The acceptance of self-discovery and the cultivation of individual identity as an end of art and even a prerequisite of worthwhile and serious art-making has been nearly absolute in modern and contemporary times, where art is a field of study. This understanding is, however, somewhat in crisis because it reflects the values and principles of a declining social technology.
This decline and the commensurate ascent of a new technology are well-described in the 2021 book You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity by Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio. Moeller and D’Ambrosio describe “authenticity” as the notion of internal and unique identity (in contrast to the sincere, role-based identity of the pre-modern world):
“In authenticity, one’s face is expected to accurately express one’s actual self. A mask that is no mask, one’s true self has to be found or created. That this may be an impossible task is indicated by the suspiciously frequent use of tautological phrases such as “truly authentic” in self-help manuals on authenticity.”1
As this quote suggests, there is a much more complex and paradoxical nature to authenticity (and every other form of identity formation), but that will remain flattened for the purpose of this article, right now. The main point that interests me in an art way is that modernism is totally inextricable from authenticity, and its influence is perhaps no more profound than in the arch-modern style of abstract expressionism, where all representation is suspended in service of expressing the artistic self. But so much other modern art too, it is plain, originates from this premise that the artist needs to develop a highly individualized approach to art, and that this approach connects in some way to the strength/quality of their character and will.
The other end of this is that the circumstances that made authenticity useful and sustainable are shifting a lot, leading to the emergence of a new form of identity that the authors term “profilicity”: “Today, society has switched almost entirely to second-order observation. This means, in line with sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s usage of the term, we do not simply look at people or issues directly but rather at how they are seen publicly by others. . . . We form identity through curating profiles. Profiles are images of ourselves presented for second-order observation. By looking at them, others can see how we like to be seen as being seen.”2
So the artist’s predicament is that we live in this system of profilicty, which conflicts with the maintenance and pursuit of an authentic identity, but the language and symbols of modernist-descended art are tied definitionally to authenticity. And so our pursuit of the authentic acts only as another work of profile-building.3 Any public expression, artistic or otherwise, is inevitably sorted through this same machinery, and so authenticity is only aesthetic, which I suppose is why narratives of authenticity are often realized and idealized in contemporary paintings.
There is a particular strain of these contemporary paintings revering authenticity that depict personal surroundings, the people to whom the artist has personal connections, their true objects of affection, etc. The emergence of and attraction to this style, I think, is to do with the vanishing of the meaningless hang-out. In other words, it reflects how relatively little time most of us spend in the uncomplicated presence of others, and, of course, this is symptomatic of the switch to profilicity in that the ability to secondarily observe each other and the expectation to curate profiles replaces the function of our authentic social interactions as far as developing an identity. In Sung Jik Yang’s straightforward paintings, this is demonstrated in the unguarded and relaxed expressions of the sitters, who we can presume are painted through candid phone pictures, or maybe on occasion even from direct observation (but my consideration that direct observation is a possibility at all is itself the power of the placid look, right there). These paintings suggest authenticity by seeming to present a real version of the subject(s), free of their social performances and profilic circumstances, rendered in a general realist style, but not so exacting as to detach the artist or deny the humanity in the picture. And the titles too are unwaveringly just the first names of the sitters, no family names, no connections or obligations, just the transcendent individual. This, the paintings proclaim, is what’s true and significant to be seen.
This style is in distinct contrast to the procedural authenticity of modern expressive painting, such as ab ex, the tradition of which persists but which is largely out of favor as a frontier (consider the “zombie formalism” scare, or the recent fascination with the government funding that ab ex artists received to bolster the movement’s international profile [both of these refer to the panic that this art is not truly authentic in the manner we are led to believe by the artists, and we are thus being deceived by people who are “just” trying to build a profile]). Abstraction is historically weighty and projects an air of self-serious Art creation, which is more transparent as profile-building. The realism of Yang’s paintings appears much less forced and affected, contributing to the sense of authenticity, and refers more to an inherent and almost effortless skill of the artist, rather than the emotional performance and subjective worthiness of abstraction and expressionism.
The ab ex manner of purifying and essentializing the authentic aesthetic is not replicable for us now because our identity structure is defined by its multiplicity and the lack of a core self. Therefore, the question of a correct style is totally missing the point, at least as strict as ab ex defined it. What could be more helpful is to assess the terms on which we engage with identity and profile-building as artists, and what this situation makes new or newly desirable for us.
Much of the new authentic painting that Yang exemplifies is not anti-profilic just because it is pro-authentic. Rather, I think this work comfortably recognizes that it has something to say and something to show the viewer because of the condition of profilicity. It’s only because we are denied much of the authentic life that these pictures become interesting.
And though I agree in principle that it makes sense to accept our circumstances amid prolificity rather than fight the losing battle for authenticity, I want to suggest and describe the avenues of expression beyond repackaging and commodifying authentic experience as an aesthetic one. There are examples of artists leveraging the particular language of profilicty to make meaning, and there are lessons to be learned from that success. Before describing that, maybe I can explain why the challenge to become a more consciously profilic artist is significant to me and maybe other artists in more practical terms.
There is an understandable sense that profile-building is somehow tasteless, or rather that to appear as though you are doing so is tasteless to people who might consider themselves authentic, as many artists do, because art school makes you into one of modernism’s ardent inheritors. This is, in part, why so many of us revolt at making and managing Instagram accounts for our art. We don’t like to confront that we use our art as a way to build our internal and external identification as being artists, that is not an innate part of us, and further that our creations are not simply for us, but that they require being engaged by the outside world in order to mean anything at all. So one reason I am writing about this is to convince myself and to convince others that this is more significant beyond its cruel necessity, precisely because it might be embarrassing and humbling. And the only thing distasteful in this is to pretend you are doing otherwise; that is the reviled bullshit lie which paralyzes us, and which others are going to be so immediately aware of you harboring. Platonic authenticity is not (and never was) possible in any format, certainly not when the self is so curated as it is in social media or artwork. And yeah, of course you can be more or less authentic throughout this (well, maybe you can’t, but it’s also true that the gross delusion is that there’s purity anywhere at all). And that’s the only difference: whether you care to break the fourth wall and acknowledge (even to yourself) the game you’re playing.
There is an unfair expectation that all artistic truth-to-self is the reveal of a shocking and profound interiority, that it is always realized in beauteous specifics; but those are the hard-won features of abnegation. In other words, authenticity is the pursuit to be seen as such. Authenticity is the castle walls around that embarrassing vulnerability of our being contingent. And I feel like I should be especially clear that these more curated feelings of us are not fake or wrong, and they do not inherently make for bad art, but our expectation that these things are alone what constitute meaningful and truthful art is an unhelpful lie (both in terms of making art and perceiving oneself). Nor does this conclude in the idea that we are original-sin cursed and incomplete. From this premise, I instead want to extract comfort in the reality of constructing our reality. I mean here that everything we do and make is authentic in the banal sense that it is of us, but what might really be worthy is to see that we inhabit circumstances that turn back in on us and make up structures that we use to place ourselves and bring forth a more compelling or satisfying version.
Again, it’s absolutely still in this range, by the way, that we can practice real feelings in our profile-building, and it is essential, actually. The challenge art can present in this context is to be totally conscious of its pleading for recognition and to be made such as to surface intensely personally specific thoughts and feelings in recognizable and popular aesthetic forms. That last part now needs more explaining.
The qualifiers I put on this are in the interest of developing an artistic approach that recognizes and uses rather than merely contributes to profilicity. The need to be personal, perhaps embarrassingly so, is in the interest of combating a sense that the profile as a category resists vulnerability and emphatically curates itself to align with an anonymous corporate-like version of the self; our curatorial choices here are guided by the thought that we have something to lose and cannot engage or be engaged with faithfully, distinguishing from and competing with the audience rather than ingratiating with them.
As well, the need to refer in some way to popular aesthetic forms is simply a matter of the no-bullshit principle. There are some artists who deign only to deal in reference to another canonized artist’s expression4 and therefore build for themselves an authenticity profile, as described earlier. Such practitioners are then limited because they more or less uncritically accept authenticity as an ideology while performing it merely as a profile, so they remain trapped in the layers of identity work apparent to everyone but them.
If there is no outside this system and no profound and genuine belief in an authentic self to which we can refer back, we are just left to imagine how our awareness of our profilicity creates new points of leverage and art-possibility. Chiefly, our artist profiles afford us a distance to our own output, which, paradoxically, means that we can perform intensely personal aesthetics and reward contradiction and difference and dissonance within ourselves and between each other. Otherwise, profiles of discretion and virtue are rewarded, and so, therefore, art must absorb some transgression and refiguring of these values. This is to say that we can forego taste and, not that it is useful to rebel against normalcy for its own sake, but artists can be fundamentally unconcerned with the profile expressions of moral and political ideals and instead profile themselves on the institution and practice of such values. This is another way of considering that culture is downstream of politics, but artistic inclination is often where our political desires first manifest and can be, in small ways, first realized. As part of a lecture given at Goldsmiths, University of London, Mark Fisher used as an example of this phenomenon how the entertainment industry in the US allowed for the performance of a transformed racial landscape in America in the early 20th century, which made it graspable and real and gave form for the civil rights movement to fill.5
As an artist, the job is not to put your nose down and act as a social Luddite to the technology of profilicity. Down this path lies only delusional false authenticity, operating still as a profile but remaining mystical to you. This is why painting in terms of modern painting history is revealed more ridiculous as the shift away from authenticity becomes undeniable; those expressive modes accepted a core of human selfhood that was to be cultivated and distilled, hence the removal of representational forms that referred to subjects other than the artist’s engagement of the material. Any painting practice that operates like this now is a role-play, and, therefore, the whole premise is invalid. Rather, we have to make art from the perspective that we are inherently, consciously role-playing. The obvious next step, in terms of exploration, is to make unexpected choices for those roles.
So, if artistic operation is all playing pretend, my preference is going to be whatever is self-conscious of that. I find this is being accomplished completely and beautifully by some musicians I follow (more so than any visual artists I am presently aware of), so I want to highlight two of them here by way of learning from their success as prolific creatives.
First, STOMACH BOOK, the most recent project of musician Vivian Weeks. On a number of STOMACH BOOK songs, the melody reference track for the vocals is still audible. Typically, it is a ringing bell noise. At other times, the vocals are hugely affected, either by electronic pitch-shifting or obvious mimicry of other singing styles (Casket Kids, for example, is heavily indebted to Serj Tankian of System of a Down). In this way, Weeks owns her need to be perceived in a certain way and courts our association with these styles, sometimes contrasting more childlike (like the genuinely infantile vocals that break out after the bridge on Nothing Special) and feminine artificial vocal tones with their natural androgynous voice. The choice to leave this intact is the artist’s comfort with their vulnerabilities and limitations and the aestheticization of their attempts to overcome, to use new tools to access a form of creation that was never possible before now. It is engaged with itself as an act of profile building, rather than trying to fool the audience into believing in the artist’s fiction of authentic, intellectual expression. Meanwhile, the premise of fine art encourages laundering limitations in irony and detachment.
Vylet Pony has made works of much greater significance and resonance than anything from the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic show on which their artist profile is based (to me, this is a genuine compliment). And this is why Vylet is a vital artist because this is not a choice that anyone should make or that would maximize extrinsic award; tying up your profile in the specifics of an internet fandom can provide some kind of immediate buy-in, but is also majorly limiting in terms of audience and in some ways artistically compromising that your creativity is put in service to another, thoroughly corporate and capitalistic work, the rewards of which you will never realize in the same way. But the artistry and skill and devotion present in their music is not fakeable and not joking. To this end, Vylet’s music is shockingly available and empathetic, and more freely approaches what we could traditionally call “authenticity” (i.e. unfettered self-expression) than nearly anything else made with a similar level of craft in contemporary art, where, by contrast, the embrace of these embarrassing aesthetics feels somewhat provocative and reflexive rather than emancipatory.
That so much painting that plays in a similar internet/fandom space is made using airbrushes is no coincidence; such art chooses tools that minimize the extent of the artist’s hand. There is an immense discomfort in fine art that we could be caught trying and failing, which manifests in this way. To the extent that it looks childish and untrained, that is “deskilling” and refers to a rich history of outsider and folk art (or perhaps, transgressively, internet fan art in this specific case). But the problem is that it has to regard itself as so very different from those sources that it deserves MFAs and white-wall gallery prestige. So be intimate with the concerns of profile-building, and be willing to pour completely and without a strainer from self into work because there is comfort in that it will only ever be second-order observed, and will therefore require every drop of tepid, embarrassing humanity to reach across and punch through that same profilic artifice of every single other person who looks at it.
- Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity (Columbia University Press, 2021), 13. ↩︎
- Moeller and D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile, 15-16. ↩︎
- Moeller and D’Ambrosio, You and Your Profile, 108-109. ↩︎
- To the extent that we (e.g., artists or anyone who considers art with enough weight to be reading something like this) describe serious painting seriously, the comments typically refer to figures of art history or maybe important contemporaries. Definitely, it’s helpful that there is a shared knowledge base and some precedent in art conversations, and this is a functional shorthand to make sure we aren’t talking past each other, and that there is some kind of grounding for the otherwise shadowy commentary that serious art tends to invoke. Additionally, though, it could also be worth considering the consequences of painting that exist primarily in terms of other painting. Because, of course, too, it’s more than how we talk about paintings, and it’s also how we know they will be talked about, and the lengths of signification and symbolism that emerge from this condition. Because there’s a necessity to building an artist profile as one who not only knows the history and technique but who is seen as knowing such things. ↩︎
- Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater 2021). ↩︎
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