Here’s a Susan Sontag quote that goes against nearly every contemporary sensibility:
Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.
Originally published in a 1964 essay, these words seem almost quaint today, especially if you describe our age as the age of exposure. Most contemporary artists do, in fact, look inward when they create—so there’s no surprise in finding the most intimate details about an artist, the most trivial of trivialities, when you look at a gallery wall or watch a film or read a novel. This exhibitionism isn’t intrinsically a problem, as there’s nothing wrong with self-exposure in art, unless—as Sontag points out—the creation is purely solipsistic.
Perhaps I can be more generous—though that isn’t my specialty—and recognize that artists are simply responding to the culture. Today’s primary currency isn’t money, nor is it even institutional power, but simply celebrity, that most vital of contemporary desires. What matters is publicity and notoriety and recognition, with the specifics, whether you’re famous or infamous, an unimportant detail. For those who labor with a film or novel or painting or song, this is the environment that their artistic creations rise up to meet. The culture roars, it barks and boasts, and many people yearn to be the loudest voice in every room, for the sole purpose of feeling the heat of the spotlight. Having a bigger brand, more prominence, a larger profile, is itself the goal: there’s no greater objective once all the likes and shares and clicks are accumulated nor is there any downside to all this exposure. And this little nightmare of incentives—because, plainly, nightmare is the right word—redounds to the artist, who learns that only one subject satisfies a contemporary culture focused on celebrity: the self.
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