This book deals with a phenomenon we propose calling the “mediatization of the artist.”1 With mediatization , we refer in the first instance to the presence of visual artists in the mass media and the active usage of those media, from the written word to the moving image , by various agents in the cultural field—including artists themselves—with the overarching goal of producing a certain image of the artist . Mediatization is a neologism coined to express how the (real or imagined) possibility of being seen—by the public, by journalists, critics, art historians, photographers, filmmakers, and so on—already shapes the image of the artist , his or her practices in the studio , and, especially, the artist’s discursive and performative self-presentation. It means more, therefore, than just the “appearance” of the artist in different forms of media, and is designed to indicate an interaction between the diverse actors in this appearance—including the media themselves and their specific ontological and technical conditions.
In many ways, The Mediatization of the Artist is an extension of work begun several years ago, when we, together with Ann-Sophie Lehmann, co-edited Hiding Making—Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean.2 Both books have grown out of our mutual fascination with the image of the artist and the ways in which painters and sculptors throughout the ages (but especially since the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) have sought to represent what it means to be an artist; the Germans have a perfect but unfortunately untranslatable word for this, namely Künstlerschaft. One might even say that one of the obsessions of artists in the modern period is a search for ways and means of expressing a range of ideas regarding their self-conception as artists .
In Hiding Making—Showing Creation we explored the ways in which the studio , whether real or represented, has been used as a foil for changing and evolving notions of artistic identity. That anthology demonstrated the continuing importance of the artist’s place of work as a theme of study for those of us seeking to understand the artist not as a kind of magical creator, but as a social being embedded in a network of ideologies and economies that determine how he or she creates and, moreover, operates in the world beyond the studio walls.3 It is exactly this latter aspect that we wish to further investigate in the current volume: the image of the artist as it is produced beyond the studio walls, by the artists themselves or by others; and through the use of what was once “new media.” Our aim here is to examine how a wide variety of media function in artists’ image-formation: how artists both use and are used by “image-makers” in the production of a broad range of (often stereotypical) artistic identities. Hence the title, The Mediatization of the Artist , implies both an active and an interactive role for both the medium and those who employ and consume it.
The aim of the volume is to demonstrate how artists have used different media to produce (or, sometimes, correct) a certain image —although we do not mean to imply that there is one true image. Mediatization as a term and concept implies not only a constructed identity, but also one that may change depending on the medium used, the intended audience, and who is controlling it. Underlying this is the idea—developed by Bourdieu—that artists continually seek to conform to the myth of the autonomous artist, and the charismatic ideology of modernism.4
Mediatization may be understood as an important part of the (open or veiled) commercial strategy of artists and their representatives. Visibility in a variety of (mass) media means a larger possible market. Of course, not all artists are comfortable with a deliberate commercial strategy, using their own persona in the promotion of their art, but since the late eighteenth century it has become something of a necessity. Diminishing patronage, the rise of the middle classes, and the increasing dominance of the market in both the production and circulation of art objects created a figure Oskar Bätschmann has called the Aususttelingskünstler (exhibition artist)—the artist who can only promote his art to a more or less anonymous audience through exhibitions, competitive venues that necessitated a certain public imago in order to stand out from the crowd.5 This development parallels the rise of mass media, from newspapers and photography in the nineteenth century to film in the twentieth. As Sarah Burns examined in Inventing the Modern Artist (1996), mass culture, commerce and consumerism had a tremendous effect on the public image and self-representation of visual artists in the nineteenth and (early) twentieth centuries. As Burns notes, through “new media” such as photography and newspaper interviews, artists learned how to “package themselves” to interest an audience in their work: “The publishing industry helped make reputations and establish canons, rendering the artist a public, media-generated figure. Concurrently, artists learned to manipulate the media to their own advantage.”6 The focus on artists’ personalities was not a solely American phenomenon—the focus of Burns’ study—it was present in Europe as well.7 By the end of the nineteenth century, artists were being discussed not only in exhibition critiques, but were also present in the visual media through portraits, cartoons, and illustrations. Most artists collaborated in interviews, posed for photographers, or tried in other ways to promote or even manipulate their public image . Burns dates the rise of the artist as a public figure to around 1850:
Whether courting publicity or shunning it, the artist […] had to confront an unavoidable fact of modern life; in addition to being a producer of aesthetic commodities, he (or she) had to become a commodity as well – a consumable personality , fodder for a curious public never satisfied for long.8
In a study on the self-representation of Victorian artists , Julie Codell similarly noted that British artists became public property by the end of the nineteenth century: “products to be circulated and consumed.”9
Of course, when dealing with the public and a strategy of public image-making the aim is not always commercial; numerous artists have also used the media to control or manipulate the way their work was interpreted conceptually, and—specifically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—to reflect on these images or make them an integral part of their artistic identities. This was the strategy employed by Andy Warhol with his seminal magazine Interview, and his own evasive way of answering interviewers’ questions, and currently by Ai Weiwei, who uses all types of media to express his activist vision of art and society. Although we are aware of the concept of “self-fashioning,” a term devised by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (1980) and used in his discussion of Renaissance authors, we prefer the concept of mediatization , as it allows us to focus explicitly on new or mass media and excludes other possible means and media artists and others may use to shape public or artistic identities, such as, for example, autobiography .10 Moreover, we wish to draw attention not only to the artist , but also to other agents acting in this discursive field.
The term mediatization may suggest a relationship with the concept of remediation, as discussed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation. Understanding New Media (1998). They, however, are primarily concerned with new (digital) media such as the Internet, virtual reality, and computer graphics in relation to earlier media like photography , film, and television , and argue that the new technologies “refashion” or “remediate” these earlier forms. What they mean is that photography based itself on genres, conventions, and motifs that already existed in painting—for example, early portrait photography of artists strongly resembles the way in which they were previously portrayed, or portrayed themselves, in painted portraits.11 In studying the image of the artist , for example through the influential Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (1979/1934) by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz , we can see that certain topoi or recurring motifs in artists’ lives are indeed present in both painted portraits and photographs of artists, as well as in biographical motion pictures. This remediation of artists’ topoi will indeed be discussed in several of the essays in this book, but we want to stress that the concept of mediatization itself focuses on the use ...