The artist serving as his or her own art form is hardly a new phenomenon. Andy Warhol is remembered as much for the wigs and the blank responses to interview questions as for his soup cans and screen-printed repetition. Yet this branding of the artist as the product itself dovetails all too well with a contemporary culture fixated with transient fame and unwarranted celebrity. Ours is, after all, an age in which celebrity no longer requires even the pretence of achievement or charm. Set against such an environment, the artist-as-art phenomenon lies somewhere between a metaphysical statement and an egomaniacal disorder.

The work of Laurie Anderson is, arguably, Laurie Anderson herself, and her performances are largely autobiographical in nature, but her ironic fireside narratives are tempered by technical craft and musical concerns. From early performances that consisted of standing motionless, wearing ice skates embedded in frozen blocks, Anderson has taken her hands-on approach through song-writing and instrument design to multimedia spectaculars. Her lilting wordplay may often be oblique, but at least Anderson knows one end of a violin from the other.

Emin, however, belongs to a long line of performers who have cannibalised their own lives for public consumption, scrambling for our attention (apparently in any form), while offering no significant reason for us to watch for very long. Conceptual artists are, perhaps by definition, prone to this predicament. Conceptualism’s retreat into theoretical abstraction has effectively left the artist alone in the spotlight. With images and objects rendered all but irrelevant by a mix of academic doctrine and cynical self-awareness, all that remains is the thinker of the thought, or the perpetrator of the prank.

Famed for allegedly stalking her critics rather than for any particular aesthetic insight, Emin is a ‘Professor of Confessional Art’ at the European Graduate School. Let us hope that her self-preoccupied students have developed rather more fascinating personal lives to publicly excavate. No indignity seems too great for such desperate talents, but then a lack of shame is a defining trait of the textbook egoist. Indeed, Emin’s work records nothing if not a kind of autistic condition, in which the artist appears unable to conceive of art as anything more than a means of attracting personal attention. Stricken by a tragicomic mismatch of ego and ability, the results of this insatiable self-regard call to mind a petulant child, kicking at the floor and shouting: “Notice me! Notice me! Pity will do…!”

This remorseless degradation could almost be viewed as a progressive illness -in Emin’s case, one that has taken her from a televised fit of drunken pique to more recent accusations of sending tampons to her enemies. Her work, such as it is, has long been overshadowed by her increasingly clownish persona. Other sufferers of this syndrome have gone further and one can only wonder where the line will eventually be drawn.

Recently, an ambitious young novelist named Emma Forrest publicised her experiments in self-harm, presumably to glamorise the otherwise blank canvas of her life. In an attempt to mythologise vanity and transform her well-heeled ennui into column inches, the 26-year-old bemoaned the curse of her wealth, good looks and celebrity lifestyle, before explaining her preference for New York over London in the following terms: “[In the UK], someone like me would just be told to pull my socks up…” A self-styled ‘Suicide Girl’, Forrest professes to write about “the ugliness of celebrity” while heroically basking in its advantages. Truly, her soul is as deep as her swimming pool.

David Blaine has also expressed his disillusionment with celebrity status, though significantly Blaine has fused extremes of physical endurance with a curious form of hip-hop mysticism, one that alludes to grander themes, larger even than the ego of the performer. As he told the New York Times: “I don’t want worshippers. I want astonishment.” A canny sound bite perhaps, but Blaine might just have hit the nail on the head. Astonishment, or certainly some whiff of the numinous, seems pivotal to the magician’s success -and perhaps to the success of any artist worthy of the name.

While Emin and Forrest appear hamstrung by their own post-modern self-consciousness -confined to endlessly referencing themselves with egotistical compulsion- Blaine reminds his audience of less tangible concerns. Indeed, his metaphysical appeal relies on our deep-rooted desire to believe in something more expansive than the man himself. Blaine may well be no less egocentric than his audience, but his unearthly attraction ultimately derives not from mere hero worship or the cult of gratuitous fame, but from his role as a symbol. While Emin clearly wants us to be inexplicably fascinated by her bedding, her former lovers and the other detritus of her life, Blaine seems to think we could be marvelling at the sky.

Despite the philosophical triumph of materialism, the desire for wonderment remains as primal as ever. The obstinacy of this appetite, even in the face of Heat magazine, could be more than simply an archaic cultural hangover. If the mind is just deluded meat and only objects are real, the world around us is rendered small and boredom seems inevitable. Perhaps Blaine’s greatest trick is restoring art’s function as a symbol and reminder that the world we think we know is wider (and weirder) than we typically imagine.

© David Thompson 2003

Published in The Times, September 3, 2003.