So, straight in with this one as it’s meant to be a part 2; I left off on the exploding-head, too much stuff, too little time feeling that the limitless flows of cyberspace inflict on our tender, over-worked souls.
It’s not just that our brains strain to compute the rivers of info, but the fear, perhaps, that we too have become bits of digital debris on the stage of social media and are thus liable to get lost in the landfill. As anyone who has advertised on the web knows, stayin’ alive is all about visibility in the attention economy; except this time, the product is you. How do you perform your product for public consumption? And who’s listening?
Attention scarcity, is, as Rob Horning puts it in a fantastic blog post about microfame, “a matter of TMI, which has an obvious connection to some of the more salient practices of microcelebrity: confessional writing, oversharing […] exhibitionism, the New Sincerity, and so on.” In other words, TMI in the sense of gross or overly personal pics, or vomiting your heartbreak all over FB, is linked to the general TMI avalanche the internet represents; there’s just so much crap out there vying for a sliver of our attention, that we must shout louder, or more embarrassingly, than everyone else to be seen, and thus validated as existing, connected beings.
Or as he puts it, these modes of self-display “reflect the possibility of a life lived merely to confess it, to share it on social media”, where intimate, private moments become tangible currency; the more outrageous, the more it gets noticed.
Not that this is anything new; reality TV cultivated- and depended on- this mode of celebrity/ infamy via public debasement (or at least exhibitionism). Except now it’s our friends, peers, family and colleagues whom we both watch and are watched by; we are the ‘microcelebrities’. From famous for 15 minutes, to famous to 15 people, to microfamous to 1500 people, perhaps.
The pursuit of microfame, predicated particularly on self-presentation to those who don’t already know you well, seems particularly pertinent to artists, for whom labour is, as Sven Luttken puts it, ‘marked by the inability to distinguish between labour and leisure, […] working hours and free time, performance and life’. Within social media, the artist’s public profile is manifested not simply through traditional signifiers of ‘work’- their videos, photos, invites to shows, press, etc- but also, crucially, through the status accorded by their connectedness to particular social groupings, i.e. their ‘non-work’ life. Again, IRL, this echoes the casting of artists- not just their work- as cover stars for mags like Art Review, or life-styley photo shoots allowing glimpses of their ‘real’ life.
In a collectively written essay called Club Kids: the social life of artists on Facebook’, the authors suggest that group exhibitions (especially online ones) function to forge publicly-paraded links between artists and curators, who simultaneously promote each other so that “the strongest ties artworks in today’s group shows often share are the Mutual Friends the artists have rather than the work itself”. These connections are further bolstered by the strategic tagging of party pics which are posted on FB for their audiences to digest.
Apart from cynical careerism and supporting the argument that labour and leisure are indistinguishable- no such thing as down-time, every moment can be instrumentalised- what this suggests is that the party-posturing and connectivity is just as important as the ‘real’ work, or that the public performance for a FB audience is the ‘real’ work.
Boris Groys has argued that autopoetics, or ‘the production of one’s own public self’ is key in the age of social media, where every public persona- not limited to politicians, celebs- is also a commodity. What the ‘Club Kids’ are flirting with then, is becoming just profiles, no work; ‘artists without art’, as they put it. Or as John Kelsey suggests, ‘the figure of the artist herself dematerialises, become a profile- her most abstract work being herself or her own connectivity.”
Can artists work with this profile, not just for instrumental ends (fame!), but to destabilise/ critique it…and if so, how will the market commodify this 2.0 version of dematierialisation?
