“I’m starting over,” the artist said, when everything had been exhausted.

In the contemporary attention, network & project economy of cultural production we are always beginning anew. Our lives, especially in terms of career & progress, are in a continuous process of starting over against a technological backdrop that is continually starting over. This is how we regenerate as artists, by starting over, staying relevant while growing old. Virtual virality is the new biological order.

Starting over contrasts with consistency in the marketplace of value. The artist’s artist is always starting over. Yet, over time, the artist’s artist or the sell-out strive to arrive at an artistic identity that is not only commercially viable but also less destructive. An identity that we find peace in, avoiding the constant dismantling of our identity and, with it, our market value. Starting over is akin to adolescence, when we repeatedly find ourselves in other people to become a Frankenstein of fraternal bits & pieces of others.

Starting over knocks on the door every few years. I’ve been a painter, an artist, an art critic, only to renounce it all, working under pseudonyms, like “iamnotapainter”, repeatedly splitting off into two identities so as to feel free to make art & write critically under the gaze of strangers not family or friends. It’s like Stewart Lee’s stagecraft, who adopts the persona of “Stewart Lee the comedian” who views the audience as the problem, not the joke. The other is the blame in the give & take of cultural production. The artist can’t put themselves on the line. They make objects to take their place.

Starting over happens to those artists who are not under contract but are striving for contracts. Such uncontracted artists break things until they find something more consistent, more them without being them. The original fetishist needed a contract to get his trills by way of the other’s punishment & withholding of love. Yet the fetishist wrote the script for the other to follow under contract. In this moment of extreme narcissism & individualism, the other is the trace of footsteps in the white remainder of the avalanche of the virtual.

📷Victor Man, Certain Way To Fade Away (detail), 2006.