With great fanfare, the Museum of Fine Arts opens two photography shows this weekend. “Mario Testino: In Your Face” runs through Feb. 3, and Testino’s “British Royal Portraits” through June 16. Both shows are open to MFA members Friday and Saturday before opening to the general public Sunday. They are the first US museum shows for the Peruvian-born, London-based fashion and celebrity photographer, whose work is familiar to readers of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other glossy magazines.

How much fanfare? “In Your Face,” which is in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery, commences with a 90-second video on 16 screens and concludes with a shop selling Testino-associated items. The video may be the single most interesting part of the exhibition. With concision and dash, it presents Testino working, traveling, being feted, being fawned over. The fawning continues with the show’s introductory wall text. The exhibition “invites you into Testino’s own world, as if stepping into the pages of one of today’s great fashion magazines.”

The rube breathlessness of those words would be endearing if it weren’t so sad. It’s the tone of someone promoting Las Vegas night at the parish hall. The sad part isn’t so much that “In Your Face” resembles Las Vegas night, though it does. Or even the spectacle (a very Testino term) of one of the world’s great art museums aspiring to be a spread in Vogue. It’s that museum demonstrating its utter incomprehension of how fashion magazines function.

“In Your Face” consists of 122 photographs. Most of them are in color. All are large, some extremely so. The show’s signature image, of model Kate Moss staring at the camera in front of a panoply of mirrors, measures nearly 5½ feet by 9 feet. A photograph of Tom Brady and a dog both baring their teeth (maybe they’re channeling their Rex Ryan) measures nearly 8 feet by 5½ feet.

So “In Your Face” is supersized, and what it’s supersizing are superstars and supermodels. It’s like a police lineup conducted by Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter: Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Charlize Theron, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Beyonce, Rihanna, Reese Witherspoon, Stephanie Seymour, Claudia Schiffer, Gisele Bundchen, Naomi Campbell. You get the idea.

The principle is the larger the better, and the more the merrier. Except that so many famous names, famous bodies, famous faces (famous places, too) quickly blur, a blurring that the oversized scale adds to. These are images that definitely grab your attention but then don’t hold it.

“I make certain prints very large to fill the viewer’s vision,” Testino says, “the way a photograph can fill an entire magazine page.” Fill — or assault? Hey-look-at-me can work to memorable effect, a spread at a time, in the context of a magazine. Clumped together in a gallery, it’s optical cacophony and exhausting. Say this for “In Your Face”: The title is fair warning.

Magazines, especially ones as visually sophisticated as Vogue or Vanity Fair, achieve a rhythm for the eye through the interplay of text, image, even advertising. It’s true that “In Your Face” has an affinity with advertising. The pictures all look like ads for some unmentioned product marketed to very rich (if not very discriminating) consumers. But there’s no rhythm. Even text is effectively eliminated. Rather than being printed on the wall, captions are on a narrow shelf beneath the pictures and at a right angle to them. The idea is presumably to minimize distraction from the image proper. But these are images that would very much benefit from distraction, which in this case would be a form of breathing room.

There’s another peculiarity to the captions. They list the magazine where the picture originally ran. Now that’s a distraction. It’s as if the fact an image appeared in, say, Harper’s Bazaar somehow enhances or validates it. Artistry makes a photograph worth looking at. So does subject. But pub-lication history? We’re back in the realm of breathlessness.