"The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create"
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Celebrity is the new art object, and Mamet is diagnosing it with a playwright's contempt for bad theater. His line splits culture into two stages: the work, and the person performing “being an artist.” The audience no longer buys a play so much as it buys proximity to a temperament. “The fact of the artist” is a brutal phrase because it treats identity as spectacle: a resume of pain, a posture of sensitivity, a public-facing wound.
The engine here is “devour.” Mamet isn’t talking about admiration; he’s talking about consumption, a parasitic intimacy. We “absorb” the artist like a brand, a lifestyle, an injectable dose of authenticity. The most damning word is “tragic.” Tragedy becomes credential, not condition. We reward the artist for having suffered in ways we can’t or won’t, then outsource our own emotional work by watching theirs. It’s empathy as voyeurism, therapy as entertainment, moral seriousness as merch.
Context matters: Mamet comes from theater, where the craft is disciplined, textual, and collaborative, yet modern attention economies flatten all that into personality-driven narrative. Long before social media turned everyone into a content creator, he’s pointing at the proto-influencer logic of arts coverage: interviews, profiles, scandals, “difficult genius” lore. The subtext is a warning to artists too: if the market wants your story more than your sentences, you’ll start writing your life instead of your work. The tragedy, Mamet implies, is that we end up with neither: an overexposed self and an underfed art.
The engine here is “devour.” Mamet isn’t talking about admiration; he’s talking about consumption, a parasitic intimacy. We “absorb” the artist like a brand, a lifestyle, an injectable dose of authenticity. The most damning word is “tragic.” Tragedy becomes credential, not condition. We reward the artist for having suffered in ways we can’t or won’t, then outsource our own emotional work by watching theirs. It’s empathy as voyeurism, therapy as entertainment, moral seriousness as merch.
Context matters: Mamet comes from theater, where the craft is disciplined, textual, and collaborative, yet modern attention economies flatten all that into personality-driven narrative. Long before social media turned everyone into a content creator, he’s pointing at the proto-influencer logic of arts coverage: interviews, profiles, scandals, “difficult genius” lore. The subtext is a warning to artists too: if the market wants your story more than your sentences, you’ll start writing your life instead of your work. The tragedy, Mamet implies, is that we end up with neither: an overexposed self and an underfed art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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