The Importance of Artistic Anonymity
The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college I worked as a character at a large theme park I'll not name. It was a coveted job among the theme park employees and because of the park's high standards, we were sworn to secrecy. In other words, we were to only say we worked in the "entertainment department" and we were forbidden to take our picture in costume while holding, i.e. not wearing, our costume head. If caught, the film would be destroyed (yes, I date myself) and we would be fired on the spot. The theme park's reasoning? To keep the magic.
And they were right. The characters are artistic creations and Webster defines an artist as one who is adept at deception. Artists create illusions which, if brought into the light of reality, will break. Pop like a fragile bubble. And as consumers of these created illusions we call art, we do not want to see what we paid for ruined. For example, we do not want to see Giselle smoking a cigarette at the backstage door as we are leaving the ballet and we do not want to see Santa Clause entering the bathroom on his union break. Such exposures pop the magic bubble and destroy the illusion. Therefore, art has to be protected if it is to have its intended effect, if it is to heard, seen, and understood for that which it was meant. And the responsibility to protect falls mainly on the artists themselves.
Over the millennium artists have chosen to remain anonymous and their reasons have been many. For some it has been spiritual. Artists who wish for their art to create a connection to God often abstain from pursuing individualism in their endeavor to create egoless art. Even artists wishing to create a connection only with the world, if their art is to say anything true and/or beautiful, must position themselves be observers of the world without altering it by their presence; using a true scientific method. When Charles Dickens come to America he was already so famous he was greeted with parties and parades everywhere he went and I dare say he saw very little of real America. It was G. K. Chesterton who said that the fiction of the novelist is truer than the facts of the historian because the novelist "looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that strange vision that we call the world," to know better "the real sentiment that is (was) the social bond of many common men."
Methods by which artists have remained anonymous have most often involved using a different name. In today's world of social media remaining anonymity has become increasingly more difficult. Not only are pictures posted on the internet in mass but book publishers, in particular, demand that writers build and maintain public personalities. Authors are expected to have social platforms thousands of followers high by which projected profits can be predetermined. With authors expected to become public personalities, talented writers are often turned away and/or the quality of their work becomes diminished.
Walt Whitman's quote, "The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse," expresses well the humility of our collective humanity; laying a foundation to the idea that individualism, ego-filled art, breaks the connection between people, art, and God. Therefore, the platform can not belong to the artist but to the art. And if we must, as artist, occasionally stand upon it (because anonymity on Banksy's level probably isn't realistic) then let us endeavor to neither in speech nor in deed, take our heads off and break the magic.