Bring your whole self to home
On authenticity, artifice, and ouroboros art.
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I read a Dave Eggers book called “The Circle” a few months ago. The protagonist lands a job at a hip social media corporation and quickly rises through the ranks. As the corporation grants her more perks, benefits, and opportunities it also consumes more of her life. Eventually, she “goes transparent,” meaning she allows the corporation to livestream her every waking moment, allowing anyone, at any time, to tune in. Though this ensnares her family, subsumes her leisure time, and hampers her ability to communicate with those around her, she rationalizes away her gut feeling that what’s going on is wrong, buying into the narrative that every element of her life should be on display. It’s the honest thing, after all. What does she have to hide?
Anyone online today may feel a similar pull, intuiting the importance of privacy yet struggling to judge whether, when, and how to seize it in a culture that encourages constant sharing. Artists, in particular, should be generous, right? And what’s more generous than revealing your true self — your hopes, fears, and vulnerabilities — to strangers through your work? In “going transparent”?
Especially if you consider yourself a truth-teller, isn’t hiding things from those who follow you a form of untruth? Isn’t it selfish?
I don’t think so, but the fact that the question — reminiscent of the core theme of a dystopian novel — feels eminently askable speaks to a reality where it’s not that weird for people to put themselves on display as well as their work, mining their vulnerabilities for content.
We see this behavior among vloggers who record their day-to-day activities, sometimes in excruciating detail (maybe stopping after reaching a breaking point, but only after posting a confessional video click-baitingly titled: “How daily vlogging is RUINING my life”). We see it among YouTubers who start their channels for a specific purpose — film or game reviews, for example — then pivot to being “personalities,” bringing their particular flavor to whatever topics are trending. And we see it in celebrities whose lives are inseparable from their art — or, at least, who want us to believe that it is.
Bo Burnham, who rose to fame on YouTube, is the apotheosis of this uneasy dynamic. His Netflix special, “Inside,” begs to be read as a commentary on the artist himself. Framed as if Burnham spent early covid times in a single room (he didn’t), and full of self-referential commentary, it asks the audience to take the artist seriously, because he’s expressing raw authentic feelings; and not to trust him, because those feelings are wrapped in the artifice of performance.
The artist-as-art dynamic is not a new development. Since the rise of mass media — and surely before then — this type has been represented by a subset of entertainers, athletes, musicians, and politicians. In the 1960s, marked by the genesis of color television, Andy Warhol embraced his inseparability from his own work, commenting on the concepts of celebrity, advertising, and artifice even as he participated in them. “I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts,” he famously said.
“I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.” - Andy Warhol
That statement hits different in the age of social media, the “bring your whole self to work” ethos, and AI-generated text and images. Likewise, the “influencer mentality” — maybe a comfortable choice for some — feels less like an option and more like an inevitability for today’s young creatives, though it remains unclear how many influencers see “influence” as an end in itself and how many see it as a necessary route to achieving other aspirations.
Regardless, once inside the influence machine, it’s easy to get caught in its cogs.
William Deresewicz describes how this occurs in his 2020 book, “The Death of the Artist.” He argues that in today’s fast-paced media ecosystem, working artists must not only commit to producing work at increasing speed with automaton-like consistency to attract notice and achieve financial stability, but also must be their own PR team and advertising arm. This effort may include creating, selling, and distributing merchandise; maintaining a presence on various social platforms; and sharing personal stories and process updates with one’s followers. These supplementary activities are incredibly time-consuming: so much so, they threaten to become the main course of an artist’s work. The art itself? Reduced to a garnish.
In the words of artist and YouTuber Alpay Efe:
Traditional art content does not and, quite frankly, cannot generate the kind of responses that YouTube is actually starting to demand to deem something worthy of recommendation … If you want to compete with the overwhelming amount of art-related content, junk content, and mainstream content … you have to play the same game. The game of clicks, of hyperbole, of targeting kids, of deception even, or of making shorter and shorter videos for people with less and less attention spans.
Even as an art hobbyist — whose income isn’t tied to my artwork — I’ve felt the pull to “brand” my work and myself, to be too online, and to overshare, and I’ve been around others who embrace these behaviors. I participated not — I believed — because of the machine’s demand that I commodify my life, but because oversharing meant caring, being an authentic voice amid the polished masses by letting readers and viewers in on my anxieties, idiosyncrasies, and fears.
But lately, I’m wondering to what degree that was the machine talking. Lately, I’m wondering: To what degree was the “realness” even real?
In “The Culture of Narcissism,” author Christopher Lasch talks about “pseudo-self-awareness”: when people seemingly divulge their deepest selves to their audiences, implicating them in the work through meta-commentary and self-referential humor, eschewing the illusion of separation between art and artist, art and audience. He suggests that this “writing about writing” often seems like self-awareness, but amounts to self-indulgence. The artist who immerses herself too deeply in her own subjectivity sinks farther from objective reality, ironically revealing something unintended: a narcissistic desire to see a favorable image of herself reflected in the eyes of others.
This rings somewhat true. When I began posting comics on Instagram, the work came from the heart. But as more and more people began following my work and providing feedback in the form of comments, favorites, and shares, I noticed myself tailoring my comics to what I believed would impress them, what they viewed as authentic. Ironically, my preoccupation with the image I projected to others often meant getting lost inside my own mind, retreading the same tired ground in my work. In doing so, I experienced what Lasch describes: Art can be tedious and circular when unmoored from observations of anything outside the inner workings of the artist’s own mind. Like an ouroboros, it eats its own meaning.
On the other hand, I don’t believe work containing self-referential elements is necessarily tedious or circular. So what prevents it from devolving into an artist’s ego trip?
Maybe: observations of people, places, ideas, and experiences beyond the self.
And here’s where privacy comes in again. Privacy — a separation between artist and audience — is necessary for collecting such observations.
Artists need time to experience their surroundings directly, unfiltered by how they imagine others might perceive them. They need space to be alone and unencumbered by the judgment — or the imagined judgment — of others. To immerse themselves in physical experience of sight, sound, touch, and taste before returning to the mental realm of the blank page to record their findings. To bring their whole self to home before bringing some parts to work.
They should seek these private moments not necessarily so their work is more “authentic,” but to maintain a boundary between reality and fabrication: To retain the knowledge of one from the other so they can apply knowledge from both to both.
Ultimately, keeping (at least) one foot in observed reality is about more than aiding the quality of the work or increasing the enjoyment of the process. It’s about honing our skills at the art of living. Accordingly, “hiding things from those who follow you” might also be described as “maintaining a meaningful relationship with yourself.” “Selfishness” might also be described as “solitude.” And being a “truth-teller” might require embracing life’s reality and art’s artifice, separately, rather than being preoccupied with merging the two.
For artists to be truly generous, they must acquire experiences worth sharing. For art to be truly meaningful, it must extend beyond the page and into hearts and minds.
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