I saw a work this past week that I did not know how to critique.
The premise of the performance was simple: MacKenzie Thomas, an internet personality with half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram, would read aloud everything she posted on X over the past year. Each month was introduced by a personal essay reflecting on the events of her life during that period. Described in promotional materials as a “durational performance,” I Said What I Said ran for four hours. So far, it has been staged twice in New York, selling out both times. This Wednesday, Thomas will bring the performance to Los Angeles at Heavy Manners.
As we took our seats in a small theater above the Flatiron vintage shop Surrender Dorothy, Thomas waited onstage beside a projector queued with a Google Slides presentation. On a nearby desk, she had arranged a Stanley cup, a Gatorade, coconut water, her computer, and a speaker.
She stood onstage and moved herself through catharsis. She broke up with her long-term “metrosexual” boyfriend. Her family dog died. She endured health complications related to her eating disorder. Her mother disappointed her—again. Another relationship began and ended. Her voice wavered as she read song lyrics from her favorite artists, then her tone switched to upbeat and zany as she delivered jokes she had posted about kissing gay men, being biracial, or her bob haircut. She often referred to herself in the third person.
She offered notes on the family dynamic that produced a daughter who compulsively performs: an erratic, somewhat absent father; a mother who wanted to be famous and wanted to be entertained, withdrawing affection and attention when Thomas was no longer “on.” Thomas is “obviously,” she said, an only child. She listed pet figures she loves and frequently references—Bill Hader, Michael Jackson, the cartoon Invader Zim. She loves her friends. Over the course of the year, she posted many videos of herself dancing, usually alone in her room using Photobooth, the early-2000s Mac app. Occasionally, a friend would film her dancing in slow motion, the camera tracking down her body—the flip of her skirt, the top of her thigh-high socks—before revealing that she is dancing on a toilet seat.
As the performance went on, Thomas became increasingly devastated. “I am a sick person who loves to perform and I’ll 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’ve all done that, when she added, “No one suffers like me.” It’s true that some people feel these things more deeply than others.
Notably absent from this diaristic account was her success as an internet personality. In 2023, Thomas was the subject of a New York Times profile about her short-form videos in which she reads fragments from her childhood diaries.
In the days that followed, I turned the piece over in my mind—affected by it, yet unsure how to write about it. What I found most compelling about the performance felt off-limits to criticism: her personality.
In Content (2022), Kate Eichhorn, chair of culture and media studies at the New School, considers how the attention economy is reshaping cultural production. “If [artists] must produce content—not necessarily about their writing or art but about themselves—in order to thrive as writers or artists,” she writes, “is culture itself now nothing more or less than the sum of the content they generate about the alleged life of an author or artist?” The question captures an arc of anxiety within the field of criticism in the age of the internet: what, exactly, are we looking at, and what is our role? Are we critiquing artworks—or the contents of people’s lives?
Yet this question was asked in contemporary art long before the internet became widely accessible. In his 1986 essay “The End of Art,” Arthur Danto argued that the rise of the artist’s personality as the center of contemporary art signaled the end of art history understood as a progression of movements (neoclassical to realist to mpressionism and so on). Drawing on Hegel’s concept of Absolute Knowledge—the point at which the gap between knowledge and its object, and thus subject and object, collapses—Danto suggested that the disappearance of this gap marked a historical shift. That collapse has only accelerated as our fragmented digital culture has hardened into our primary monoculture.
More recently, literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has argued that immediacy is the driving aesthetic of contemporary culture. Tracing the rise of autofiction and the personal essay, she links these forms to a post-2008 precarity economy in which one must constantly capitalize off and optimize “one’s inner material.” Talk of inner material quickly becomes talk of personality: she’s insane, a narcissist, an icon. Thomas’s performance—sometimes described as a “one-woman show”—blends several genres of inner material: the Substack personal essay, the diaristic X feed, the end-of-year Instagram post.
Historically, contemporary art and criticism have operated differently from the relationship between internet audiences and internet personalities. In “Merely Interesting,” literary critic Sianne Ngai describes a shift in art criticism from judgments of beauty—characterized by sudden revelations—to judgments of the interesting, claims of value that asks for justification, a more lingering temporality. If beauty became suspect because it reproduced existing power structures, the interesting offered critics something else to respond to: ideas, arguments, evidence. But judgments of both the beautiful and the interesting require, at base, objectification: the artist must create something outside of herself.
In Thomas’s performance, she repeatedly insisted that she did not know where her personality ended and her persona began. By contrast, early net-art performances—from Marisa Olson’s Marisa’s American Idol Audition Training Blog (2004–05), to Ann Hirsch’s Scandalishious (2008–09), to Jayson Musson’s Art Thoughtz (2010–12)—were marked by the construction of personas that could be shaped and controlled for the sake of the project. The separation between performer and persona made critique possible, rather than psychoanalysis.
This is not just a personal problem. The diminishing relevance of criticism in the face of haters and stans doesn’t merely mark the slow fade of a genre of writing but points to the kinds of lives we can lead and art we can make. Objectification enables a freedom that the constant performance demanded by content capitalism does not. Anthropologists have long noted how communities “externalize values and meanings embedded in social processes, making them available, visible, or negotiable for further action by subjects,” as Fred Myers described in The Empire of Things (2002). Objectifications thus allow those values and meanings to be be stored, circulated, and brought out to be performed at key moments—a ritual, or an exhibition. The non-objectified persona, like content itself, operates differently. It must be continually animated, even as its circulation stretches beyond the author’s control. Performance becomes ceaseless in two ways: the need to keep performing the persona, and the persona’s endless circulation as content.
This dynamic is starkly illustrated by events like $DOGCAGE, a memecoin launched on the blockchain platform Pump.fun. The stunt featured a livestream of a masked man sitting in a dog kennel, eating dog food until the coin reached a $25 million market cap. Online discourse labeled $DOGCAGE “performance art” for lack of a better term, but it resists criticism, though not cultural commentary. Wearing only a mask and underwear, pumping a coin—was this man anything more than a puppet of content capitalism’s logic, which treats absurdity, humiliation, pain, and endurance as the most obvious paths to attention? Is obedience to that logic itself creative? And for artists, does this mean their role is simply to replicate—with distance and control—what is interesting about the personalities that produce such internet events?
But to return to Thomas’s work, it’s not completely true that there is nothing in the performance that is available for criticism. Some time ago, I came across one of her Instagram Reels while scrolling. Then I never saw her videos again—until last week. It’s nothing personal—it’s the nature of the scroll. I swipe past faces trying to get my attention so that I don’t have to pay attention to anything. The durational capacity of the performance felt like a way of reasserting control in an infrastructure that demands its performers never rest for an audience that is barely present. After the four hours of the performance ended I felt like I had downloaded a person. If attention is the metric, it was an aggressive and successful act: I think of her now.
