Do Influencers Pass the Artist Test?

Measuring the creative collective

The influencer industry is worth $7 billion. Influencer Jimmy Donaldson, better known as Mr. Beast, is worth more than $100 million. Gaming influencer Mark Edward Fischbach is worth $35 million. Some of these hallowed names - like PewDiePie ($40 million) and Logan Paul ($19 million) - are the cowboys and anti-heroes to a generation desperate for a new kind of rebellion. The fourth most popular career aspiration for kids is “social media star.” Who can blame them?

The influencer empire is built on algorithms powered by individual expression created for collective consumption. Influencers are icons of a new movement. Are they the artists of a new movement? Multimedia experiences, whether a Twitch stream, a YouTube video, or a painting of soup cans, is “art” to the right people. That’s the fun part.

Let’s forget what “art” is and what it isn’t. What are “artists” in the first place?

The Conviction of Creation

The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization.

-Otto Rank

Austrian psychologist Otto Rank (1884-1939), a colleague of Sigmund Freud, was a psychologist and a writer. In his Art and Artist (1932), he explores “the spiritual why” of art, asking what makes artists create.

Rank believes that artists do not create art solely from their personal histories and psychology. The act of creation can’t only be understood by the creator’s personal experiences. In creating art, artists are expressing the collective and the experience of the collective as an individual. The tension between artist and collective is the creation. Rank writes:

Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the consciousness of the individual.

He considers the example of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel to show how art expresses the collective but, at the same time, is the vision of the individual. In another time dominated by another collective, Michalangelo may have been painting portraits of Zeus or directing Taylor Swift music videos.

Artists create within the collective, but the creation stands outside of it. This is how fans become in awe of ascendant art: we travel the expression as a medium and reach the mood, not the maker. In Van Gogh paintings, we experience a feeling but not the feeling of the need to cut off an ear.

Cafe Terrace at Night (1888), Vincent Van Gogh

In the influencer economy, “influence” could be interpreted as a school of art and every stream, video, and touchpoint with an influencer is an individual art piece within this style. But where is the artist? Are influencers expressing individuality outside the collective or are they making mirrors for what’s trending?

Will we, as a society, be going back to watch videos of Mr. Beast reactions ten years from now? Ten days from now? Do we revisit influencer videos to revisit ourself beyond the self? Is the thumbnail art of this video a new style of art of which Mr. Beast is the Michelangelo of his time?

Let’s review three basic tenets of being an artist:

1. Exposure

Every year, 6 million people visit The Sistine Chapel. The video above drove 36 million views within six months. If we measure exposure as the measurable merits of a movement, Mr. Beast is the greater artist. His catalog creates more conversations and connections and experiences.

2. Inspiration

Mr. Beast creates for the sake of his audience, his collective, and a lot of his motivation for creation is money. His primary interest in a lot of his work is commercial.

Could we argue that influencers aren’t artists, because they hope to get paid? Of course not. Michelangelo got paid the equivalent of $600,000 to paint the chapel ceiling.

3. The Spiritual Why

Art and Artist defines the artist by spirit, not the substance or even the style. Rank’s primary requirement is that they are creating something that goes beyond the collective, giving their soul to the work and leaving that shard of self to orbit within the world.

This is where we might call a strike against influencers: there is no “spiritual why” to the work. The work does not challenge or explore. It cannot be said to reveal something new or something transcendent to be shared. Influencers serve the collective. Influencers become their influence. The collective consumes them. Influencers are the anti-individual.

Can we argue that there’s something artistic and spiritual in becoming a medium for people’s clickiest desires? Let’s see if influencers fit into Rank’s two artistic categories: the Romantic and the Classicist.

The Romantic

Could influencers be our new Romantics?

“Romanticism” may bring to mind Percy Shelly, Lord Byron, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The era lasted roughly from 1800 to 1850, but the novel that characterizes the self-indulgent sentimentality of the period is Man of Feeling (1771) by Scottish author Henry Mackenzie in which, if the memory of my college class is correct, is mostly about a man who walks around crying.

Romantic art deifies emotion and glorifies nature as an analogs for the human spirit, defying a collective world where the Industrial Revolution vomited across cities and the Enlightenment attempted to quantify empirically the body and mind without leaving space for a soul.

To be a Romantic is to be isolated in order to elevate your ego above the collective. This is best embodied by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who turned his lifelong quest to get off the grid into spiritual art with Walden (1864).

To create, influencers disassociate from the self to become a conduit for the collective, creating in an empty room on behalf of the prediction of some future audience.

Romantics cannot disassociate. They must become the work. Rank explains that the Romantic lives within the work full-time, because Romantic art is ego and ego is ideology and ideology is inspiration for a Romantic world, whether it’s Thoreau hiding from society or Wordsworth live-streaming his walks in his poetry or Shelley personifying revolution in retelling of Greek mythologies or Lord Byron believing in freedom so much he went to Greece and died while leading an artillery strike or Keats reflecting on life within the shadow of death that was his life.

Rank explains:

The Romantic artist is thus the self-justification of the individual raised above the crowd… [living] perpetually in creative work without absorbing much of life.

The Romantic, Rank concludes, creates art in “total.”

The Classicist

Pylades and Orestres Brought as Victims Before Iphigenia, Benjamin West (1766)

The opposite of the Romantic is what Rank calls a Classicist. This is an artist who follows a spirit of discipline and practice likened to the ancient artists of Greece and Rome. As one source defines it:

Classicism is generally associated with harmony and restraint, and obedience to recognized standards of form and craftsmanship.

Classical artists crystallize their experiences within their creations. They process life by each piece. Voltaire and Jonathan Swift are named as “Classical artists.” Rank recognizes the Classical style as “partial” art. Once the experience is manifested outside of the artist, whether book or song or painting, it is used up.

[The Classicist] has to continually absorb life so that he may throw it off again in his work…[every creation] is a sacrifice which is buried alive to ensure a permanent existence to the structure.

The Romantic lives his truth through art without living life and creating through ego. The Classicist lives life through art without living in perpetuity but manifesting serially. Classicists are masters of old forms, not creators of new forms:

The Classical type excels less, therefore, in the creating of new forms than in perfecting them. Further, he will make much more frequent use of old traditional material, full of a powerful collective resonance…

This type of artist is more common in a commercial world where ideology must be given make-up and ego is massaged to an agreeable product. Pulp fiction, Hollywood movies, and streaming-friendly pop are pieces of art pressed into traditional, consumer-friendly material expected to evoke what Rank calls “a powerful collective resonance.” The artist’s experience between individual and collective is commodified and the mood is an episode.

Classicists look to the forms of art that create collective resonance, create pieces to capture the mood of separate moments and movements as sacrifices for the sake of expressing the experience. Influencers produce videos and streams and artwork that are sacrifices buried alive to create a permanent existence to a structure. Just like Classical artists. The structure in question must be individual and stand outside the collective. Could the structure of influencer art be the influence itself? The fans of major influencers are vast, preposterous in number, and they gather around the structure built by the influencer’s self-sacrifices to find a feeling.

A Post-Classical Movement

Art and Artist, published in the early 1930s, reflects the curious predominance of the feverish, almost animal hunger of artists and critics in Vienna in the 1880s to define the soul and calculate creation.

Otto Rank, who died in October 1939, did not live to see modernism or postmodernism and would have certainly suffered a migraine if exposed to the term “metamodernism.” This leaves us with two strict options for influencers: Romantic and Classicist.

Influencers are Classicists, through and through, and live each art piece as a sacrifice to maintain the structure of their influence. Yet we may still wonder if they’ve passed Rank’s baseline test of the artist: can they answer the “spiritual why” of why they create? Or is the spirit now a stream?