Armed with his high-tech toys, our Anonymous Author, just like the kid in the tram, has today occupied a lot of territory. He has occupied the television — and all power to him, television was always meant to be his medium, and today it finally is. The intended viewer is also “one of his people,” and also passive no more. Today’s viewer is (inter)active, his phone calls are broadcast live mid-program, he sends SMS messages and e-mails, he comments and makes requests, he’s there on stage and in the studio — in actual fact, programs wouldn’t exist without him. AA has occupied the newspapers; protected by the mask of anonymity (a kind of condom), he spends hours firing off comments. Because only authors — people with first names and last names — are responsible and vulnerable to attack. AA’s power lies in his namelessness, irresponsibility, and invulnerability. All the same, AA forces you to communicate with him, and if you don’t, he simply excludes you from his field of vision. Remember: he doesn’t need you, you need him. He has his online newspapers, his blogs, his network of readers, he is himself both an author and a reader. AA has occupied YouTube and hundreds of similar sites, which were all invented for him in the first place. Don’t even dream they were for you. He is an anonymous creator, editor, contributor, and end-user of his own encyclopedia, Wikipedia. And hey, amazing, he’s now the most consulted global source of general information. Protected by the mask of anonymity, AA establishes his hierarchy of values. He decides whether his Mom is worth a Wikipedia entry, how much space Paris Hilton deserves, and how much Nikola Tesla. AA has his own literature, determines canons, and then does whatever he likes with them. And nobody can hold him to account, because he is nameless. He has his own culture in which others just like him, the nameless, actively participate. He has set up his virtual institutions, developed his forms of education, his information, and his leisure activities. AA doesn’t need existing institutions — he will invoke, destroy, and reference them; AA has created his own parallel world in which everything belongs to him. AA is in the majority. That’s his strength. He controls the most powerful toy in the world, the Internet, that’s where his strength lies. He is fluid, changeable, ephemeral. He is a morph, he is infantile, he is elusive, he is mobile, he “rides” and “surfs,” he moves around, he appears and disappears. He doesn’t have a declared program to contest or dispute. Actually, he doesn’t have a program at all, but this doesn’t stop him from making his fanatical and penetrating voice heard — that’s where his strength lies. You are in his power. You have a first name and last name, you’re an author, you stand behind your work; you are responsible for what you’ve written. He’s not interested in responsibility (To whom? To what? I mean, do the superstars of the contemporary art world show any responsibility?!), nor is he interested in authorship. He takes whatever he likes, and justice is on his side. His constructions are virtual, he builds and destroys them with ease, and like a good thief, he leaves no trace. He is a representative of the new, you are a representative of the old, that’s his strength and your weakness. He’s young, you’re old — that’s his advantage. Fighting him is as senseless as punching the wind. Getting into an argument with him is stupid, ignoring him more stupid still. This is his time and his culture, you’re on the margins. Learning his codes is tough, but if you don’t know his languages, you’re condemned to linger there on the margins. It is both a comforting and terrifying thought that he too is vulnerable: the source of his strength lies — in wires.
In wires?! Standing next to the kid in the tram, your hands loaded with bags of groceries, him having occupied the seat, headphones on and iPhone in hand, suddenly you reconcile yourself to the fact that yes, this is the normal order of things. Because AA lives in a world that “has narrowed, not broadened, in the last ten years,” he lives in the “ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity — monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring.”[2] AA is a child of the consumer and conformer age, an age dominated by fear of loss (of one’s job, one’s identity, one thing or another) and the ideology of catastrophe and global crisis. And it can’t be ruled out that the delirium of communication — his everyday life practice — is in fact a form of autism, of apathy, a refusal to confront a world that has the measure of him and threatens to swallow him up.
“The steamship of contemporaneity,” from which you for a moment felt thrown, is a metaphor for a revolutionary age, a time when steamships symbolized progress, speed, and modernity, when artistic gestures really were “a slap in the face of public taste.” The revolution in society at the beginning of the twentieth century was marked by concomitant revolutions in literature, painting, film, architecture, poetics, and systems of thought. The entire cultural system was turned on its head. AA doesn’t incite revolutions, and he’s too much of a conformist to give anyone a slap in the face. In any case, a slap in the face is an authorial gesture. AA is a child of his time, his gestures — irrespective of his occasional self-adulatory revolutionary rhetoric — are neither great, nor powerful, nor subversive, nor mind-blowing. Deep down, AA is just a small-time hacker. He’s not even driven by a powerful and passionate Salieri-like envy. He hardly knows who Mozart and Salieri are — questions of copies and originals are lost on him. He is a sophisticated barbarian, the sophisticated part his mobile phone, the barbaric his message, which he films live and sends to other users. AA shouldn’t be underestimated. Don’t get all worked up, just meekly bow your head: this is his moment, his era, and his culture. While he sits there comfortably sprawled out over the seat, you stand there with your shopping bags thinking about him. There’s no need to worry about him throwing you overboard, if that’s what you’re worried about. His authentic “revolutionary” gesture is not invention, but intervention, not originality, but appropriation, not explosion, but implosion.
[1]The “steamship of contemporaneity” is a syntagm from the 1912 Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov), which called for the destruction of old traditional values in the name of a new future.
[2] Ibid, Kirby.
10. AND THERE IS NO END.
I just came across a newspaper story about the opening of a virtual “ABBAWORLD” in the Earl’s Court Exhibition Center in London. Visitors have their photos taken at the entrance so they can later buy an ABBA record sleeve with their portrait, or a poster on which they have swaggered their way into a group photo with the famous four. But that’s not all. Visitors will be able to get up on a stage with a spectacular three-dimensional holographic illusion, and sing with the virtual ABBA while watching themselves on video screens. Visitors will then be able to buy a DVD of their performance, so that back in their meaningless lives they can watch themselves and ABBA until their hearts are content. Forecasts suggest that this interactive mega-exhibition is going to attract millions of visitors. Abbasolutely fab, isn’t it?
Cultural managers, curators, festival and event organizers, cultural theorists and commentators all assure us that the concept of the professional artist, he who “knows knowledge,” belongs to the past; that the false cordon between the amateur and professional artist has finally given way; that the professionalization of art killed spontaneity and the fun of the artistic gesture; that amateurism is the only hope; and that today art finally belongs to the international creative masses.