To Be Enviable
Sept 2025
Sept 2025
When we move through the world, we are immanently reminded of what we do not have from a sensitivity to difference. In this state of ‘not-having’, circumstances might present as benign or neutral — the lack of a thing not occurring as something to consider. Other times, what intrudes is a mix of discomfort, desire, and resentment, becoming what we know to be as the feeling of envy. It is the burden that compares, reminding us once more that what we have is not enough to close the gap. An asymmetry folds into hierarchy, where those with the privilege of having are seen as hostile to the less fortunate. Here it seems that envy is not only a desire for a particular thing to be in our possession, but also a dislike of the other for having what we do not have. With the proper conditions, this tiny spark of distaste can swiftly erupt into a blaze of hatred. Bitterness and loathing preys on the one who realizes that ‘what they don’t have’ is ‘what they can’t have’.
Under examination, the envied thing splits into two objects — the thing itself, and the position of being enviable. However, in order to envy, the self needs to be threatened by a particular lack, an abrasion to the present moment of stability. It signifies for the subject what terrorizes its identity. The thing itself becomes enviable via comparison, a standard that positions us in a social order and offers relief through categorization. A cold shift, a warping of the space we inhabit, is to envy. The position of being enviable is what the thing itself represents for us, although it multiplies in meaning — as a desire to be enviable to others, as a fantasy that a certain satisfaction is final, as a confirmation of our self-image, and so on. To eventually have the thing itself is to induce amnesia, a visceral past sedated by possession. If misfortune places the envied thing outside our reach, envy intensifies and invades our being.
It is taboo to speak candidly about the fact that we are not simply wanting some tangible thing, material or otherwise, but rather that we want to numb a narcissistic wound. The collective attitude presumes that envy is an immoral feeling, a mark of immaturity, or an untamed greed. Our conscience sits with guilt and punishes us for straying from the long and narrow, imposing gratitude as a practice that can calm the drives of envy. To regain control, the envied subject must be eliminated from thought (‘I want what they have, not who they are to me’), as it is not the envied thing that we find threatening, but the other serving as a painful reminder of our lack. This gaping lack, this symbolization of what we are missing is a taunt from the side of idealism, a cackling of our misery. Mortified, we sit with shame and seethe. But repression is not enough. We must distort — through denial (‘I didn’t want that anyway’), antagonism (‘You don’t deserve this’), appropriation (‘I will have that for myself as well’), or sublimation (‘I will instead admire what they have’) to neutralize the sting. In a cycle of self-love and self-hate, the image of ourselves shifts between beautiful and abject. But if a momentary glimpse of our reflection presents as ugly, a tremendous inferiority flushes inward. Unattractive, we conspire and persecute the envied subject for having what we do not. To have is now an otherness, ownership becomes a vice.
To hold relation to an other is to risk feeling envy through paradoxes of sameness and difference. Uncomfortable in our own skin, we are disoriented by the neighbour and the stranger. The familiar becomes an uncanny doppelgänger — a sameness that shatters a unique identity, stoking the heat of jealousy inside us. In difference lies an alienation that exposes weakness or vulnerability, a foreignness. In our rumination, we imagine a future state of having — it pains us, yet sustains a mirage of hope, a glimmer. Industries of production seize this kernel, dressing it up as nostalgia — the air of simpler days. Seduced, we draw close and inhale... sucking in its scent, as it putrefies into envy.
On Secrets
Sept 2025
Sept 2025
A secret is a powerful instance of language that we discover early in life — it evokes an image where one’s voice is cupped by the hands and in a hushed tone, delivers a classified message to its receiver. It signifies privileged access to vulnerable information, a risk in its discovery by an unintended other, and the creation of social space based on exclusion and difference. In children, the contents of a secret commonly ranges from innocent gossip to romantic crush, but in transition into adulthood, the notion of a secret explodes and takes our innocence as collateral — morphing to include conspiracy, transgression, and betrayal. As outsiders to such a secret, we may be indifferent (‘that has nothing to do with me’), paranoiac (‘I’m afraid that it has something to do with me’), or resentful (‘I should be included’). In the formation of a secret, we are then introduced to three distinct parties: the secret-bearing holder, the recipient, and the excluded outsider. As such, it appears that what constitutes a secret is inherently in the positing of the outsider, present or absent. What was perhaps a neutral exchange between two parties, becomes secret when there is reason to hide from peering eyes. And if we are to situate ourselves as outsiders, the existence of secrets(without knowing their content) is enough to pluralize speech, introducing an ethics that complicates the relationship between honesty and deception.
Secrets are produced in a variety of ways. The first instance involves the recipient intuiting the sensitivity of shared content and sensing that if indiscriminately shared, would culminate in discord and distrust. The second case is more abrupt — when a message becomes a ‘secret’ retroactively and without the recipient’s awareness. The dilemma arises when the recipient realizes that in ‘giving it away’, what was shared inadvertently exposes the secret-holder. This example becomes particularly pertinent when ethics are later considered. Through a variety of signals, the recipient learns ‘the hard way’ that what was offered in conversation was not meant for outsider consumption. This classic case of miscommunication and misunderstanding is inherent to speaking beings since language itself is not a medium of complete transparency between the self and the other. A secret takes on the status of an object, where its value is tied intimately with exclusion, rendering its contents as secondary. Secrecy in this way becomes a form of currency, where each effort to keep itself hidden is a deposit of emotional investment, producing an increase in value — whereby leaking its contents results in total liquidation.
When the status of this object is known to be secret, it offers pleasures for all parties involved, including the outsider. The secret-holder and the recipient’s retention of the secret produces a gratification of concealed knowledge and an enjoyment of in-group membership produced by the frame of exclusion. In contrast to the secret-holder’s willful self-disclosure to others, the recipient’s nonconsensual revelation of a secret’s contents reveals a perverse underside that sabotages the social pact, showing a pleasure in a particular expulsion. The recipient in this way, ‘gets off on’ the secret by sharing it with others. Once a pattern emerges, it designates the regularity of gossip as a fetish. To prolong this sadistic satisfaction, the recipient must keep their own indulgence hidden for as long as possible — by monitoring the loyalty of ‘those who now know’ and checking with the possibility of the secret-holder finding out. A certain fascination with self-destruction and transgression emerges when the recipient shares the secret with the outsider. Despite being aware of the risks it poses to the relationship with the secret-holder, the recipient may succumb to the specific pleasure of sharing the secret, perhaps through some coaxing by the outsider (‘I won’t tell them that you told me’). Given their lack of membership, the outsider has greater possibility for shameless enjoyment — a unique vantage point of witnessing the live-action detonation of a relationship behind a screen of anonymity and uninvolvement. Here, we locate a sadistic quality in the outsider’s participation, found in the inattention to the possible erosion of another’s relationship, and a latent masochism in the recipient’s act of revealing, despite the likelihood of introducing distrust and paranoia to their relationship with the secret-holder.
Interestingly, the initial positions that structured the hierarchy based on an in-group/out-group distinction, now become inverted — power is no longer situated at the top by ‘those who know’ but by outsiders who have no stake in the secret’s circulation. In a sense, what was at first a pleasure produced by knowledge becomes the very threat to the secret-holder, although in a different form — as the knowledge of its exposure. In this way, the nature of the object-as-secret is both pleasurable and threatening. Tragically, the act of confiding has the potential to implode both secret-holder and recipient. It seems that here, the recipient is the weakest link. Betrayal, intentional or not, unclothes the secret-holder, turning them into a social exhibition for a voyeuristic audience. The utterance of what becomes a secret then becomes a kind of demand, a bind between oneself and the recipient, a promise not to be broken, an oath from which one swears silence. It implicates the other. In another way, we could see the secret-holder as holding a perverse position of power in relation to the recipient — handing them one half of enjoyment with an implicit prohibition not to enjoy the tempting latter half in their absence (‘You do not get to enjoy the pleasure of disclosure’).
Through an evolutionary lens, a functional account can be made for secrets. Sitting adjacent to blackmail and gossip, secrets seem to function like a social litmus test, a heuristic for determining who to trust and who to exclude. In this sense, the desire to share secrets is informed not only by an ancient history, but also by what it means to be a speaking self. If we are to imagine ourselves as children once more, are our secrets not simply expressions of what we really think and feel about ourselves and the world? If so, then the secrets we share as adults are perhaps defensive postures clothed as chatter or confession — a fear that a commitment to complete transparency and unflinching honesty assures self-destruction. What was at first a form of childhood expression is now a complicated strategy of self-preservation, where in the act of openness, we risk turning our vulnerability into an objectified plaything.
Subversion of the Artist: Psychoanalysis and Painting
August 2025
August 2025
A common convention in academic discourse is to challenge the artist (as painter) to explain the why of their practice — a demand for a justification for why one should make paintings at all. Here, the voice of an institutional power loops a productive yet anachronistic ritual, the periodic resurrection of painting’s corpse. The inquisition of the artist’s act parallels a particular saga within philosophy’s history, where a persistent ‘why is there anything at all’? is posed across millennia. In response to this dilemma, past thinkers have excavated the why to raise a more fundamental question of what it means to be. In this sense, the institutional why — framed as an exercise in articulation — overreaches, and seizes upon what is primordial for the artist. This overextension implicates ethics, as the artist is compelled to account for themselves, their motives, and their practice. In the historically shifting forms of the artist — as a servant of the divine, as a mirror of power, as part of the avant-garde, or decentered as an artist-as-brand (Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Murakami) — what broadly constitutes the artist becomes outsourced or siloed. However, when the unconscious from psychoanalysis is pulled into view, we’re presented with a wholly different picture of the artist — where the artist’s subjectivity comes to the fore.
‘Painting for its own sake’ connotes a practice that justifies itself, where both its means and ends feed into each other, and where the boundaries between the act and its cause dissolve. But prior to the disappearance of these boundaries, the artist was once a student with a particular set of motives and contexts, with only an inkling of know-how. In the burgeoning of the student’s familiarity with the medium, a need for knowledge appears. And insofar that we find need, we find a lack — as such, painting as an act is tied to learning as its partial cause. When the student finds their voice and presumes their artistry, they may see the cause of their practice as the mediation of autobiographical, biological, political, or social realms. Or, they may see the act of painting as self-sufficient and autonomous — perhaps indicating a suspicion that underneath the demand for justification is a reduction to mere conditions. Without diminishing the role of the artist (as subject), the terms of the act and its cause can be transformed through a psychoanalytic formulation. Here, the self-enclosed notion of painting as an act turns into fantasy, while the reductive materialist explanation dissolves the artist’s subjectivity — taken together, psychoanalysis locates the artist as a split subject.
Through this reframing, the act of painting can be understood apart from consciousness and material conditions — through the drive and jouissance. While these concepts are polyvalent in meaning, we can distill two important aspects that relate to the partial motive of the painting act, which is: the drive as the enjoyment of repetition itself and the drive as that which produces an excess of enjoyment (jouissance) on the level of the unconscious. In a practice, the completion of a painting may result in a satisfaction with the finished object, but this does not necessarily result in a complete and final satisfaction that exhausts the need to paint (which would dissolve the practice). The movement found in working on one painting to another, illustrates the drive’s enjoyment through repetition. Put another way, the question of when a painting is ‘finished’ directly connects to the ‘aimless’ character of the drive. Since its enjoyment is found in repetition and not finding its object (total satisfaction), a work that isn’t a ‘paint by numbers’ exercise exemplifies the always-incomplete state of the painting — a ‘finished painting’ is contingent on the circumstances of the artist. The repetition of the drive also produces jouissance, a transgressive enjoyment tied to an excess of pleasure, an intensity from being ‘too-much’. Practically, this appears as the accumulating fatigue of the body when a session of painting tips into longer studio hours or when frustration intensifies failure into self-flagellation. These are masochistic pleasures normatively veiled as virtues, an inversion that appears as the idiom of a practice serious enough to be viewed as monastic or ascetic. A commitment to a practice involves following our conscience or the psychoanalytic equivalent, as the superego’s imposition on the ego-ideal — from its place, a commandment is issued: to follow our passions (desire), to continue creating (drive), and to enjoy the suffering (jouissance) it comes with. What follows is that the engine of a practice is not fulfillment, but lack, repetition, and excess.
In this way, painting becomes a site of ethics in its connection with a narrative — producing an opposition between an affirmative, positive conception of the artist as presumed by the institutional why and the negative metaphysics tied to the psychoanalytic unconscious of the artist. In a Lacanian key, the artist is a tragic character with no stable self, caught in language yet unable to secure stability through it. The historic and contemporary elaboration of what an artist is predicates an identity bundled by intrinsic traits and external structures (signifiers) — the interaction of these elements (signification) is what produces the conception of the artist. Psychoanalysis posits that this image is fractured, where its appearance is found not in consciousness, but in the gaps between signifiers in the register of the unconscious. Consequently, this entails that the artist is a ghost, a spectre caught between the play of language. When institutional forces seek to grasp the substance of what an artist is, the psychoanalytic reply involves a productive fiction haunted by a tragic ethics of desire.
Making Sense of Our Time
August 2025
August 2025
‘Everything happens for a reason’. ‘Trust in the universe’. Expressions like these circulate widely — from Chinese fortune cookies to Horoscope blurbs to Broadway productions (as in Beetlejuice’s No Reason). They belong to a pattern of cultural representations that seek to stabilize our sense of past, present, and future by framing life through the lens of purpose. And while these platitudes might be overused, their subtexts suggest an anxiety that emerges when confronted with ambiguity. Despite their usage with irony, partial belief, or social circumstance, the critique of such clichés is hardly unfounded. However, the impulse to derive meaning from narratives about one’s own life or locate causality in personally significant events isn’t new. It’s equally symptomatic in cultural, religious, historical, and philosophical traditions — finding their form in destiny, predestination, revisionism, or determinism. While we might be soothed by the authority of modern science or the promise of transcendence, they come at the cost of shaping what we are permitted to desire or imagine.
Our views about how to situate ourselves across time expose a broader symptom — a desire for an underlying ideal or rationale that regulates our perception of events, relationships, or the self. This framework functions as an organizing principle that stitches together past experiences and imparts a sense of order and predictability. The past becomes less enigmatic because we’ve displaced part of its mystery by translating it into terms we can grasp. And in saying so, meaning becomes interrogated by sorting a prior experience within the network of our present understanding. In psychological terms, this is the way in which our beliefs about the world converge, and if that integration fails, instability appears as cognitive dissonance. Repression, denial, and distortion are the ego’s strategies to defend against the threat of randomness — and by extension, death itself. Our own frame of reference for the past also informs the way we look into the future, although in a different form. When we envision it, two vantage points appear: the future as viewed from the perspective of the present, and the present as viewed from a future self. Underneath this dual-conception of the future lies a retroactive logic that structures predictions — a necessity for self-preservation, both on the level of biology through adaptation and on the level of the psyche through fantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense). And while the function of imagination extends beyond mere survival, retrospection and forecasting holds a premium value within human history, even if the evolutionary forces that produced them aim toward preservation over objectivity. Over time, varying selections and transformations result in an evolved need for coherence — where stories morph into folk theories, which then codify into norms. This paves the way for social hegemony to materialize and parasitize on our vulnerability, extorting it through its own logic.
The adaptive strategies once primed around survival become retooled through socio-political structures — producing incentives and deterrents to pressurize conformity to existing paradigms. We find their expressions in the familial as parenting style, the cultural as productivity, the in-group as politics, or religion as denomination. The double-bind: belonging in exchange for a piece of our desire, or alienation in the pursuit of personal meaning. The connotation of virtue and vice finds inversions in collective societies — where prioritizing parental wishes over one’s own appears as duty or avoidance of a particular vocation upholds honour. These configurations offer a frame for which to make sense of our experiences — translating phenomena into legible units of meaning. The uptake results in our ability to plot the coordinates of our experience and compare them to pre-established notions of ‘the good life’ — offering us direction, but at the price of disputing our desires.
Beneath the weight of social demands and the pull of our personal wishes, lies a primal anxiety — the fear that without an external reference, our lives might amount to nothing. In an ancient history, death was our familiar guest. But we’ve hushed its presence — breaking it into smaller, manageable sublimations. If we wish to move past any guarantees, we can take a leap into the place where desire resides. Where instead of an eternal guarantor, we extend our sights forward and imagine our future self — looking back as witness to our present, steadying us against the void.
Dreams and Their Contents
July 2025
July 2025
From the drift of sleep to the moment of waking, we are roused from rest — by the ringing of an alarm, the rustlings of a partner, or the gentle lift from a well-tuned rhythm. We might not be so lucky each day. The visceral experience of a nightmare can jolt us into a fevered consciousness and leave us disoriented. As children, we may have enlisted an adult to interpret a dream’s meaning or lack thereof — to diffuse our anxiety. We might have been comforted by the idea that ‘it wasn’t real’, that ‘it never occurred’, or that it was because we ‘watched too much’ of something unpleasant. In much of contemporary life, we may be encouraged to ‘see right through’ the fiction of dreams. Since they occur in a different world, they are often ascribed little or no value. ‘Reality’ is what matters. Why spend time thinking about something that never actually happened?
In many historical traditions, even disturbing or frightening dreams were treated as exegetic material — where messages, prophecies, visions, revelations, insights, and truths could be gleaned. Today, the practice of interpreting one’s own dreams is seen to belong to the realms of pseudoscience, where its utility is solely for narrativizing and installing personal meaning. Approaches like defusion and decentering — drawn from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and mindfulness-based practices — echo a similar logic to the posture modelled in adulthood: regarding dreams as mere occurrences in sleep, without identifying with the contents or ruminating further on ‘what it means’. If a dream is experienced through a ‘perspective’ — whether through their own or someone/something/somewhere else — is the dream not their own? While self-identification with dream content may be counter-productive to the pragmatist, in what sense can we write it off as mental cinema? How can what occurs in our dreams have nothing to do with us? Whether the dreamer experiences depersonalization or an out-of-body state, the dream’s re-telling will always be located in the person who dreamt it. To insist on one’s ownership of their dream is not to claim that its contents hold hidden meanings or allegories. It is to affirm an ethic of remembering, because it is our relationship to dreams that ‘say something’ about us. The dream speaks, but it is our relation to its form that’s worth considering.
Unlike waking life, dreams have the power to induce us into unusually heightened subjective states. We might feel unsatiated, volatile, uninhibited, or removed, positioning us to act and perceive in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. Research indicates that nightmares occur more frequently in children, revealing that our methods for coping underwent great rehearsal. It is this particular repetition that informs how we might respond to the aftermath as adults. In order to manage the intensity of bad dreams or nightmares, we use a host of strategies — including but not limited to: disavowal (‘it was just a dream’), integration (meaning-making), repression (pushing the dream or its emotional charge out of consciousness), sublimation (a re-framing of overwhelming affect), or rationalization (explaining a dream’s content in logical terms). The fact that dreams lack coherence, causality, or stability suggests that these mechanisms function as necessary defences, operating as safeguards upon waking. But the knife twists when we realize that these protections are a response to an inheritance of a fundamental anxiety about dreams. This ties in with early childhood experience, where anxiety often functions like a currency — opting to trade it for a less threatening affect (displacement). The very fact that defences appear suggests that anxiety is a brush against death. In essence, defensive formations are safeguards against anxiety — they’re measures to create distance from the unbearability of confronting our own deaths. Our closeness with the objects of dreamt experience expose us to other threatening possibilities: as fulfillment of unconscious wishes in a disguised form (Freud), as the staging of our desire (Lacan), or our impotence to resolve failure (Cathy Caruth). The dream is issued from the place of our own subjectivity, but without our authorship. What Lacan calls extimate — the intimate, yet alien part of ourselves — names the structure of our relation to dreams.
In conscious life, our most reliable defence against death follows a logic of containment — a sense of safety secured by the frame of the thinking self. But within this lucidity, we quietly accept its offer: giving away our anxiety for the illusion of mastery, a promise made by the ego. Now, we are left to steer the vehicle alone — as subjects responsible for a route we neither chose nor fully understand.
Half-truths: When Our Tools Break
July 2025
July 2025
With the online circulation of art critique ‘hot-takes’, it only takes a glance to observe the polarization of opinions — condemning ‘woke’ art, calling out ‘money-laundering’, and a host of other laments from the ‘de-skilling’ of art education (‘my kid could do that’) to the perceived bankruptcy of works that fetch several figures in the secondary market. This cacophony of frustrations touches on a nostalgic longing for a ‘return to beauty’ uncontaminated by artspeak or market forces arbitrating aesthetic value. Yet beneath the harshness lies a deeper divide about how the meaning of art is negotiated. Within the art world itself, we find an orientation between two poles — one that prioritizes formal properties, and the other that foregrounds contexts, privileging institutional narratives and political imperatives. And while most figures and institutions of the art world communicate with both sides in mind, it is difficult to ignore how art discourse in practice privileges one over the other. When one particular ‘face’ dominates, what kinds of meaning slip from view?
This dynamic shapes the way we tend to think or examine any given art object. These two orientations of analysis pertain to what we might call their internal and external features. In reference to what is internal, we’re speaking to qualities like appearance or materiality — aspects that directly connect to the object’s particular composition or inhabitation of space. In contrast, the external mode of thinking is a focus on context, where an object’s subject matter or political positioning, for instance, is of primary concern. Across Western thought, we see a recurring oscillation between these two perspectives, as evidenced through Plato’s transcendent forms, Kant’s immanent purposiveness, or Clement Greenberg’s medium-specificity (later coined as formalism by critics). Unsurprisingly, history has shown that we have a particular penchant for binaries. Art critic Hal Foster confronts the dualism in his Return of the Real (1996) by calling attention to contemporary art’s reintroduction of traumatic and bodily concerns, as evoking the Lacanian Real, where the Real is ‘what resists symbolization absolutely’. Here Foster aims to move beyond the binary, yet remains entangled in the opposition, since attempts to embody what can’t be symbolized inevitably returns to representations — a deadlock that may leave audiences untethered.
A functionalist account of historically contingent modes offers counterpoint to our relation with art objects. Heidegger’s concepts of ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit) and ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) in his seminal Being and Time, are apt here. He elaborates with an analogy of a ‘hammer’ — that in its use, recedes into its means to drive nails (ready-to-hand) rather than appearing as a hammer in itself. However, if it were to break, then the hammer would reveal its thingness (present-at-hand) — where its function as a tool surfaces through its broken state and inability to perform its ‘intended’ task. In the reading of Avant-Garde works — Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Krasner, Rothko) or Modernism (Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh) — the formalist frame of the picture structures our enjoyment seamlessly. Its function as a tool for examining features like colour or texture slips beyond our awareness. And while we might be able to appreciate the scintillating character of ‘colour fields’ or point to the flickering of imprimatura grounds, administering the same application of thought to a Kehinde Wiley portrait (without reference to European historical painting and the ‘Black’ experience) or Anselm Kiefer (without connection to Nazism and the Holocaust) would expose its limits. Here, the formalist framework reveals its thingness — as a theoretical construct with visible seams. This realization suggests that the tension between internal and external interpretations might dissolve if we thought of these perspectives simply as tools, rather than as mediums channelling any final truth about art objects.
Ironically, this might say more about human nature than the nature of art objects. Whether it’s our attitude about institutions mobilizing art for activistic ends, or devotion to essentialist ideas instituting ‘real art’, let us be under no illusions — these are interpretive frameworks, not pathways for art’s ‘true nature’. When our ‘tools’ break, it is us, not the objects of art, that are suspect for examination.
Mythologizing
July 2025
July 2025
The confronting ‘What do you want to be?’, posed to us in early life, echoes across our lifespan. What begins as a question about our vocational aspirations soon becomes distorted, taking on an existential weight. It plants an unconscious seed — an anxiety of what one ought to be as an adult. As children, we respond to this ‘innocent’ prompt by choosing what’s most salient, which is often what becomes enacted or fantasized in play or modelled by those we aspire to be like. The question about how we might imagine our future position inserts a quiet teleology about our ‘purpose’ and finds itself popularized in culture as: What’s the meaning of life? And while it’s taken on an ironic status amongst Millennials and Gen Z’s, the question still finds its form, albeit repressed and sublimated through career aspirations, romantic relationships, and other narratives of fulfillment. This pressure to ‘be something’ seeps deep enough into ordinary ways of thinking that it risks opening simple creative gestures to evaluation and judgement.
Through schooling or the conditions of the home, we may be encouraged to pick up a pencil or a brush and told to express ourselves. These acts quickly entangle with notions of ‘creativity’ and are evaluated by praise, disapproval, or indifference. Over time, their appraisals lead us to associate these acts of mark-making with the artist, a cultural representation that quietly appropriates exploration and curiosity on the page. With enough internalization, an inner critic emerges and demands we do better or give up entirely. Many of us fall into this trap of over-determining what might otherwise remain an ordinary act of exploration and oppressing ourselves by comparison with the ‘genius’ of the artist. From birth, this ‘person’ is endowed with a gift of knowing, fluency, and self-transparency. Insofar as we think this way, we alienate ourselves beyond the margins of this conception of the ‘genius’ artist. We respond to self-defined notions of failure and success through negotiation and re-negotiation of such terms — inciting a masochistic circling around our identity. This evocation of ‘who is’ and ‘who is not’, elevates the artist status through imagined scarcity and predestination.
Creation ex nihilo — ‘creating out of nothing’ — assumes the originality of the artist as an independent being. It imagines them creating spontaneously without aid, reference, or dependence on predecessors or collaborators — instead, operating alone and citing divine or spiritual intervention, or enshrining their ego as the wellspring of ideas. In the digital world, this narcissistic trope of originality manifests more broadly in ‘celebrity culture’, IYKYK (if you know, you know) influencers, and narratives that grandstand tech-billionaire founders (Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos). Through various forms of media, we can call to mind the hyperboles of the ‘tortured’ artist — the apparent necessity of mild to severe mental illness for creating ‘works of art’ or depictions of substance abuse and alcoholism amongst artist-types framed as ready-states for inspiration — further perpetuates this motivic relationship between deteriorated mental well-being and artistry. From advertising to film, popular media is saturated with these stereotypes, which raises broader concerns — how do we want to think of ourselves, and by extension, others, in a culture that reveres mythologies that confine and overdetermine identities?
The Subject of the Artist
July 2025
July 2025
’Thinking through paint’ is the kind of innocuous expression one might hear in an artist talk or interview. It gestures towards what can’t easily be named. And among artists, this idea appears self-evident — painting itself is the ‘thinking’. In the studio, the artist’s engagement with their medium(s) unfolds as a complex, layered process, where embodiment precedes language, where ‘thinking’ occurs without words, and where the terms of one’s practice folds back into the act of creation itself. It’s then no surprise that we reach for these studio-born idioms to capture a part of this private experience.
Julia Kristeva’s semiotic knots this more tightly — that the ‘thinking’ of this kind can situate itself in the body as a felt drive or an undercurrent that expresses itself through language. By contrast, the ‘thought’ in everyday thinking is directed towards particular objects. The artist’s ‘thought’ is located in a kind of flow state, where the subjective experience of “I” recedes. But if the unconscious is that which appears in slips, jokes, or dreams, and the “I” is what appears in self-consciousness, what can we say about who’s doing the ‘thinking’ at this level? Perhaps we already sense that language struggles to translate these experiences into ordinary terms. So, maybe, you just had to be there.
Audiences often make genuine efforts to engage with a given work through feeling, reflection, and analysis. But Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum challenges what it means to come away with a sense of having got it. What feels like comprehension may well be a response to a simulation. Formal considerations like line or shape in a painting can be examined, or an artist’s experiences empathized with, but if our ideas about Art exceed illustration or reproduction, then what does it mean to ‘know’ a work at all? Perhaps the remedy to this impasse is to resist mastery altogether and let the work remain opaque, without demanding resolution.
However, in an attention economy that privileges speed over slow-burning meditations, it’s evident that this productive logic seeps into our after-work lives, turning leisure into labour. It’s no wonder, that some aspect of our relationship to Art too, seeks comparable immediacy — a 2001 study conducted at the MET indicates that the average museum-goer spends around 27 seconds for a given work (consider how much shorter that time might be today). Consumer conveniences like same-day shipping (Amazon) or AI-personalized algorithms (Tiktok, Instagram) quietly displace our patience and tolerance — traits to be kept in check if we want to stay vigilant against the creeping expectation for faster returns on our attention. In practice, the anxieties and apathies found in the art-viewing experience seem to relate in part to their legibility and relatability. Even the opacity, and at times, outright obfuscation of gallery wall texts, further amplifies our desire for clarity. Yet the artist who refuses explanation, leaves the viewer without much scaffolding, risking the same charges of mysticism they sought to resist.
Speaking about one’s own work is like creating a scene in a film: show, don’t tell. The audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed, but inspired to imagine and interpret in the spaces our speech leaves open. To quote Edward Hopper, ‘If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’