Toward a More Radical Selfie

Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012

We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as a product: what it means, who owns it, what it costs, what it’s worth. The word celebrity suggests that this value can be quantified and, generally, stands as a catch-all term for the collective disorders (disembodied  desire, objectified anxiety, schadenfreude as catharsis) underpinning a cult of self. As two of the leading lights in male egomania, Elon Musk and Kanye West, enter ecliptic phases of digital self-harm, we see that a long-standing crisis is coming to the fore of the treatment of ourselves as characters. The similarity of their breakdowns is uncanny and no doubt representative of a broader crisis in charismatic authority nationwide. Like failed children of the Lacanian mirror stage, the reflection of their own, simplified self-image precipitates a meltdown instead of a progression.

Yet this era was heralded years earlier, in 2007, when