The global cinema of the past decade or so has produced a number of incisive films on creative personae and their unquenchable thirst for public recognition, which leads them invariably down a path of self-immolation. Just a few recommendations from this growing canon include Mika Nanagawa’s Helter Skelter (Japan, 2012), Elina Psykou’s The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas, Gaspar Antillo’s Nobody Knows I’m Here (Chile, 2020) and now Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself (Norway, 2022). There will almost certainly be more to come on this theme, as humans become gradually more dependent on social acknowledgement and approval as the barometer of how well-lived their individual lives are (or if they are even, in fact, alive). The paradoxically anti-social nature of hyper-sociality, incentivized and encouraged by follower counts and the like, is now a phenomenon so common as to inspire such triumphantly idiotic takes as Emmanuel Macron’s recent attempt to lay the blame for the current French riots at the feet of “social media”. Elsewhere, stokers of apocalyptic geopolitical tension love to remind us of studies in which the dream occupation for American schoolchildren is to be a social influencer (whereas their supposedly less corruptible counterparts in China want to be astronauts).
Sick of Myself is one of the most recent, but not the only, cinematic product to skewer the decadence and apparent desperation of the present-day creative industries: there is a small but patiently expanding genre comprised of both fictionalized narratives (Untitled, The Square) and trenchant documentaries (see e.g. My Kid Could Paint That, with its none-too-subtle implication that spurned artists would be willing to sacrifice their own children to Moloch for the recognition they feel they deserve). Nevertheless, Sick… is a particularly remarkable entry in this new breed of cautionary fables for the hyper-social age: not just because the scenarios depicted in it are highly plausible, but because it colorfully dramatizes one of the stranger beliefs of some artists and “creative class” workers: namely, that they should have immunity from many of the fundamental laws of society while also seeking that society’s uncritical embrace.
The film’s anti-heroine Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is not an artist at the outset of the film’s action, though she is in a relationship with one (“Thomas Meinich,” played by Eirik Sæther). She clearly resents his success, which she partially enables by helping him to shoplift the furniture pieces from which he makes his pseudo-readymade sculptures. Curiously, Meinich titles his works with stylish lacunae of meaningfulness like “The Damage”, and his sponsoring gallery is the Cotard (incidentally, the name associated with a syndrome that causes the afflicted to believe that they are already dead – appropriate for a film exploring subjects who feel themselves to be the walking dead without the lifeblood of public validation).
The action in Sick… opens with Signe and Thomas wining and dining at an Oslo restaurant whose fare is clearly beyond their modest means. Thomas enacts a devious duck-and-dine scheme which allows him to bolt out of the restaurant with a bottle of $2,300 wine; and already we get clues as to the depths of Signe’s self-absorption when she insists on participating in this scheme only if she can announce, at an upcoming party, that she was the one who eventually escaped with the bottle rather than Thomas. At said house party, she converses with her journalist friend Marte (Fanny Vaager) on the essentiality of narcissism to making it in the world, and soon after a chance event (Signe getting soaked in blood when she aids a dog attack victim who stumbles into her café) cements her narcissistic desire to be at the center of any attention. Soon after, she will attempt to upstage Thomas’ post-art opening dinner by faking “nut allergy” to again draw attention to herself as a victim, and her success with this stunt leads her to research and consume huge quantities of a Russian drug Lidexol, which has been causing an unsightly skin disease to manifest in its users. Signe is able to procure some from a socially awkward friend who typically deals in less esoteric recreational drugs, and she is then off to the races.
As the Lidexol begins to do its malevolent deforming work on her body, Signe embarks on a series of laughably “best-case-scenario” fantasies that will be peppered throughout the film. She fantasizes about the sincerity of the mourners at her own funeral, and about the book that will eventually be published on her experiences (in one imagined reviewer’s eyes, it is as much of a national treasure as Hamsun’s The Hunger). She daydreams of her estranged father begging her forgiveness on national television (during which time she also exhibits her singing talent), and of course the conquered art rival Thomas tearfully prostrates himself before her, but she rebuffs his plea for her to be the subject of a future artwork – she is, after all, spending all her valuable time resources on a Balenciaga fashion shoot.
Initially her public relations successes are fairly modest; along the lines of musician Lars Lillo of the deLillos re-tweeting the newspaper article detailing her sickness - though eventually she makes her breakthrough to legitimate artistry, signing up with an “inclusivity”-oriented modeling agency and landing an assignment to model in a commercial for the gender-neutral clothing brand Regardless. At this point, she comically takes the opportunity to dispense with any inkling of humility, and mocks her close circle of friends for not having achieved a similar level of brand-name adjacency. However, as might be expected in a story arc like this one, Signe is not at all able to limit the extent of her self-affliction, with symptoms becoming much more ugly and aggravated than her short-sighted planning allowed for. Needless to say, things progress very differently than they do in her wild fantasies. Yet her ambitions merely grow with the worsening of her physical health, and (in ways similar to the doom befalling the main character of Helter Skelter mentioned earlier) Sick… presents an easily intuited moral message about the spiritual sickness of narcissism externalizing itself in very unflattering ways.
This message is, I think, one that will probably resonate with most of the viewing public, though there are other equally relevant threads to follow if this is looked at from the perspective of someone interested in the evolving social role of artists. For example, as psychopathic as Borgli reveals Signe to be, her actions are partly driven by a desire to beat her partner at his own game, in which the real defining feature of his artistry is not his constructions’ aesthetic value but the narrative animating them: in this case, the fact that his compositions are the product of literal theft from retail stores (a fact foolishly revealed by the artist to the local press). Both Signe and Thomas are inhabitants of an art / media ecosystem that allows artistry to extend to the planning of “situations”, and in which mental faculties (for decision-making, persuasiveness, or even deception) have long since been a suitable replacement for the traditional model of creativity having to do largely with craftsmanship. It’s a state of affairs that has been canonical within Western art since at least the time of Duchamp, and regularly refreshed with proclamations like that of Yves Klein (i.e. “a painter must paint a single masterpiece, constantly: himself…”)[i]
This art-historical shift wouldn’t, on its own, account for the types of outrages that real-life Signes may hope to perpetrate in order to solidify “artist” status, and to thereby be shielded by a socially acceptable context wherein even petty personal vendettas become acts of a dialogistic, critical nature. What would account for that, however, is art’s eventual refusal of its autonomous status with relation to other human industries: this was always a devil’s bargain that, while having the potential to be a genuinely critical undertaking and to broaden the variety of human expression and experience, also facilitated the marriage of art to other institutions with less noble aims. In particular, more recent enmeshing with public relations industries, themselves closely aligned with a mass media that incentivizes and profits from tragedy. It is a fictional P.R. duo, depicted in the aforementioned The Square,that trenchantly lays out the stakes involved when they are trying to pitch a marketing campaign for the unnnamed Stockholm museum featured in that film:
This project raises many interesting, topical, and humanitarian issues. But the challenge here is to cut through the media clutter. Your competition isn’t other museums – it’s disasters, terrorism, and controversial moves by far-right politicians.
In this conception, the “work of art” is a more or less negligible object or set of processes that occupies a space between those processes crafted by the p.r. teams and media agents: the act of narrative-building and the eventual documentation of public reactions. Of course, not all artists whose work feeds into this machinery actually intended to be complicit in this act, and a good number of art actions / events have capably turned this media apparatus back on itself in ways that range from sublime to hilarious. Yet, as Sick… suggests, it is particularly difficult to weed out bad actors and bona fide narcissists when they feel that their peers are not other artists, but rather other forms of media spectacle. We can only imagine how many artistically-minded psychopaths took composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s comments on the 9/11 terror attacks – that they were the “the greatest work of art that has ever been” – as an actual “positive review” of the events’ aesthetic quality, then setting out to conceptualize ways to equal this impact.
I feel that, in general, present-day artists and would-be artists understand that “p.r. as art” is just as easily a road to endless derision as it is to achieving fame, yet it still accounts for a great deal of the activity of the institutional art world. I also feel this would not be nearly as popular a route to take if there were other competing reward mechanisms in place. Herbert Read, one of the great chroniclers of abstraction in art, proposed a trinity of such means that keeps art thriving within society:
In a vital community, art is promoted in three ways: socially by appreciation, economically by patronage, and essentially by liberty. These are the three necessities upon which the life of art depends: appreciation, patronage, and liberty.[ii]
Following upon this realization, I’d argue that one of the main reasons for art thriving on public acknowledgement is the deficit we now experience in the supplies of both patronage and liberty. Sure, the presence of social media will always mean an increased lust for public recognition as a reward for one’s work, but this might be less so if these other factors mentioned by Read were playing a larger role. Patronage still exists for a select few, but can still be “a form of servile dependence, however enlightened the patron may be.”[iii] The absence of liberty, meanwhile, is more concerning, being in retreat in the very Western nations which comprise the official Art World: the governing bodies of the West invariably wish to promote themselves as bastions of expressive freedom, all the while leaning on a fascistic merger of corporate and State power to limit the types of public expression related to issues now including election transparency, public health officials’ conflicts of interest, and the justifications for potentially planet-consuming war. It is difficult enough to throw one’s hat into the art ring when concerned merely about peer approval, it is another thing entirely to be frozen by the possibility that uninhibited expression will result in demonetization, “de-personing”, imprisonment, or any of the other methods utilized by gangster regimes promoting themselves as human rights organizations.
So it is easy enough for aspiring artists to end up in situations where social acknowledgement and approval may be the main, or only, game in town. On its own, this is not really that much of a problem: perhaps it is eminently healthier to seek out responses in one’s own time rather than constantly keeping one eye on posterity. Yet the hilariously vindictive, self-aggrandizing conduct of Signe in Sick… raises a very interesting question with regards to all this: what happens when we have someone who insists upon social acknowledgement being the currency they are paid in, yet who believes the only purpose of the social body is to dispense with this payment? If art and life are to really one and the same, we have to accept that audiences and other external influences will be more than passive, non-communicative vessels, yet this is exactly what the Signe character sees them as: she treats potential collaborators as mere extensions of her will, she substitutes idealistic fantasies and daydreams of human interactions for genuine insight, and sets up carefully stage-managed “challenges” instead of submitting to rites of passage with more uncertain incomes.
As it comes to pass, her artificial challenges do wriggle free from her and bring about her final downfall, and the visual sequences depicting this are a nauseating but capable metaphor for all the worst that the official art world has to offer. Whatever schadenfreude viewers might get from this willl be short-lived when realizing just how many real Signes are waiting in the wings, bearing with them a highly infectious spiritual malady.
[i] Klein, Y. (2007). “The Monochrome Adventure” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein. Trans. Klaus Ottmann. Putnam CT: Spring Publications.
[ii] Read, H. (2002). To Hell With Culture. New York / London: Routledge Classics.
[iii] Ibid.