OLD NEWS

INTERNET PERSONALITY MACKENZIE THOMAS’S FOUR-HOUR PERFORMANCE
<https://tinyurl.com/2pz6266v>
I saw a work this past week that I did not know how to critique.
The premise of the performance was simple: MacKenzie Thomas, an internet personality with half a million followers , would read aloud everything she posted over the past year. Each month was introduced by a personal essay reflecting on the events of her life during that period. Described in promotional materials as a “durational performance,” I Said What I Said ran for four hours. So far, it has been staged twice in New York, selling out both times. Thomas will bring the performance to Los Angeles
As we took our seats in a small theater, Thomas waited onstage beside a projector queued with a Slides presentation. On a nearby desk, she had arranged a Stanley cup, a Gatorade, coconut water, her computer, and a speaker.
She stood onstage and moved herself through catharsis. She broke up with her long-term “metrosexual” boyfriend. Her family dog died. She endured health complications related to her eating disorder. Her mother disappointed her—again. Another relationship began and ended. Her voice wavered as she read song lyrics from her favorite artists, then her tone switched to upbeat and zany as she delivered jokes she had posted about kissing gay men, being biracial, or her bob haircut. She often referred to herself in the third person.
She offered notes on the family dynamic that produced a daughter who compulsively performs: an erratic, somewhat absent father; a mother who wanted to be famous and wanted to be entertained, withdrawing affection and attention when Thomas was no longer “on.” Thomas is “obviously,” she said, an only child. She listed pet figures she loves and frequently references—Bill Hader, Michael Jackson, the cartoon Invader Zim. She loves her friends. Over the course of the year, she posted many videos of herself dancing, usually alone in her room using Photobooth, the early-2000s Mac app. Occasionally, a friend would film her dancing in slow motion, the camera tracking down her body—the flip of her skirt, the top of her thigh-high socks—before revealing that she is dancing on a toilet seat.
As the performance went on, Thomas became increasingly devastated. “I am a sick person who loves to perform and I’ll have sex with someone to keep someone who doesn’t really care about me.” I found myself thinking, You’re not sick, you’re okay, we’ve all done that, when she added, “No one suffers like me.” It’s true that some people feel these things more deeply than others.
Notably absent from this diaristic account was her success as an internet personality. In 2023, Thomas was the subject of a New York Times profile about her short-form videos in which she reads fragments from her childhood diaries.
In the days that followed, I turned the piece over in my mind—affected by it, yet unsure how to write about it. What I found most compelling about the performance felt off-limits to criticism: her personality.
In Content (2022), Kate Eichhorn, chair of culture and media studies at the New School, considers how the attention economy is reshaping cultural production. “If [artists] must produce content—not necessarily about their writing or art but about themselves—in order to thrive as writers or artists,” she writes, “is culture itself now nothing more or less than the sum of the content they generate about the alleged life of an author or artist?” The question captures an arc of anxiety within the field of criticism in the age of the internet: what, exactly, are we looking at, and what is our role? Are we critiquing artworks—or the contents of people’s lives?
Yet this question was asked in contemporary art long before the internet became widely accessible. In his 1986 essay “The End of Art,” Arthur Danto argued that the rise of the artist’s personality as the center of contemporary art signaled the end of art history understood as a progression of movements (neoclassical to realist to mpressionism and so on). Drawing on Hegel’s concept of Absolute Knowledge—the point at which the gap between knowledge and its object, and thus subject and object, collapses—Danto suggested that the disappearance of this gap marked a historical shift. That collapse has only accelerated as our fragmented digital culture has hardened into our primary monoculture.
More recently, literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has argued that immediacy is the driving aesthetic of contemporary culture. Tracing the rise of autofiction and the personal essay, she links these forms to a post-2008 precarity economy in which one must constantly capitalize off and optimize “one’s inner material.” Talk of inner material quickly becomes talk of personality: she’s insane, a narcissist, an icon. Thomas’s performance—sometimes described as a “one-woman show”—blends several genres of inner material: the personal essay, the diaristic feed, the end-of-year post.
Historically, contemporary art and criticism have operated differently from the relationship between internet audiences and internet personalities. In “Merely Interesting,” literary critic Sianne Ngai describes a shift in art criticism from judgments of beauty—characterized by sudden revelations—to judgments of the interesting, claims of value that asks for justification, a more lingering temporality. If beauty became suspect because it reproduced existing power structures, the interesting offered critics something else to respond to: ideas, arguments, evidence. But judgments of both the beautiful and the interesting require, at base, objectification: the artist must create something outside of herself.
In Thomas’s performance, she repeatedly insisted that she did not know where her personality ended and her persona began. By contrast, early net-art performances—from Marisa Olson’s Marisa’s American Idol Audition Training Blog (2004–05), to Ann Hirsch’s Scandalishious (2008–09), to Jayson Musson’s Art Thoughtz (2010–12)—were marked by the construction of personas that could be shaped and controlled for the sake of the project. The separation between performer and persona made critique possible, rather than psychoanalysis.
This is not just a personal problem. The diminishing relevance of criticism in the face of haters and stans doesn’t merely mark the slow fade of a genre of writing but points to the kinds of lives we can lead and art we can make. Objectification enables a freedom that the constant performance demanded by content capitalism does not. Anthropologists have long noted how communities “externalize values and meanings embedded in social processes, making them available, visible, or negotiable for further action by subjects,” as Fred Myers described in The Empire of Things (2002). Objectifications thus allow those values and meanings to be be stored, circulated, and brought out to be performed at key moments—a ritual, or an exhibition. The non-objectified persona, like content itself, operates differently. It must be continually animated, even as its circulation stretches beyond the author’s control. Performance becomes ceaseless in two ways: the need to keep performing the persona, and the persona’s endless circulation as content.
This dynamic is starkly illustrated by events like $DOGCAGE, a memecoin launched on the blockchain platform Pump.fun. The stunt featured a livestream of a masked man sitting in a dog kennel, eating dog food until the coin reached a $25 million market cap. Online discourse labeled $DOGCAGE “performance art” for lack of a better term, but it resists criticism, though not cultural commentary. Wearing only a mask and underwear, pumping a coin—was this man anything more than a puppet of content capitalism’s logic, which treats absurdity, humiliation, pain, and endurance as the most obvious paths to attention? Is obedience to that logic itself creative? And for artists, does this mean their role is simply to replicate—with distance and control—what is interesting about the personalities that produce such internet events?
But to return to Thomas’s work, it’s not completely true that there is nothing in the performance that is available for criticism. Some time ago, I came across one of her Reels while scrolling. Then I never saw her videos again—until last week. It’s nothing personal—it’s the nature of the scroll. I swipe past faces trying to get my attention so that I don’t have to pay attention to anything. The durational capacity of the performance felt like a way of reasserting control in an infrastructure that demands its performers never rest for an audience that is barely present. After the four hours of the performance ended I felt like I had downloaded a person. If attention is the metric, it was an aggressive and successful act: I think of her now.
_Shanti Escalante-De Mattei _ARTnews

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ON ART, POLITICS, AND TODAY’S EVOLVING CULTURAL LANDSCAPE.-- SEAN MONAHAN
“I think the [cultural] gridlock has to do with social media. I think human beings fundamentally aren’t supposed to have this much attention from this many strangers on them constantly. Gen Z has a more personal branding-inflected relationship to consumerism that also comes from this general sense that you’re being surveilled, judged, upvoted, or liked. I think these things sound almost corny to bring up now because they’ve become so deeply normal, but I think they’re deeply abnormal for human beings. I do think, and a lot of this is my perspective from hearing people talk privately, that people have a general paranoia in the art world; about what their peers are thinking about them. It’s very meta. I think it’s easy to just point at politics, right? I think that’s what everyone would think I’m talking about explicitly when I say that. But that’s only one piece of it. I think people have similar anxieties about who they talk to at parties and where they go out to eat. These things have always been latent in any kind of cultural scene that really relies on interpersonal relationships. There’s always a bit of a popularity contest, you’re always managing how you’re perceived in these kinds of spheres. That’s not new. What’s new is that all these things have been supercharged by the internet. To have interesting creative ideas, you have be a bit more reckless.” _artnet

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ANDY WARHOL WOULD HAVE HATED SAFE SPACES.
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One rainy afternoon last winter, sitting under a blanket with a cup of tea, I found myself Googling paintings by Chaïm Soutine. It’s a pastime I’ve indulged ever since visiting an exhibition of his portraits of hotel staff on the French Riviera during the 1920s – paintings that combine such a mixture of tenderness and debasement that it’s as if his brush is kissing and beating his subjects at the same time.
I flicked through images of hopelessly innocent cooks and bellboys, with complexions the colour of raw sausage and ears that look as if they have been brutally yanked. And as I did, I came across a review of the very show where I had first encountered Soutine’s works. Ah, I thought, looking forward to luxuriating in literature about his particular genius for kindly sadism.Yet my plans to float away on Soutine’s twisted dreams came to an abrupt halt. For as I read, I realised that the tangled emotions and gnarly moral complexities that make his paintings so intoxicating had been erased from the picture. In their place was a sanitised vision of an artist with a “profoundly compassionate and humane eye” that “sympathetically drifted to the underclass”, who made paintings that celebrated “the richness of these otherwise forgotten lives”.
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Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone want to reframe Soutine as a saintly advocate for social justice? (While little is known of his life, existing material paints a picture of a complex and difficult man with a profound disdain for the shtetl in modern-day Belarus where he grew up.) After all, this was the very same artist whose skill as a painter-cum-butcher inspired Francis Bacon’s magnificently nightmarish visions.
Like so many great artists throughout history – from Hieronymus Bosch’s holy perversions to Paula Rego’s knotty psychological dramas – it is precisely by channelling ambivalent emotions that Soutine is able to speak to the dark and complicated nature of being human. What makes his paintings of hotel staff so powerful, so moving, is that they mix brutality with affection – and in doing so, invite us to contemplate our own discordant drives and emotions. Few of us are outright psychopaths, after all, but all of us must reckon with the fine line between desire and exploitation.
I soon realised that the review itself was entirely unremarkable, insofar that it was typical of a way of discussing art that has become culturally ubiquitous. For the past decade, we have been living through an era in which art is required to conform to a moral code. Dead or alive, artists are increasingly expected to model righteousness and empathy, and their work asked to promote values that are feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic and committed to accessibility and inclusion.
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This “moral turn” is behind the tendency for exhibitions, reviews and books to edit artists’ biographies, retroactively framing them as social justice advocates and exemplars of community spirit. It can also be seen in the panic that ensues when institutions fear an exhibition may fail to explicitly promote these values, in some cases leading to their postponement or the removal of works.
Take, for example, Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol show in 2020, where the great vampire of the New York scene – a man who fetishised electric chairs, filmed fame-seekers high on drugs, and made art from an image of a young woman falling to her death – was described in an exhibition wall text as an artist who “provided a safe-space for queer culture”.
Then there is the baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work has come into vogue in recent years. Her most famous work, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c 1620), which depicts the biblical heroine cutting off the head of an Assyrian general, is now widely interpreted as an autobiographical response to her own rape by the painter Agostino Tassi. When an exhibition of Gentileschi’s work was shown at the National Gallery in 2020, documents from Tassi’s trial for rape were placed in the opening rooms, positioning her assault as a key to understanding her work.
Who does this kind of historical revisionism serve? Not Warhol, whose art remains so charismatic precisely because of its amorality. Not “queer culture”, whose leading lights are reduced to moralistic teaching aids. Not female artists, whose works are seen as indivisible from their private lives. (The primary evidence for Gentileschi’s painting being autobiographical is that the artist appears to have based the figure of Judith on herself. Yet she often did this, because of the prohibitive cost of hiring models and the social conventions against women doing so.) And most of all, not audiences.
Because yes, the principles that underpin art’s moral turn are absolutely worth insisting upon in our personal and professional lives, and fighting for in political governance. But if we apply these same principles to evaluating all art, we compromise our ability to think critically and to engage with it on its own terms, in all its glorious ambivalence. Most of all, we lose the ability to be genuinely challenged and transformed by it.
Ambivalence, after all, has its political uses: being plunged into discomfort can push us to question our assumptions and sharpen our thinking. Take the paintings Philip Guston made during the 1960s of Ku Klux Klansmen: cartoon-like dreamscapes in which hooded figures – painted pig-pink in Guston’s childish style – are depicted smoking cigarettes, making art and driving. While Guston was a politically active figure, his paintings do not preach any obvious lesson or convey a clear moral message. Rather than letting viewers off the hook by instructing them what to think or feel, they immerse you in the deeply uncomfortable reality that racism is unexceptional, as much a part of the everyday as cars, cartoons and fags. “We never know what is in their minds,” said his daughter, Musa Mayer, of the images; “but it is clear that they are us. Our denial, our concealment.”
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after newsletter promotionArtemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, c 1620. Illustration: Carlo Bollo/Alamy
Yet such is the intolerance to anything approaching ambivalence that a touring show of Guston’s work across the US and UK was postponed in 2020. After Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd, the organisers decided to delay the exhibition until Guston’s “message of social and racial justice” could be “more clearly interpreted”.
When the show eventually opened in Boston in 2022, then travelled to Tate Modern in 2023, efforts were made to position Guston’s work in the lineage of social justice movements. This hand-holding of audiences, as Paul Keegan noted in the London Review of Books, is indicative of an era in which “paintings and the public can no longer be left alone in a room together”.
Some on the political left may feel queasy about sticking the knife into a cultural model that shares many of their political principles. This is understandable, given that mocking lefty values has proved fruitful in the culture wars, and given the global rise of anti-trans and anti-immigrant views. In such a climate, patronising and reductive interpretations of artworks may seem a worthwhile price to pay for spreading political messages.
But what happens when the shoe is on the other foot? Across the world, the resurgent right is making inroads into the arts. Giorgia Meloni has appointed a rightwing president of the Venice Biennale. The Trump administration has placed allies in senior roles at arts institutions, attempted to block grants to arts organisations deemed to promote “gender ideology”, and taken aim at museums exhibiting work focused on the legacy of slavery. If we insist that art functions as a tool for promoting a limited set of political principles, what happens when an ideology that doesn’t share our values sweeps into power?
Learning to engage with complexity is a necessary skill if we are ever to drag ourselves out of the puerile swamp of the culture wars. But if we continue to reduce art to moralistic soundbites, we will only succeed in stripping it of its capacity to transform us, which would be a huge loss. Art can help us to better understand ourselves, and the world we live in, by expressing those things that words cannot. It exposes us to a vast range of experiences, and asks us to sit with the fundamental ambivalences, moral complexities and conflicting emotions that are a part and parcel of being human.
If only we are encouraged to look, we can often find these qualities in the art that is right in front of our noses – in the psychological chiaroscuro of Gentileschi, the profound voyeurism of Warhol, the troubling dreamscapes of Guston, the tender brutality of Soutine. Now is the time to argue for an art that can help us to feel more, think more, know more: if we don’t, we risk reducing art to mere exemplars of pre-approved ideas, and forfeiting our cultural intelligence. _Rosanna McLaughlin _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mr2xdwnt> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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AND ONLYFANS MODELS DOMINATE US ‘EXTRAORDINARY’ ARTIST VISAS
On the wall of immigration attorney Michael Wildes’s office hangs an enormous photo of Yoko Ono and her late husband Beatles frontman John Lennon — clients of Wildes’s father who defended the couple from deportation.
Decades later, Wildes represented some of the biggest actors and singers of his own generation. But now a growing number of those contacting him to seek visas are social media influencers and models on OnlyFans, the streaming platform for sex workers and celebrities.
“I knew the days of representing iconic names like Boy George and Sinéad O’Connor were over,” Wildes said, as he described the shift towards what he called “scroll kings and queens”.
The number of influencers who have successfully applied for an O-1B visa, reserved for “exceptional” creatives, has exploded since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to immigration lawyers like Wildes, talent managers and creators.
Some immigration attorneys said influencers now made up more than half their clientele. They are happy to take on these clients, not only from a financial perspective, but because “likes” and subscriber figures are easy metrics to quantify compared with the often murky process of proving “exceptional ability”.
“A lay person is very easily impressed by a large number of followers,” said immigration lawyer Elektra Yao, founding partner of the Yao Law Group. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist,” she said.
The number of O-1 visas — which include the O-1B arts visa and O-1A for remarkable abilities in science, education, business or athletics — granted each year increased by more than 50 per cent between 2014 and 2024, the most recent year for which figures are available. Meanwhile, the total number of non-immigrant visas issued grew by 10 per cent.
The criteria for O-1Bs — which can include performing in a leading role for a distinguished production, a record of commercial success or significant recognition from experts — have been adapted to fit online influencers, say attorneys.
High follower counts and big earnings can be used to establish commercial success, landing a contract to promote a certain brand can qualify as an endorsement of talent and being featured at a store opening could be considered starring in a distinguished production, said Fiona McEntee, founding partner of the McEntee Law Group.
“If you think about how many people are on social media every day and how few people actually make a living from it — it is really a skill,” she added.
But others worry that the shift in focus to attention-based metrics will spill over into how traditional artists will be judged.
“We have scenarios where people who should never have been approved are getting approved for O-1s,” said immigration lawyer Protima Daryanani, managing partner of the Daryanani Law Group. “It’s been watered down because people are just meeting the categories.”
New York City-based attorney Shervin Abachi, founder of Abachi Law, warned there was a risk that artists whose work is not engineered for online hits will be disadvantaged as immigration officials turn to online reach as a metric of success in considering O-1B applicants.
“Officers are being handed petitions where value is framed almost entirely through algorithm-based metrics,” Abachi said. “Once that becomes normalised, the system moves towards treating artistic merit like a scoreboard.”
This means traditionally trained artists, whose work is central to America’s cultural ecosystem but who do not necessarily benefit from social media algorithms, will find it harder to make their case. Immigration officials are being tasked with deciding who can turn online traction into a meaningful career in the US, Abachi said.
“That is a structural shift, not a niche development,” he said. “What looks like a spike in influencer filings may be signalling a broader shift in how opportunity is allocated.” _FinancialTimes