The reality star turned entrepreneur aimed to "break the internet" with her naked derriere but she merely dented it with new images of her oiled up, overexposed backside which she promoted this week.

Along with the photo she also posted a tongue in cheek nod to her detractors on social media, "And they say I didn't have a talent ... try balancing a champagne glass on your ass LOL," the woman famous for being famous wrote.

As Paper magazine's latest cover girl, the 33-year-old was photographed in various states of undress by French illustrator and photographer Jean-Paul Goude.

Considering every aspect and minute of her life is strategically controlled and curated, Goude, the master of image manipulation even before the advent of Photoshop, was the man for the job. As Esquire's boundary pushing art director in the 1960s, he "sculpted" and "corrected" images of his muses, including singer Grace Jones, into strong, mythical African and Amazonian figures.

The photo of Armenia-American Kardashian resting a champagne glass on her "ass" may appear to be just another attempt to titillate her fans and traumatise Krispy Kreme lovers, but it was a recreation of Goude's iconic Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976 image. A photo which featured in Jungle Fever, a book of his favourite projects and subjects who belonged to the marginalised African-American and Hispanic communities.

The 2014 version of the image received a paltry (by Kardashian standards) 770,000 likes and, in Australia, triggered about 184 tweets per minute when it was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Comparatively, singer Taylor Swift attracted more than 1 million likes recently when she posted a photo of herself dressed as a fluffy white pegacorn for Halloween.

Kardashian then recruited her husband, humble rapper Kanye West, who once proclaimed she was "the most important woman on the internet" and he was "the person who invents new thoughts, who brings new ideas into the universe", to share the image. Something he rarely does. But not even his seal of approval – the hashtag "all day" – could generate anything more than a few million impressions on Twitter.

Is her posterior now becoming more of an internet pest than Amanda Bynes? Or are us mere mortals the butt of a highly conceptual joke that only those with a doctorate in fine arts can comprehend?

Earlier this year, Kardashian assumed Instagram's Most-Liked Photo mantle after an image from her wedding day featuring her husband and a wall of dying flowers (because it took four days to create) clocked up more than 2 million double taps. Now, even though she has a social media audience of more than 70 million and is in possession of the third most popular account on Instagram, another semi-naked photo has failed to disrupt the world wide web.

"While Kim certainly shook the internet she didn't quite break it. By cross-posting from a third-party photo service she limited her reach to a still impressive 1.7 million impressions. We always recommend to our VITs [very important tweeters, Kardashian is one Twitter's most followed personalities] to post natively to Twitter to reach 'Ellen-selfie' proportions," a Twitter spokesman told Fairfax Media.

Last year she posted a selfie styled in a similar fashion to boast about her toned post-baby body. The image of the mother of one in a white high-cut swimsuit received more than 1.12 million likes and spawned countless parodies, however this latest flesh baring PR stunt has confirmed that we're no longer all about her bass with it failing to deliver its promise to break our broadband.

 

Time will tell if the article, which was released 24-hours later and contains full frontal nudes, suffers the same lukewarm fate.