The Artist As Ambassador
A new kind of artist is emerging—one who harnesses and focuses the energies of a scene.
In the past, a master painter might command a workshop of apprentices. The master painter, in a quasi-managerial role, handles high-level vision and planning work, but delegates out much of the actual painting to his workshop. The workshop is an highly bounded economic unit, with formal admissions processes and pay.
This new breed of artist emerges from subcultures that are already producing art, often for themselves, without any formal economic structures supporting them. Rather than slowly working up, over a lifetime, to the status of master painter, this artist self-elects as “focusing” and aggregative force, purely by fact of prodigiously collaging everyone he comes into contact with.
In the past, it was common that one or a small handful of artists from a given scene would mainstream. Although their aesthetic sensibility and style were developed alongside and in discourse with the scene, these artists were members of the scene; they did not explicitly take the scene itself as subject for representation.
This new breed of artist explicitly takes the scene itself as subject for representation. He focuses scene creativity, and converts oral culture to text, meatspace to cyberspace. He may resemble an ambassador and translator between the subculture and the mainstream. He may resemble a museum collector, or an art curator, or a collage artist. He may resemble a looter, an exploitative capitalist, a Judas. Traduttore, traditore, the expression runs—“Translator, traitor.”
The prototype for this new kind of artist is Andy Warhol, with his Factory & Superstars. Today, due to the proliferation of “worlds” online, this position is becoming increasingly common as a form of cultural arbitrage across subcultures. Artists are beginning to mine 4chan, degen Discords, and meme subreddits for textual sources, often compiling quasi-documentarian for later showing. The creative energies of virtual worlds (e.g. Eve, Second Life) are being compressed into gallery shows. One of the best examples of such an artist today is Angelicism01; we can excerpt here from Sierra Armor’s essay on his recent Film01, which takes scene-girls as its subject:
I have never been in a movie before, but, like all girls, I desired to be in one… When I heard a clip of an authentic voice message I sent Angelcism, begging him to put me back in the movie, I felt slightly nauseous…
These girls are filming themselves for Angelicism01 to watch, for the world to watch. I act supremely awkward in all of my footage because I already felt hyper-seen. Angelicism itself, in contrast to the girls of Film01, is invisible… During dinner I thought, but didn’t say; Isn’t it insane how the thing that brought us together is the only thing that’s missing? Isn’t it kinda beautiful tho?
