The release last week of the movie Art School Confidential confirmed one thing: It's hard work mocking something that already parodies itself.

On the side of truth and beauty in the film is Jerome, the naif who wants to find a muse and make portraits of her naked, Ă  la Picasso. Yawn. On the other side are psycho cases, criers, suck-ups, and windbags, but at least they provide fodder for comedy.

Daniel Clowes first created the story as a comic based on his own experiences at art school. His view of the art world is flamingly cynical—which is intensified by the fact that galleries, museums, and critics routinely ignore cartoonists—to the point that the likable self-doubt typically woven into his stories in this case is swallowed up in a righteous blaze of hostility. Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff get in a few good laughs first, but their poorly drawn grotesque turns on them in the end.

For these and other reasons, I don't want to sympathize with the peevish adolescent idea that art is full of crooks. But this trope refuses to die. It's even a profitable subject for a long line of artists, the latest of whom I notice is profiled on the front of the New York Times arts section right as the movie is coming out.

The May 1 story, "Chinese Artist Zhou Tiehai Proves the Emperor Is Naked," is framed like a rags-to-riches drama that begins with a frustrated nobody passed over by Western critics and collectors who are exalting second-rate Chinese artists, and ends with our hero choking back tears at a reception in his honor hosted by Western critics and collectors who are exalting second-rate Chinese artists.

What a performance. While Zhou's works, mostly paintings developed from borrowed imagery on Photoshop and executed by assistants, are his ostensible products, his real object is his career, now perfectly canonized by the New York Times. A photograph from the artist's studio shows him small and in the background, talking to someone, as one of his anonymous assistants labors with a brush in the foreground. It reminds me of the title of his first solo show in New York, in 2001, which the NYT didn't mention (but which Holland Cotter reviewed favorably at the time), called "The Artist Isn't Here," featuring copies by his assistants of altered masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy.

Before his success, Zhou was a performance artist, and this is just another fine turn—the marketing whiz who satirizes marketing—that adds an intercultural variable to years of aggregated experiments by other artists on appropriation and co-optation. Its all-too-familiar logic is that certain forms of resistance are the fastest routes to assimilation.

Reminders that the art world, like any media empire, has an insensate medulla—its market—are enough to make a girl critic long for a nap, or a shower, or a drink. Whatever hypocrisies abound, Clowes is neither their first nor most qualified chronicler. Nothing is outside of contemporary art; not even its own trash.

jgraves@thestranger.com