For "Most Wanted," a new show that is slated to open at White Cube in London next week, painter Richard Phillips — acting as the official pied piper of tween celebutantes — has lured the A-list of the precociously sultry set into the gallery and trapped them there, where they toothily smile out at star-struck passersby. OK, that's not exactly what he's done. Actually, in the show, which will run through March 5, Phillips is displaying ten large-scale oil paintings of Taylor Swift, Zac Efron, Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, Justin Timberlake, Miley Cyrus, Robert Pattinson, Chace Crawford, Taylor Momsen, and (one of these things is not like the other one) Leonardo DiCaprio. Each member of this horde of wisdom-toothless white folk is depicted in Technicolor, against a backdrop festooned with luxury corporate logos, and each star is painted with Richard Bernstein-ian halos hovering around their heads. Riffing on those addictive red-carpet photos that we all scroll through in an US Weekly-induced trance, these lurid works look like something produced by a teenybopper who’s been boning up on his/her Alex Katz. ARTINFO corresponded with the artist, who was in London to install the new show.

Your new work seems to address the ways in which young, sexy celebrities have become commodities — luxury products along the lines of those things sold by the companies featured in your backdrops. But this idea of selling youth, selling celebrity (and selling artistic reproductions of both) isn't really new or shocking at this point. What is different about how you tackle these issues, versus your Pop predecessors, except in the fact that you're depicting new celebrities?

In a way these paintings are no different from monochrome paintings one might find on view at a Modern art institution except that they have acknowledged what must be present for their own survival and preservation. The logos have come off the step-and-repeats at the museum's gala entrance and the celebrities are now joined with them to manifest this new economic realism in painting. The young stars within this series define our present condition of the inescapable and total subordination to this logic on every level of culture. Rather that being engaged in idolatry or showing how stars are "just like US" or even showing how artists can be just like stars, the "Most Wanted" paintings were synthesized from the aggregated images of the red carpet context to portray entertainers giving their carefully rehearsed expressions precisely for indiscriminate commercial endorsement. Art institutions are not exempt from falling all over themselves to beg for funding by either aligning themselves with these brands or having any one of these young stars appear at their event to gain "relevance" in a popular media which ultimately has a direct bearing on their budgets and attendance. The fact that institutions such as Guggenheim and MoMA have recognized and responded to this condition with their Armani and their Tim Burton shows respectively points to the eradication of the separation between art production and celebrity/media culture that the 50-year-old inception of Pop art failed to address.

Your work appeared on "Gossip Girl," and now the "Most Wanted" series includes images of actors from the show. What's the significance of this intertextuality, this cultural loop that you've inserted yourself into?

For "Gossip Girl," Art Production Fund initially approached me about contributing a painting because they had been asked by the production designers of the show to curate the art on set. My painting "Spectrum" from 1999 was chosen to be hung over the staircase in the "Van der Woodsen loft," which is one of the main sets for the show. When I went to check out the installation and observe scenes they were shooting I was very impressed by the degree to which the show's producers, directors, and production designers were aware of their involvement in a first-order projection of popular art as an integrated synthesis of the social cues embedded in fashion, cinema, art, and tabloid media compared to the 50-year-old idea of simply holding a mirror to popular culture and reproducing its image. The evolutionary difference is articulated in script changes based on current news items in the NY Post, ensemble acting, product endorsements, and the cameos from all sectors of culture that serve the purpose of changing people's perception of how they could imagine themselves in a completely immersive drama loop of unending life/commerce luxury/degradation patterns (to borrow from Jeff Koons). As I was leaving the set I jokingly asked about my cameo, and they said casting would call me the following week. And so it was that I appeared on the episode "Serena Also Rises"!