Flight Risk

Today’s social media landscape lets artists promote and market their work in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago, but it also enables a cycle of rapid-fire production and consumption that excises exploration and experimentation from the art-making process. In today’s attention economy, a modern artist’s work must be commodifiable in order to justify its existence, not to mention meeting the cost of living in a so-called arts-and-culture center like New York City. By participating in the cycle of production and consumption, artists become “creatives,” and as our large cultural centers become increasingly inaccessible to anyone outside of the business or media sectors, we have two options: either to conform to social media’s demands or to flee.

The tension between commodification and flight sits at the heart of Fiona Alison Duncan’s debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa. Her narrator—also named Fiona—is a burned-out and struggling culture journalist in New York City who bolts for Los Angeles. Tired of the materialistic world of celebrity journalism, where everything is distorted by the presence of media attention, she moves into a building known as La Mariposa and takes a cheap room. Thus Fiona tumbles into a circle of twentysomething creative types who are as resistant to the idea of normalcy as she is. But when Fiona develops a scheme to monetize the lives of the house’s inhabitants while challenging the attention economy’s dominance, she realizes that it’s not as easy to get distance from that dominance as Fiona had thought.

Fiona pitches a reality show about her roommates, Nadezhda, Morgan, Alicia, and Miffany—along with various subletters, lovers, and hangers-on—to a branding agency with the slogan “Be Human.” While she’s repelled by a world in which lives are on constant display, she’s intimately familiar with it: in her previous career she had been enmeshed in a glamorous world of high-fashion events and chic parties. She’s got the contacts, sensibility, and experience to develop a show, but she’s also intrigued by the possibility of using reality television and social media to critique and comment on the way they transform the lives of young, media-savvy creatives into goods for public consumption. She envisions the show as an analysis of our relationship to social media and of the effects of that relationship on our humanity. The project will be a “trial in inter subjectivity. A critique of youth as a commodity. A vision of zeitgeist really embodied...