Last Sunday, Sharon Stone appeared at the 17th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation's Oscar party, giving a tour de force performance in the role of her own nipples.

Whether we rave or revile, we must admit that the ultimate effect of so much surgery is strangely modest. Ms. Stone is self contained in her own discrete envelope, rendering discretion moot.  Her body can no more be naked than can a well designed automobile's. Having transformed herself into a garment, anything she wears is redundant. The next logical aesthetic step would be for her to eliminate clothing entirely, merely choosing accessories to complement the apparel she's created out of her own skin: she's well on the way.  Like successful architecture, she requires no wardrobe, only the right setting.  

Her acting career is now as irrelevant as her gowns. Hers is now a recursive - and therefore perfect - celebrity.  She's famous for being famous. Having become her own trousseau, she invites us to witness a perpetual wedding whereby she marries herself. Self referential, self contained, and hermetic despite its ubiquity, her happy couple has vanished into her, leaving behind only an icon for the faithful. She is a bookmark that implies the existence of some Platonic ideal of a text that need not be written or read. We can't help but watch her as we stand at the same window through which her architectonics has defenestrated itself.  Hers is a strategic death in life, and the dead Diva is ideal:  she can never disappoint us by rashly doing something new.

She is become a Goddess, and the Temple of Stone is anywhere there is a camera. Love or loathe her, we all nonetheless worship her through our awareness of her.  She is the secular equivalent of religious imperialism, and has constructed her church out of our consciousness.