A Desk Job

Matt Watt

Abstract

This paper examines the paradox of authenticity in contemporary identity-driven art practices through the lens of Slavoj Zizek's ideological critique. It argues that the gesture of asserting identity within the art world - especially under the guise of authenticity and lived experience - is no longer oppositional but is rather integrated into the ideological machinery of late capitalism. Authenticity, once transgressive, is now almost entirely performative. Identity is curated. And irony, once a strategy of subversion, has collapsed into a recursive attempt at authenticity (futile nonetheless). I argue that art is caught in the loop of self-display and institutional appetite, and it has become a self-consuming spectacle of sincerity.

Introduction: Identity Porn

We are living in the era of curated wounds. A time where the highest currency in the art world is well-articulated trauma, preferably marketable and not too complex. Identity has become a catalogue item.

But what happens when the assertion of assumed identity becomes the most ideologically compliant move one can make? As Zizek warns, "the supreme form of ideology is the belief that you are beyond ideology." (Zizek, 1989). The artist who performs themselves as radically authentic may be the most captured of all. In proclaiming "this is me," one often says: "this is what you want me to be."

Entire categories of artistic expression have now become galleries of soft performance. The art world no longer asks for subversion - it asks for clarity (professional wounds). A particular kind of queerness, of Blackness, of diasporic dislocation - one that can be laminated into the language of grants and glam openings. In this world, personal pain is artistic capital.

Major art fairs now function as the global cathedrals of this spectacle. One walks from booth to booth witnessing the same tropes recycled under the banner of "urgent voices," each offering the comfort of recognition without the threat of real confrontation. The curatorial language is always the same: "holding space," "foregrounding narratives," "challenging norms" - phrases as hollow as the gestures they exhibit. And on the other hand, what passes for radical art is often just perfectly branded dissent. Artists are no longer asked to think; they are asked to represent.

This is not an attack on the artists themselves - many are caught in a system that offers only two choices: comply or disappear. But the machine feeds on repetition. It does not care whether your performance of identity is sincere, ironic, or broken. It only asks that you repeat it often enough that it begins to look like culture.

Zizek and the Joke of Authenticity

Zizek's theory of ideology hinges on the idea that we are never more ideological than when we believe we are being ironic or critical. In fact, it is through irony that the system absorbs critique and neutralises it. You tell a joke about the institution - you get funded by the institution. You turn your identity into spectacle - you become its product.

For Zizek, ideology is not a mask we wear over our authentic selves; it's the very field in which our authenticity is constructed. "We don't believe in ideology," he writes. "We believe through it." (Zizek, 1989).

Art practices today reflect this perfectly. To perform identity is not to resist power - it is to become legible to power.

Irony to Zizek is a failed exorcism of meaning (Zizek, 2008). Post-irony was meant to be the evolution - an ironic sincerity or a sincere irony, depending on which thinkpiece you read first. But really, it was just irony catching its own reflection and smirking. Meta-irony followed close behind, irony about irony, trying to outpace its own recursion. Again, a failed exorcism of meaning.

And yet, irony for me is still preferable to the sincere performance of identity (or the performance of sincere identity) - because irony knows it's failing. That's the point. It performs the pretence of meaning while showing you the wires and scaffolding. It collapses under the weight of its own contradiction, but it does so visibly. It makes its audience complicit in the failure. There is no delusion of transcendence. Just a gesture. Irony is the art of pretending to pretend. It fails on purpose.

Sincerity, by contrast, mostly doesn't know it's pretending. Or worse: it does, and lies to itself anyway. It presents the self as source - authentic. This is what I feel. This is who I am. This is my truth. But identity is never that simple. This palatable form of identity is scripted and rehearsed. The sincere performance of identity is simulation - it is the sign pretending not to be a sign. The artist believes they're unveiling themselves. In fact, they are disappearing into the role that was written for them.

But let's not romanticise irony either. Irony is inauthentic too. Zizek would be the first to remind us: irony does not absolve you. It does not rescue you from ideology. In fact, it may be ideology's most elegant trap (Zizek, 2009). You joke about complicity, but you remain complicit. You laugh at the performance, but you never leave the stage. Irony becomes its own form of denial - palatable, clever, self-aware, and utterly ineffective. It lets you feel like a dissident while doing absolutely nothing. Irony is the dream of resistance that keeps the dreamer asleep. But it knows it!

As I've always said: a painting has never stopped a bullet and if you're here to make a difference, choose another profession (or make a bulletproof vest) (Vest, 2024).

Yet the art world loves this illusion of progress masked as irony and identity representation. It craves ironic critique because it's safe. It's clever. It flatters the institution while pretending to subvert it, and the institution gets to feel included all the while (ironists are very inclusive after all). Meta-irony, post-irony - these are just software updates in the failing operating system of critical art. They give the illusion of depth while circling the same drain. Same with identity art. The institution wins either way.

Authenticity as Labour and the Crisis of Freedom

Contemporary identity-based art demands that artists not only make work - they must become the work. The artist is to be a performance of legible suffering. The politics are secondary to the polish. This is the monetisation of selfhood (or the idea of it).

As Byung-Chul Han would say: "Today, we exploit ourselves and call it freedom." (Han, 2017: 1)

The gallery today is a marketplace for the artist's ontology. And it must be instantly digestible. Your trauma must be coherent. Your queerness must be palatable. Your racial experience must be legible to whiteys, but just "authentic" enough to preserve its otherness.

Artists are rewarded not for problematising identity but for personifying it. The more complete the performance of self, the more easily it can be slotted into the circulation of meaning. It doesn't matter whether the art is good. It matters whether the story fits. And so, in the age of psychopolitical labour, identity is something you can now manufacture and curate, like content. As Han reminds us, neoliberalism no longer disciplines us through prohibition; it seduces us with empowerment. The artist believes they are speaking truth to power while they are actually falling victim to it.

And the system loves this. It loves how productive we've become - how self-critical, how introspective, how curatorial of our pain. You are free to say anything, so long as it affirms your brand and maintains the illusion of institutional progressiveness! The problem isn't the expression of identity. The problem is that it can no longer escape its own performance. Han will happily remind you that "although the achievement-subject deems itself free, in reality it is a slave. In so far as it willingly exploits itself without a master, it is an absolute slave." (Han, 2017: 2)

But what's left, then? A loop of self-presentation mistaken for revelation. A cycle of exhibitions where every show looks like a group therapy session with better lighting. But there's no healing here.

Conclusion:

Get a desk job.

(Watt, 2025)

References

Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event, 7(1).

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Verso.

Virno, P. (2004). A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Semiotext(e).

Zizek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.

Zizek, S. (2008). Violence. Profile Books.

Zizek, S. (2009). First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso.