It is hard not to sympathise with the guts of what is being said here. Staged photographs of artists beside their creations are faintly ridiculous. The fact that they are not seen as such is part of the problem. I was only discussing the increased tendency towards this recently with a friend. The vanity point is valid across many fields though the article at times sounds almost quasi-religious in its suspicion of self-presentation. During election campaigns, the Republic of Ireland features thousands of plastic corrugated placards, ‘corriboards', showing candidates faces tied to utility poles, a practice notably absent across the, so called, United Kingdom for example. Parliamentary politics seems no more, nor less, corrupted on either island. With art nowadays however you might at least expect a degree of self-deprecation.

The phenomena described are hardly new. Long before Instagram and prize-culture saturation, glossy lifestyle magazines, weekend supplements, arts journalism and publicity machinery were already manufacturing scenes, reputations and ‘ones to watch’ or ‘rising star’ lists. Think too of the catalogues that historically were produced for exhibitions which always, or often, contained accompanying fawning text, at times mixed with intelligent critique. Terms like ‘emerging artist’ or ‘mid-career practitioner’ position art as something closer to a conventional career pathway or entertainment industry trajectory. You hear less about the perfectly interesting activities of other, presumably ‘submerging’, artists. Ironically what is most interesting about the idea of art, as it happens to have emerged over a few centuries, is its separateness from commodity production, its involving a different kind of labour, namely free labour, permitting critical and career-detrimental positions to be adopted.

In fact, historically, many artists and movements deliberately exploited celebrity and persona alongside the work itself. Think of Oscar Wilde, Joseph Beuys, or Andy Warhol turning self-mythology into artistic material, or Carolee Schneemann and other actionists. More recently, Pussy Riot consciously weaponised publicity, and Kenneth Goldsmith, advocates Duchampianism in literature, and builds work around the performance of found texts, delivered with conviction and in excellent suits.

What the article avoids addressing directly is the rise of identity-centred art discourse and the intensely personalised, confessional and self-branding tendencies that often supplement it. In that atmosphere, criticism becomes socially hazardous because critique can quickly be received as an attack on an individual’s lived experience, identity or community. In addition, individuals may feel coaxed or compelled into performing forms of identity-work when their actual interests lie elsewhere, while, ironically, those positioned within the ‘dominant culture’ remain free to pursue whatever subjects, abstractions or formal concerns they wish without explanation or expectation. Foregrounding the author’s identity matters to some individuals and movements and does not to others. Sometimes it might correspond with egotism or narcissism, sometimes with politics, autobiography, visibility or survival. There is no avoiding those tensions. Either way, the work itself, whether crafted or found, physical, digital or ephemeral, separated from its maker, connected with the modernist idea that art should somehow ‘speak for itself’, has never been the only factor at play.

The motivations in exposing the shallowness in this post (above) feel suspect and possibly conservative. One could easily retort: who exactly cares about ‘collectors’ in a fractured developed-capitalist culture? Charles Saatchi certainly exercised forms of ‘discrimination — comparison, argument, historical awareness’, within British art culture, however problematic, unlike oligarchic wealth treating art purely as speculative investment or money-laundering décor guided by advisers. But that world was always a bit sick, disconnected, and barely affects what most who call themselves artists do, whether critically self-aware or not. That is not to say one would refuse money from an interested source.

What, btw, is inherently wrong with phrases like: ‘The artist is rigorous.’, ‘The work is urgent.’, ‘The exhibition opens conversations.’, ‘The practice engages with lived experience.’? For sure, any term or phrase that is overused can become formulaic and untrue, and as cliched as having a photo taken in front of a fake bookcase on completion of a degree course or when artists pose in front of their often framed, often rectangular artefacts. Many terms emerged for reasons connected to ‘conceptual art’, now itself a ‘dead category’, or from social practice, activism, feminism and postcolonial critique. The supposedly harder or important question - ‘Is it any good?’ – though is not straightforward. What exactly does ‘good’ mean? The phrase ‘works that achieve something’ is equally vague. Is the romanticised hero ‘figure wrestling with form, perception and failure’ an appropriate one to conjure up today? All this smacks of nostalgia for the Greenbergian period of formal judgement and criticism, maybe, or nineteenth century Romantic practices even, as though conceptual art, minimalism, pop art, institutional critique and the broader ‘end of art’ debates never happened. Judgements are still being made, just on different bases. Some of the post’s observations and arguments ring true. How decisions are made about what is exceptional and what is not is a vital and interesting question. Like it or not your Archibald Prize is part of that mix. But what is being advocated here could also suggest a refusal to fully reckon with the last sixty years of art history, and an old world which blatantly excluded many demographics and populations from the game.