first act of…” And then, sitting thus, they read the play. No sets, scant costuming. But wait—

Pirandello’s play is about nosy neighbors encountering an epistemological impasse. Signor Ponza, his wife, and his mother-in-law are newly arrived in a provincial Italian town and cause a stir with their peculiar living arrangement and lack of neighborly etiquette. Their erratic behavior becomes an obsession for the Ponzas’ prying neighbors, but Ponza and his mother-in-law, in their attempts to explain themselves, instead offer differing accounts of the family’s misfortune, which leaves the others to speculate on which of the two has told the truth and which one is insane. In the end Signora Ponza, the wife and daughter whose mysterious identity is at the heart of the conflict, finally appears, only to tell the imploring neighbors that she is both who her husband says she is and who her mother says. For Signora Ponza, this is no contradiction—she is, she boldly declares, whoever you want her to be.

The play is a comedy with serious intent, a send-up of small-town nosiness that points to the impossibility of discovering the objective truth about other people. But the audience at the Guggenheim could hardly know this. By the time the combined tediousness of the reading (which was not only barely acted but, given the poor acoustics in the Guggenheim, almost impossible to follow) and the voyeuristic peeking through the binocs had hit a fever pitch—Was Salman Rushdie sleeping? Did Jerry Saltz look bored? If I move to the other side will I get a better look at David Byrne? Why did Klaus Biesenbach leave his seat? Isn’t that him right behind me? Weird!—finally, toward the end of the third and final act, amid sounds of thunderous bass and bursts of strobe light hitting the upper reaches of the parapet walls, there was Cate Blanchett, playing Signora Ponza, sauntering down the spiral ramp from the very top, decked out in funereal Galliano-for-Dior-designed garb. Walking backward ahead of her was a fellow with a large spotlight, and two others—fake paparazzi—snapping pics. (A scenario strangely recapitulated in reality the next day when paparazzi photographs taken earlier, showing Blanchett leaving her hotel for Vezzoli’s performance, appeared on a web site.) She arrived in the center of the circular stage, amid the other celebs, to utter the play’s climactic lines: “I am whoever you want me to be.”

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.

Which is one way of saying that when an artwork sucks—and let us be clear, Vezzoli’s restaging of Pirandello was about as mind-numbing an hour and a half as you are ever likely to see—it’s your fault.

Well, not entirely. Vezzoli may hide behind the quote from Pirandello about the premiere of Right You Are that appeared in the brochure: “It has truly been a great success. Not for the applause. But for the astonishment, the bafflement, the exasperation, and the dismay I caused the audience. You don’t know how much I enjoyed it.” But bad art begins with an artist, and Vezzoli comes out of this embarrassing affair looking no better than the rest of us who sat through the event, shaking our heads at its awfulness, but knowing that at the end we’d still offer polite applause.

And when the final lines were spoken, that’s exactly what we did. In a profile of Vezzoli that ran last week, New York magazine dubbed him an artist who “has his celebrity cake and eats it, too.” “I am often accused of wanting it both ways, to share in the celebrity of my actors, but at the same time, I crave for a sort of intellectual acceptance,” the magazine quotes him saying. In short, there was no cake. We ate it. It was terrible.

Editor's Note: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the performance was produced by Gagosian Gallery; in fact, it was commissioned by PERFORMA and produced in collaboration with Gagosian and the Guggenheim.