{"id":578499,"date":"2026-08-01T07:43:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T07:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/578499\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T07:43:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T07:43:10","slug":"the-guide-254-artist-anonymity-is-a-radical-act-in-our-cultural-obsession-with-visibility-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/578499\/","title":{"rendered":"\u200bThe Guide #254: Artist anonymity \u200bi\u200bs a radical act in \u200bour cultural obsess\u200bion with visibility | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1985, an anonymous group of women disguised in gorilla masks burst on to the art scene in New York. At night, the Guerrilla Girls, as they named themselves, fly-posted around the city: funny, eye-catching posters highlighting gender and racial biases in museums and galleries. (\u201cDo women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?\u201d read one now-famous poster.) \u201cOf course, we were afraid that if we blew the whistle on some of [the art world\u2019s] most powerful people, we could kiss off our art careers,\u201d a founding member explained<\/a> in an interview for their 1995 book. \u201cBut mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collective is still active; 55 members have come and gone over the years. When giving interviews, they use pseudonyms borrowed from dead women artists: Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, K\u00e4the Kollwitz. Only a handful of their true identities have been revealed over the years, mostly after their deaths or due to lawsuits. But this week, a Guerrilla Girl made headlines when she chose to unmask herself on her own terms. \u201cI\u2019d had a pact with another Girl that whoever died first, the survivor would bring her out,\u201d said<\/a> the 83-year-old artist Joyce Kozloff (codename: Liubov Popova). \u201cBut I suddenly realised that if I were dead, I couldn\u2019t tell the story my way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anonymity isn\u2019t a straightforward route for artists. This is especially true now, in a media culture that is increasingly ruled by the twin cults of celebrity and personal identity. If you want attention in the 21st century, nothing matters more than making strangers on the internet feel as if they really know you. And yet there are still those \u2013 visual artists, writers, musicians, film-makers \u2013 who have opted for the cloak of anonymity.<\/p>\n

Often, there\u2019s an element of self-protection. Just as the Guerrilla Girls were anxious about jeopardising their professional opportunities via their activism, the anonymous author known as the Secret Barrister \u2013 who started blogging in 2015 in order to shed light on the legal system \u2013 has explained that their hidden identity keeps them safe. \u201cPut simply, anonymity buys me the ability to speak plainly, frankly and without fear or favour about the problems that I see in the criminal justice system,\u201d they wrote<\/a> in one post. When Banksy first picked up the spray paints in the early 1990s, he was just another Bristol street artist using an alias to avoid getting into legal trouble. These days, his acts of vandalism are unlikely to be prosecuted, given that an original Banksy is far more valuable than any property it may have defaced.<\/p>\n

Faceless \u2026 Daft Punk. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Others just want to focus on the work. For Elena Ferrante<\/a>, the bestselling novelist behind the \u201cNeapolitan quartet\u201d, using a nom-de-plume was initially a way to deal with shyness but evolved into a crucial dimension of her practice. \u201cAnonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on my writing,\u201d she has said. The French electronic duo Daft Punk never hid their names \u2013 Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo \u2013 but they did conceal their appearances with robot costumes (or, in some early instances, a cloth bag over their heads<\/a>) for performances and press. \u201cOne thing I like about the masks is that I don\u2019t have people constantly coming up to me and reminding me what I do,\u201d Bangalter once said<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to be able to forget, but there are occasional downsides. Several years ago in Ibiza some guy ran up exorbitant bar tabs at clubs while claiming to be me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some have more niche motivations for staying under the radar. In 1968, the Directors Guild of America introduced the pseudonym \u201cAlan Smithee\u201d as an alternative credit for any director that wished to disown one of their own films. This was usually because the artist felt that others had meddled to the extent that they did not have creative control over the final product (though then the pseudonym itself became too notorious, and has since been officially retired<\/a>). A few high-profile authors including JK Rowling and Stephen King have published books under a different name in an attempt to avoid market oversaturation, or to see whether their success is just down to hype. In Rowling\u2019s case, she would have already been used to having a pen name. The initials \u201cJK\u201d were suggested by her Harry Potter publishers \u2013 she doesn\u2019t actually have a middle name \u2013 because they feared young boys wouldn\u2019t knowingly buy a fantasy book by a woman writer.<\/p>\n

Then, there\u2019s the aura of mystery. It may seem counterintuitive, but anonymity can be a useful strategy to get everybody talking about you, particularly in this age of oversharing and content overload. People become desperate to figure out who you are. On a practical level, it\u2019s nearly impossible to conduct your business nowadays without sharing personal data \u2013 unless you\u2019re willing to be paid only in crypto. More than once, I\u2019ve been told by someone in a given industry that of course they know who XYZ is. A decade ago, an investigative journalist put forward a convincing, though unconfirmed, case identifying Ferrante as literary translator Anita Raja. Earlier this year an in-depth Reuters investigation seemed to definitively confirm past reports that Banksy is a 50-something-year-old man called Robin Gunningham.<\/p>\n

Celebrities\u2019 pseudonyms also rarely survive for long. The debut novel in the Cormoran Strike series by \u201cRobert Galbraith\u201d had barely sold 1,500 copies when Rowling\u2019s authorship was leaked by a lawyer. Perhaps that settles the \u201ctalent or hype\u201d question.<\/p>\n

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It was people\u2019s incessant curiosity that in 1990 inspired the Guerrilla Girls to put out a new poster with the headline \u201cGUERRILLA GIRLS\u2019 IDENTITIES EXPOSED!\u201d The work<\/a> featured 10 columns with over 500 names of women involved in the art world at the time, concluding with the line \u201cAND MANY MORE\u2026\u2026..\u201d This was obviously a joke, as it would have been impossible for so many to be involved (although each of the since confirmed members are on there). But what a clever way to live up to the group\u2019s original raison-d\u2019\u00eatre: by calling attention to the countless under-recognised women who have, in fact, wanted to make a name for themselves.<\/p>\n

To read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe<\/a> to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1985, an anonymous group of women disguised in gorilla masks burst on to the art scene in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-578499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}