In his book En public. Poétique de l’autodesign,¹ Russian theorist Boris Groys describes a world in which we are no longer satisfied with the old dividing line between producers and consumers insofar as most of us have since grown preoccupied with auto-poiesis or self-creation. This trend is not so new. According to Groys, it began with the death of God and the emergence of the avant‑garde artist who sought to transform his or her life into a work of art. If we are to believe Groys, the aestheticisation of life would therefore go hand in hand with the death of God. So is he right? I would say so, insofar as modern people no longer seem to care about their afterlife, but rather about the number of likes or followers they have on social media. But that doesn’t mean God is any less effective. A father, Freud teaches us, only becomes truly powerful after his death.

In Dieu: La mémoire, la technoscience et le mal,² French philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem notes, through an immanent conception of God, that Big Data is God and that the internet is merely his chapel. If we take Belhaj Kacem’s hypothesis to the extreme, can we then consider artists and all the other stars of our time who have turned their lives into works of art as the new saints of this digital chapel? Was it not Athanasius of Alexandria who asked: ‘Did God become man so that man could become God?’³

From a materialist point of view, it is easy to see that in the art world, self-design has become a way of nullifying the old alienating relationships between artists and mediators. This new trend implies that it is no longer ‘the viewer who makes the work’, but artists themselves; indeed, not only that: the basic material of artists is themselves. Their greatest desire: to create a world of their own. Take Marina Abramović, for example. In 2010, she created The Artist is Present, one of the most striking performances of all time. For seventy-five days at the MoMA in New York, Marina Abramović sat for seven hours a day at a table in the atrium, dressed, depending on the day, in a long red, white or blue dress, and offering herself to the gaze of visitors like a living statue, silent like a goddess receiving visitors in her temple. Some cried with emotion, others came back again and again, shaken, sometimes eliciting the same reaction from Abramović, who leaned towards those who seemed to need her most, taking them by the hand. In this way, the artist became a mirror, a therapist, a confidante, a point of reference. Shortly afterwards, in 2012, she was drawn into The Life and death of Marina Abramović, a larger-than-life quasi-opera directed by Bob Wilson, in which Abramović the person and Abramović the artist are perfectly aligned in a grandiose vision of life and death. Then came the most difficult stage of all, one that can take a lifetime: the art of ridding oneself of the ego using a full suite of Buddhist methodologies. That this should come from an artist who has almost become a brand name may seem paradoxical. But Marina Abramović has always been a master of paradoxes, founding in 2023 the Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI), which aims to help human beings evolve their consciousness through performance art. Since then, the institute has encouraged interdisciplinary collaboration and union between practitioners of all disciplines, including art, science, technology and spirituality.

Marina Abramović’s art has been accused by critics such as Jerry Saltz of being too narcissistic and exhibitionist, while critic Christian Viveros-Fauné believes she risks ‘triggering a pandemic of narcissism in the art world which could, if nothing is done, turn into a serious mental health emergency.’⁴ This recurrent criticism of the artist’s presence in their own work fails to take account of the fact that all artistic creation depends on a certain degree of narcissism. But what is meant exactly by narcissism?

Psychoanalysis presents narcissism as a powerful unconscious force in one’s psychic life. Sigmund Freud described the charm of the narcissistic child and of certain animals that seem not to care about us, such as cats and large birds of prey, and also mentions great criminals and humourists, but does not include artists on this list. But Freud was the first to associate art with narcissism when he observed that artists tend to withdraw into their fantasy life to the detriment of their investment in reality, a behaviour he describes as a kind of ‘narcissistic withdrawal.’

There is, however, a way out of narcissism, he holds, when the artist finds the path that leads him or her back from this world of fantasy to reality, turning fantasies into new realities. ‘This is how the artist really becomes the hero, the king, the creator, the beloved he wanted to become without going through the enormous diversions of actually transforming the outside world.’⁵ Freud therefore sees a clear dividing line between art and life, real life and imaginary life, which is not at all the case for writers like Oscar Wilde who, through his characters, sought to turn his life into a work of art.

But turning one’s life into a work of art comes at the price of an over‑exaggerated self-esteem that risks ridicule, as La Rochefoucauld once described in his Réflexions:

The same could be said of an Influencer, or even a garden-variety Instagram user. Are we living in an age of widespread narcissism? On the Internet, via microblogs and forums, everyone seeks to tell their own story and give their opinion on every- thing. As for political and social commitment, altruism, like virtue, is nothing more than ‘vice in disguise,’ to paraphrase La Rochefaucauld.

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