The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism.
—Christopher Lasch (1979).
When people today speak of “real life,” what they usually mean is the global media market. And that means: The current protest against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in the name of aesthetic equality but is, inversely, aimed at stabilizing and entrenching currently prevailing tastes.
—Boris Groys (2006).
The badaud and the flâneur share superficial similarities. The latter Parisian social type was a keen observer of modern life, often regarded as synonymous with the modern artist-poet. Though both are part of the crowd, the badaud — prone to gawking and idle curiosity — is of the crowd, moved by its whims and attentive to its rhythms.
The following is a speculative attempt to summarise a pervasive turn toward badauderie in criticism, offering a partial tracing of its lineage/s and coherence with broader trends. Traditionally, the badaud does not write. He observes, open-mouthed, gaping as if he plans to swallow the spectacle whole. However, in lieu of value judgements and connoisseurship, passive observation and trivial thrills are increasingly present in art and cultural criticism today. Just as social media offers a play-by-play of the lives of others, critics regularly punctuate reviews with in-crowd references, personal anecdotes and stuff their friends said. We therefore must ask: is anything subversive or informative achieved with social reportage and self-referentiality, or is this a stale formula that might subjugate aesthetic experience and the nuances of art to the tabloid draws of ‘real life’ and ‘true stories’? Scene reports, personal essay-style art reviews, anecdotal retellings of the reviewer’s journey through the gallery and edu-tainment ‘art history’ TikToks might fall into this category.
Though the quasi-democratic terrain of the internet has bolstered the trend, its trajectory is more indebted to nineteenth-century literary culture than one might expect. New Journalism — a subjective, literary journalistic style that came to prominence in the 1960s-70s — is its nearest precedent. The style is associated with writers like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson. Despite its novelty in post-war culture, its most famous art critic, Dave Hickey, asserted that the style merely ripped off Victorian era social reportage.1 Indeed, the journalistic flair of the Victorian era has an allure for many. As Morley Musick laments of his own writing aspirations: ‘What I really wanted to be was a 19th-century journalist, which is to say, hardly a journalist at all—just someone who wanders around a city recording trivial observations and inventing lies.’2
What was significant about New Journalism, however, was that it undermined the aura of celebrity by presenting a perspective that wed informed criticism with insider knowledge. The author, who had access to the person behind the art, could counter the public persona by revealing the artist’s foibles and inconsistencies in a way that could potentially expose something valuable about their art or the operations behind it. It also helped when they were not, like the badaud, an elevated fan or petty rival. Memorably, rock journalist Lester Bangs called his hero Lou Reed ‘a prick and a jerkoff’ while praising his music, managing — to an extent — to separate the art from the artist.3 In her work, Chris Kraus represented the nastiness and exploitative core of the New York art world in the 1980s with brutal clarity. Badaud writing, however, often becomes an extended practice in networking: of mentioning the right people, flattering them, or establishing hierarchies by signalling a kind of possession of others through the objectifying act of documentation. It is a little like tagging people in a group selfie. Accordingly, this kind of writing often emulates the very patter of conversation one suffers at such events. This is because it is born from the same motivations that drive social performance. In this way, badaud writing is a perversion of New Journalism, a return to the indulgence in spectacle and auratic elevation the genre was established to counter.
Though the artworld badaud would likely balk at commercial talk radio or edu-tainment television, they may not realise that their edgy podcasts and Substack subscriptions are often of the same species. In these parasocial forums, genuine insights about art, culture and social dynamics are buffered with prattle. Defenders of parasocial media argue that these playful modes help disseminate ideas that perhaps would not otherwise find a platform. Maybe so. It is true that autofiction, in the hands of competent writers, can offer psychological or literary insights. But when slang, topical references and the saliva-sodden mush of gossip scaffold discussion of art and culture, it tends to collapse into a bog where fact, opinion and insight lose their independent integrity.
Badaud writing and media uses informal language liberally. At its best, in its most organic manifestations, informality in prose can successfully cut through the pretensions and rigidity of technical writing, salvaging a meaningful encounter with art from the homogenising syrup of art speak. Too often, however, excessive informality is deployed as an imagined affront to seriousness: an adolescent act of defiance which relies on countering an obsolete stereotype of art and art writing as a preserve of the elites. Overloading a text with slang, references to micro-trends or celebrity figures might seem like a subversion of the seriousness and potential ‘inaccessibility’ of academic prose: a way of expressing one's ideas superior to plain English because it is steeped in the moment, in our present culture and ideas, potentially allowing the reader to ‘feel included’ by using familiar terminology and playful references. But this deference to the present may offer only further obfuscation and performative gesturing.
Rather than being liberatory, scene-conscious writing often constitutes another specialised (and exclusionary) language which attempts to signal knowing with information and buzz words rather than substance. Similarly, the desire to shock an imagined prudish bourgeois other drives the badaud writer to use expletives: ‘if I say “fuck” and “shit” it shows how passionate and renegade I am!’ they seem to imagine. Yet, this is also a rather long-established bourgeois convention, its complete acceptance in polite society signalled by the inclusion of ‘naughty words’ in the titles of best-selling self-help books and novelty coffee mugs.4 In a similar gesture, to feign everyman status, terms of endearment are regularly lifted from the working class. In the prose of the inner-city badaud, ‘old mate’ is the linguistic equivalent of distressed denim.
In badaud writing, slang and topical references deployed to impress the reader by establishing the author’s youth — or, more accurately, a burlesque of adolescence characterised by an overuse of slang and an over-investment in the new — betray insecure overcompensation. Expressions like ‘slay’, ‘cheugy’, ‘mothering’ and so on are more likely to flow uninterrupted from an insecure millennial than a puppy-fat plumped zoomer. This attentiveness, at its best, makes the aging badaud the ultimate kid — a shame-driven adherent of the status quo, or attuned culture maker. Remember, many creatives that define a generation are often on the cusp of, or belong to, an older generation.
Despite the cloak of faux transgression and eschewal of intellectual labour, discipline matters greatly to the scene-conscious badaud, as it does to anybody fickly concerned with external appearances. This disciplinary mindset also coheres with the creative managerial class’s love of making and enforcing rules (often through soft social control) and glee at identifying patterns. For example, punctuating sporadic near-insights, Dean Kissick makes pronouncements like ‘No one wears opaque clothing anymore’, or ‘Not many people wear bras, except as a statement top’.5 Sometimes this garnish might strike as throwaway commentary offered to capture the zeitgeist. However, along with recounting minor art world rifts, the lite taxonomising of micro-trends also demonstrates a desire to ‘live in a now’ with little sincere regard for history or posterity. Ironically, this tendency aligns well with both the well-worn lampoon on macho know-it-alls’ ‘I have a PhD in life’ and academia’s investment in ‘positionality’ or ‘embodied knowledge’ as research methodologies. This is not to suggest that the latter two methods are inherently flawed, but, rather, that they become convenient crutches for cynical, lazy writers, or those suffering under the pressures of neoliberal productivity culture.
Along with slang terms and gossip, the badaud writer often peppers their prose with references to counter-cultural checkpoints: ‘Dimes Square this’, ‘Bronze Age Pervert that’, or ‘Michel Houellebecq probo king lol’. These references are dropped to signal awareness; not intellectual, aesthetic or political alliance or intellectual engagement — an important distinction. Edgy figures or subcultures suffice as props for the artworld badaud excited by the controversy surrounding them while transparently uninterested in their work or the lineage/s they operate within.
Like an attentive student dutifully parroting the textbook, it is a flaunting of a shallow shadow of knowledge — a superficial knowledge that is not tempered by discernment or insight. Knowledge, in this case, is a kind of ownership signalled merely by awareness of a topic by the undiscerning observer who enjoys the clout of having traversed cultural terrain deemed unsavoury or edgy. Crucially, this terrain is outside the knowledge base of normies with whom the author and their readers have a dialectical relationship. The author positions themself as cool and aware, taking the role of the fashionable insider, a pseudo-flâneur, with whom the reader can align themself. At the same time, an uninformed, imagined other (the normie) is conjured to represent a group that the author and their readership can feel superior to.
This tendency to present information, to flaunt it without offering thorough analysis or a defined stance, is a common problem across art writing.6 Appropriated from the creative writing maxim, many apply ‘show, don’t tell!’ very literally to art criticism. This tendency, prevalent in the work of the New Journalists, attracted a resolute critic in American historian Christopher Lasch. Rather than ‘fictionalising personal material or otherwise reordering it,’ Lasch levelled that the New Journalists had taken ‘to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations’ appealing, therefore, ‘not to the reader’s understanding but to his salacious curiosity.’7 In Lasch’s assessment, this preference for presenting undigested information signalled the contemporary writer’s inability ‘to achieve the detachment indispensable to art.’8
What kind of cultural objects does this culture foster? In a book-length account of his dispute with the Dutch collective KIRAC, French author Michel Houellebecq identifies ‘un Mal moderne générationnel’ (a modern generational evil) characterised by a ‘mania for recording everything, for constantly documenting’.9 KIRAC, who created a documentary on Houellebecq that inspired a prolonged legal battle between the writer and the documentarians, is an acronym of ‘Keeping It Real Art Critics’. But what is real? And is this ‘reality’ (offered through gonzo journalism, documentary footage and probing interviews) inherently better than art or written criticism at conveying ‘truth’? The events behind this controversy are not for debate here,10 but Houellebecq’s diagnosis of ‘a modern generational evil’ characterised by enthusiastic surveillance is pertinent.
The left were once suspicious of biopolitical control. A defining feature of post-war progressive discourse was the minimising of governmental and institutional access to personal information. As many commentators have noted, the left’s rigid adherence to Covid-19 restrictions and their close monitoring and punishing of others (for real or perceived non-adherence to an ever-changing set of rules) signalled an inversion of these politics.11 The widespread and often joyful indulgence in exposing people for minor infringements, leaking private messages or recounting embarrassing interpersonal encounters with others reveals an untempered enthusiasm for Orwellian surveillance, if it is in service of ‘the good’ as determined by current consensus values. In a sense, this tendency is a deafening reverberation of the 1970s feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. In this literalist interpretation, all aspects of the personal can be mined for meaning and the inconsistencies or transgressions of others can be wielded to undermine their entire person, oeuvre or belief system/s.
While non-academic writing often appeals to appetites for gossip or topical content, under neoliberal managerialism, the university increasingly privileges the facilitation of job-ready skills and interdisciplinary instrumentalisation over critical thinking or the life of the mind. That is to say, most creative work today is beholden to ‘real life’ or ‘the real world’. But how much can we know something from its skin, even if we probe the pores? Does high-definition pornography reveal the truth of sex? Maybe there is no poetry after Twitter, but recognising the inadequacy of the surface is crucial to eliding the traps of a pervasive literalism that is not only hostile to art but incapable of appreciating the nuances of emotional life, its irreconcilabilities and occasional unknowns: necessary voids that are honoured by convincing art and writing.
[1] Dave Hickey, ‘Dave Hickey: The God Ennui’, School of Visual Arts, 28 May 2021, footage of a lecture recorded 9 September 2009, 29:29 - 29:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0x5IDjQLNs.
[2] Morley Musick, ‘The People on Buses and Trains’, n+1, 6 February 2024, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-people-on-buses-and-trains/.
[3] Lester Bangs, ‘The Bells’, Rolling Stone, 14 June 1979, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/the-bells-192254/.
[4] See New York Times bestseller Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (New York: Harper, 2016).
[5] Dean Kissick, ‘The Art Party Carousel’, Spike Art Magazine, 12 May 2021, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/the-downward-spiral-the-art-party-carousel; Dean Kissick, ‘Fall’, Spike Art Magazine, 9 September 2020, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/the-downward-spiral-fall.
[6] Dave Hickey levelled that art critics were increasingly becoming art describers or biographers. Dave Hickey, ‘Lecture: Dave Hickey ‘The Age of the Art Fair’’, Institute for Research in Art - USF, 3 June 2016, footage of a lecture recorded 22 February 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HBcQ6XJsSE.
[7] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979), p. 17.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Michel Houellebecq, Quelques mois dans ma vie: Octobre 2022 - Mars 2023, Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2023, p. 86.
[10] Houellebecq sued KIRAC after they released a trailer for a documentary featuring the writer in a state of undress with a young woman. KIRAC have orchestrated sexual encounters in their work before. For example, Honey Pot (2021) features conservative philosopher Sid Lukkassen having sex on-camera with a leftist student. While Houellebecq had consented to being involved in the documentary, he filed lawsuits against the collective in Paris and Amsterdam. Due to Houellebecq’s legal actions, the film has yet to be released. Notably, the generational commentary inspired by the controversy unambiguously reinforces a crucial underlying concern of Houellebecq’s project: a brutal reflection of the untempered disgust and contempt levelled towards the aging after the sexual revolution. For example, in his lengthy defence of KIRAC, founder of The Manhattan Art Review Sean Tatol described Houellebecq as ‘a bitter, vindictive, and depleted old man’ who ‘brings with him the stale air of the dead’, ironically echoing a Houellebecqian misandry. Regardless of the potentially cynical intentions behind Houellebecq’s involvement in the project, it is disingenuous — or extremely naïve — for KIRAC to express shock at the outcome. With a long literary career dotted with accusations of hate speech, Houellebecq’s hostility toward others is entirely conspicuous, as is his sublime (though generative) self-pitying. This attitude forged his entire literary identity. Considering this clear context, one might wonder if this ‘shock’ may be part of the pantomime of KIRAC’s creative image. Some have even speculated that the media storm could be a collaboration between the filmmakers and the writer. See Sean Tatol, ‘The Manhattan Art Review Goes to Europe: KIRAC vs Houellebecq’, Memo no.1 (2023-24), p. 65; Nina Siegal, ‘Trailing Michel Houellebecq From the Bedroom to the Courtroom’, New York Times, 1 June 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/arts/design/kirac-michel-houllebecq.html.
[11] See Blake Smith, ‘Are Conservatives the New Queers?’, Tablet Magazine, 9 December 2021, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/conservatives-new-queers; Edward Colless, ‘New Mutants’, in Agent Bodies (Melbourne: RMIT University Gallery, 2022), p. 24.
