Above is a feebly related image to introduce this post on Art or exhibitionism?

A recent post ^[1] by Belgian blogger Martin Pulaski, in which he shares with his readers his list of medication, prompts me to think about the relation between art and exhibitionism.

All of us bloggers are to a lesser or greater extent exhibitionists and artists. We want to share, get our message out there, we imagine a readership, we want it to grow, we want to connect. All are qualities of the artist and the exhibitionist. Whether we succeed or not can only be left to posteriority. This has not always been the case perhaps, I hear myself wonder. It hasn’t and it has.

One can easily point to the Romantics and JJR‘s Confessions as a starting point of this exhibitionism. One can even go further back to Catullus who authored these incredibly explicit lines of poetry in the first century BC.

Coming back to the present age and the contemporary relevance of “art or exhibitionism?,” there has been the internet which has made each and everyone of us self-publishers.

Back to the arts, the real arts, the institutionalized arts.

I’ve been very much intrigued by Tracey Emin‘s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a concept that needs no explanation except maybe a Google gallery ^[2].

I’ve made a variation on this candid list: Everyone I’ve personally known who committed suicide. I know it’s macabre, even more than Emin’s listing the foetus of her aborted child; but this is a dedication to those who’ve said goodbye, and a thank-you-note to whoever for my life until now.