When the Numbers Win
The art world has always operated through a kind of managed mysticism—access is difficult, the criteria are opaque, and the people inside seem to prefer it that way. Veronika Christine Dräxler’s blog Selbstdarstellungssucht—roughly, "Narcissism Compulsion"—spent ten years documenting that world from a position that was simultaneously inside it and suspicious of it. Interviews with figures like Robag Wruhme and Alexis Felten, arguments about online discourse, bathroom selfies taken at graduate exhibitions—the thing was erratic, occasionally maddening, and clearly made by someone who actually cared about what she was looking at.
In August 2017, Veronika shut it down. The reasons she gave were worth reading carefully.
The blog started as a diary of self-discovery—an expression of internal necessity, not an editorial product. But somewhere along the way it became one, and the transition was gradual enough that she couldn’t point to the exact moment it happened. She started filtering for content with the highest click-through rates. She accepted the implicit bargain of the platform economy: give the audience what they’ve already indicated they want, and the numbers go up. When the German federal government designated Selbstdarstellungssucht a "Creative Pioneer of Germany" in 2015 and she received professional success coaching, it probably felt like recognition. It functioned more like an installation of different values into a space that had been running on something else entirely.
I have subscribed to the circulus vitiosus of external validation,
she wrote. The blog had become part of the Western art machinery, its image that of a validation platform.
Requests started arriving from people who wanted to be featured—not because they had something worth showing, but because they wanted to join the list of already-validated names. The thing that had made the blog interesting had quietly become a mechanism for manufacturing prestige for others.
I understand that sentence more than I’d like to. The distance between writing because you need to and writing because you need to be seen doing it is barely perceptible when you’re crossing it, and enormous when you’re looking back from the other side. It’s the same logic that turns a music blog into a promotional vehicle, a personal project into a brand, a voice into a tone of voice. The idiosyncrasy that attracted people gets sanded down in service of the audience that idiosyncrasy built.
Her closing statement went further. She described a society organized around external validation as structurally exploitative—of the self, of others, of everything—because the threshold of enoughness is always raised to just above whatever’s currently achievable. The ideal is a number, and the number is always higher. I can and will not be required to be part of this in my artistic practice,
she wrote. Therefore I am hereby concluding the project Selbstdarstellungssucht.
She announced a new direction: a research journey toward the world buried beneath projections, toward alternatives to value systems shaped by external approval, toward more chaos and wildness. Whether the project that follows will have an audience—and whether she’ll care—is its own interesting question. Creative people don’t stop needing to make things public. They find new containers for it, usually stranger ones.
What happens next to Veronika and the writers and editors who built the thing alongside her—Natalie Mayroth, Caroline von Eichhorn, and the rest—will come clear in time. The gap they leave is a specific shape, though. Not the art world itself, which will continue producing content that is more correct, more consistent, more optimized than anything Selbstdarstellungssucht ran. Just the part of it that started because someone needed to write about marble statues at midnight and had no better reason than that.
You know it won’t stay empty. You know whatever fills it won’t be the same thing.