Artists that lack imagination or are quite frankly, "not very good with their hands" have an easy option out. They can dress strangely and stare blatantly into a camera. If the image is strange enough, someone will write about it and before they know it, they are on a quick route to artworld fame. Glossy art magazines love this kind of artist as the photographic material is easy to reproduce and can be sent by post. No need to visit a gallery and squeeze a huge installation into one small photographic frame and no hopelessly blurred video stills.
Thanks to the popularity of performance art these overnight artists are cashing in on our unquenchable thirst for disturbing, amusing, perverse images of actual people doing weird things. It is an extension of the docu-drama phenomenon that has conquered British television. The audience gets to see real people acting out their fantasies. There is a lot of gender-bending and hinting at illicit activities behind closed doors. 
        In Ernesto Pujol's case, he lived in a monastery for four years before hitting on the idea of dressing up as a nun for the camera. His "performance" is thus given more credence by the fact he actually knew what being virginal is all about. However in the end, we are just confronted with a man in a nun's habit - a standard fancy dress costume for parties worldwide, a Monty Python gag. In other shots we are shown Pujol in a dark brown nun's habit writhing on the floor, Saint Theresa style. He calls them "performative photographs" and tried to elevate them to a higher art form when feeding them into a computer and producing digital prints, (which anyone can do on their own Hewlett Packard at home). Part of being a Narcissist is the ability to justify your self-portraits with a load of hackneyed theorizing. Example : "Following the classic feminist position that the personal is political, and that sentimentality and nostalgia can be subversive because they are underestimated and ultimately dismissed by patriarchy as the language of the weak much of my past work has made use of personal memory as the vehicle through which to establish a social critique." Its almost painful to read. 
 

It is remarkable how many of these "I am the work of art" types are male, considering women are always seen as
the vainer sex. The Italian diva (and aren't Italian men the vainest beings alive?) Alberto Sorbelli takes photos of himself in various roles, "The Secretary", "The Prostitute" and sometimes just stands in front of the lens naked and tries to look gorgeous in soft focus. Of course Sorbelli is not even the photographer, just the object photographed - so we have to presume his creative role takes place somewhere in the conception of the pose. There is no startling experimentation with the photographic medium, these are just snapshots. If the world adores Super Models in fashion magazines, why not artists in art magazines?, I suspect is part of their reckoning. Although the typical Narcissist takes pains to produce flattering images of themselves, sadly they do not always have the pleasant physical attributes of super models.
 

Artists who portray themselves in paint, wood, bronze, clay,  etc.  interact with a medium they need to manipulate in order to create the image - there is a vast difference between this process and that which the Narcissists employ. They only have to thumb through the yellow pages to get a photographer.
The Narcissists are not to be confused with artists like Shirin Neshat, the Iranian woman who uses her identity to speak for the veiled women of her country, whom she also includes in her work. Neither would we list Cindy Sherman who has a far wider subject index than her own frequently used face. However we could include Yasumasa Morimura who expects us to fall off our chairs with astonishment as he poses in Audrey Hepburn's guise in large-scale cibachromes. Like Pujol cashing in on the double gimmick of cross-dressing and being a 'real monk' from the enclosed world revealing himself to an outside world, Morimura uses his masculinity and oriental features to disrupt iconic occidental images of women. His American counterpart would be Karen Kilimnik who produces photographic self-portraits posing as well known celebrities, "Me as Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar, Part II", 1994. There are more interesting and provocative images to be taken at any provincial Elvis look alike competition. Kilimnik has had a long and successful career dabbling in various mediums and the irony is that this Narcissistic turn is finally making her famous. If she photographs herself as a man, her notoriety will skyrocket. Kilmnik does not really qualify as a devoted Narcissist, but she is dabbling.
The art of the Narcissists is as shallow as the paper it is printed on. Forget the droning soliloquy they print -  basically, they are just saying "Look at me, am I not fabulous?". Their names are easily forgotten and it is doubtful any of them will be brave enough to continue their self-exploration/exploitation into old age, which as a documentary of a life - may at least hold some interest. If Ernesto Pujol is still posing as a nun when he is eighty, then we will know he really was trying to say something and this author will review his opinion.