The Tamesis
Last week I saw a work that I don’t know how to review.
The premise of the show is simple: MacKenzie Thomas, an internet celebrity with half a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, will read aloud everything she’s posted on X over the past year. Each month is introduced with a personal essay reflecting on events in her life during that period. Promotional materials describe it as an “ongoing performance” I said what I said Four hours of running. So far, the play has been performed twice in New York, with all the tickets sold out. This Wednesday, Thomas will take the show to Los Angeles for a performance at Heavy Manners.
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As we took our seats in a small theater above Surrender Dorothy, an antique store in Flatiron, Thomas was on stage waiting for a projector with a Google Slides presentation lined up next to him. On a nearby table, she placed a Stanley Cup, a glass of Gatorade, coconut water, her computer and a speaker.
She stands on stage and moves herself through catharsis. She broke up with her “metrosexual” boyfriend of many years. Her dog died. She suffered from health complications related to an eating disorder. Her mother failed her again. Another relationship begins and ends. Her voice starts to shake as she recites lyrics from her favorite artists, then her tone turns upbeat and hilarious as she tells jokes she’s posted about kissing gay men, biracial people, or bob haircuts. She often refers to herself in the third person.
She chronicles the family dynamics that created a daughter who was a compulsive performer: a erratic, somewhat absent-minded father; a mother who wanted to be famous and entertained, and who withdrew affection and attention when Thomas stopped being “active.” Thomas was “obviously” an only child, she said. She lists pet characters she loves and often quotes — Bill Hader, Michael Jackson, cartoons intruder jim. She loves her friends. Over the course of the year, she posted numerous videos of herself dancing, often alone in her room using Photobooth, a Mac app from the early 2000s. Occasionally, a friend would film her dancing in slow motion, with the camera tracking her body—the cuffs of her skirts, the tops of her stockings—before revealing that she was dancing on a toilet seat.
As the show continued, Thomas became increasingly frustrated. “I’m a show-off patient who would have sex with someone to keep someone who doesn’t really care about me.” I found myself thinking, You’re not sick, you’re okay, we did it all”, she added, “No one suffers like me. “It’s true that some people feel these things more deeply than others.
Notably, there is no mention of her success as an internet celebrity. In 2023, Thomas becomes a subject new york times A profile of her short film, in which she reads excerpts from her childhood diary.
In the days that followed, I turned it over and over in my mind, deeply moved but not sure how to write about it. What I found most striking about this performance was beyond criticism: her personality.
exist content (2022), Kate Eichhorn, chair of the Department of Cultural and Media Studies at the New School, considers how the attention economy is reshaping cultural production. “if [artists] One must produce content—not necessarily about their writing or art, but about themselves—in order to flourish as a writer or artist,” she writes. “Are cultures themselves now nothing more than the sum of the content they produce about the lives of so-called writers or artists? ” This question captures the anxious arc of criticism in the Internet age: What exactly are we looking at, and what is our role? Are we critiquing works of art, or the content of people’s lives?
However, contemporary art has been asking this question long before the Internet became ubiquitous. In his 1986 article “The End of Art,” Arthur Danto argued that the rise of the artist’s personality as the center of contemporary art marked the end of art history understood as a series of movements (Neoclassicism, Realism, Impressionism, etc.). Danto draws on Hegel’s concept of “absolute knowledge”—the point at which the gap between knowledge and its object, between subject and object, disappears—and argues that the disappearance of this gap marks a historical shift. This collapse has only accelerated as our fragmented digital culture has solidified into our dominant monoculture.
More recently, literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has argued that immediacy is the driving force behind contemporary cultural aesthetics. She traces the rise of autofiction and personal essays, linking these forms to the precarious economy of the post-2008 era, in which people must constantly exploit and optimize “their own inner material.” Talk of inner substance soon turned into talk of personality: she was a madman, a narcissist, an icon. Thomas’s show—sometimes described as “a one-woman show”—is a blend of multiple types of in-house material: Substack personal essays, diary-style X feeds, year-end Instagram posts.
Historically, contemporary art and criticism have operated differently from the relationship between online audiences and online personalities. In Merely Fun, the literary critic Sianne Ngai describes the shift in art criticism from judgments of beauty (characterized by sudden revelations) to judgments of fun, a value proposition that demands legitimacy, a more enduring temporality. If beauty becomes suspect because it replicates existing power structures, interesting stuff provides critics with something else to respond to: ideas, arguments, evidence. But both judgments of beauty and interestingness fundamentally require objectification: the artist must create something outside himself.
Throughout Thomas’ performance, she repeatedly insists that she doesn’t know where her personality ends and her persona begins. By contrast, early Internet art performances—from Marisa Olson Marissa’s American Idol Audition Training Blog (2004–05), to Ann Hirsch scandal (2008–09), to Jayson Musson artistic thought (2010-12) – marked by the construction of personas that can be shaped and controlled for the sake of the project. The separation between performer and character enables criticism rather than psychoanalysis.
This is not just a personal matter. The diminishing relevance of criticism in the face of haters and supporters alike signals not only the slow decline of a genre of writing, but also the kind of life we can live and the kind of art we can create. Objectification brings a freedom that the constant representation required by content capitalism cannot. Anthropologists have long noted how communities “externalize the values and meanings embedded in social processes, making them available, visible, or negotiable to subjects for further action,” as Fred Myers writes in empire of things (2002). Objectification thus allows these values and meanings to be stored, communicated, and acted out at key moments (rituals or exhibitions). Non-objectified characters, like the content itself, work differently. It must be constantly active, even if its distribution is beyond the author’s control. Acting becomes never-ending in two ways: the need to continually perform characters, and the endless cycle of characters as content.
Events such as $DOGCAGE, the meme coin launched on blockchain platform Pump.fun, illustrate this dynamic. The stunt featured a masked man sitting in a doghouse eating dog food live, until the token’s market cap reached $25 million. For lack of a better term, online discourse refers to $DOGCAGE as “performance art,” but it resists criticism, though not cultural commentary. Wearing only a mask and underwear, pulling out a coin – is this man just a puppet of the logic of content capitalism, which sees absurdity, humiliation, pain and endurance as the most obvious avenues for attention? Is following this logic inherently creative? Does this mean for artists that their characters simply replicate, through distance and control, what’s interesting about the characters who spawned such internet events?
But returning to Thomas’s work, it’s not entirely true that there’s nothing in the performance to criticize. Some time ago, I was scrolling and saw one of her Instagram Reels. Then I never watched her videos again—until last week. It’s nothing personal – it’s the nature of the scroll. I swipe across faces trying to get my attention so I don’t have to pay attention to anything. The duration of the performance feels like a way to regain control of the infrastructure, requiring the performers to never take a break for a barely present audience. After the four-hour show, I felt as if I had downloaded a person. If attention is any measure, this was a positive and successful act: I think of her now.
