At a wedding in 2021, Natasha Stagg received as a party favor a plastic lighter emblazoned with the newlyweds’ names and the word “forever.” The idea, presumably, was that the couple would be together “forever.” But also, Stagg observed, lighters take “forever” to empty and no one is really together “forever.” Days after I put down Artless: Stories, 2019–2023, Stagg’s new collection, publishing next week, this is the image that haunted me.
Whether we like it or not, there is messaging associated with everything we wear and everything we make and everything we do and—certainly—everything we post online. Even if we actively resist the impulse to brand ourselves, that, too, registers as a choice of self-presentation. The arts today are defined by a reflexive, self-referential quality that makes it nearly impossible to separate the art from the artist, or, rather, their brand identity.
While Stagg’s work previously had a symbiotic relationship with her social-media presence (she wrote Surveys, a novel about influencers, in 2009, nearly a decade before “influencer” was a job), she deleted her accounts in 2020. “It’s definitely a privilege to not be on social media at this point,” Stagg, 37, says over steak tartare and french fries at Lucien, a popular restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. “I’ve learned that I would like to be perceived as someone who isn’t so authoring of their brand.”
The idea that everything is branding has an ouroboric quality, since you can “never totally win,” even if you reject it, Stagg says. It’s an idea not stated outright in Artless but infused throughout the collection. Take artists who consider themselves more “honest,” for example: “they’re working in one of the most corrupt industries in the world. They’re just making currency.” Stagg pauses. “But it’s wonderful that they do. We shouldn’t tell them that what they’re doing is bad.”
Beyond the art world, the wider public has been trained in self-commodification via social media and dating apps, where people ostensibly go to find authentic connection. “If you want to find a person that is of similar mind, why does that have to pass through the filter of whether they’re good at presenting themselves to you?,” Stagg asks. It’s that extra step—of posting, of preening—that elicits eye rolls. Eating lunch at Lucien would not be annoying if one did so quietly, but the act of broadcasting one’s Lucien lunch says more about the person than the lunch itself.
“The way that people see themselves looks-wise has changed because of the way we’re constantly being told to be presentable for a camera,” Stagg says. “There are no cameras inside Lucien,” but “somebody could walk by on the street and just be filming themselves” for TikTok or Instagram. “And then one day, you see that horrible, blurry picture of you through the window. And you’re like, ‘I can’t believe that’s what I look like. That’s what the world sees me looking like.’” The face was not forced to see itself as often as it does now.
Stagg glances downward and off to her left when she speaks, as if delicately untangling knotty ideas. Her “like”s and “whatever”s actually make her sentences more meaningful because they reveal an acceptance of inhabiting the same world she critiques. “She doesn’t really come in with any agenda,” says Chris Kraus, her editor at the independent book-publishing house Semiotext(e). “She’s very clear-eyed.”
“It’s definitely a privilege to not be on social media at this point. I’ve learned that I would like to be perceived as someone who isn’t so authoring of their brand.”
Stagg, who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, studied creative writing at the University of Michigan before enrolling in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona in 2009. There, she drafted Surveys, her debut novel. Stagg cold-e-mailed Kraus, who requested the manuscript and was immediately fascinated. “I never heard anything quite like it,” Kraus says. Nor had she encountered a writer who used her own online presence “in a way that felt so real.”
After the M.F.A. program, during which she started writing freelance, Stagg moved to New York to write while working other jobs. While employed as an editor at V Magazine and living with a rotating cast of roommates in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, Stagg continued to write freelance on the side, including the essays that would become her second book, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York, 2011–2019, a dissection of the downtown fashion eco-system in the 2010s.
“If you want to find a person that is of similar mind, why does that have to pass through the filter of whether they’re good at presenting themselves to you?”
In 2016, a friend passed Sleeveless to her boss at a branding studio, who hired Stagg as a brand copywriter to write taglines, ad copy, newsletters, and press releases. “I still don’t understand brand strategy as much as I should, because I think I’m too literary-brained or something, like everything is supposed to emote or whatever,” Stagg says. “Strategy is the opposite of that.”
Today, brands deal increasingly in the premise that authenticity is currency, which means advertising has taken on a meta, self-aware quality where brands attempt to absolve themselves of capitalistic ills by acknowledging them. It’s a language Stagg speaks well. Her books have become her “calling cards,” she says. “It’s almost ironic, because I’m talking about how corrupt that world is. And then they’re like, We’ll take you.”
In Stagg’s (and my) New York, work begets opportunity, which begets experience, which often begets more work. There is a porousness between one’s professional and social lives, which feed off each other. “I didn’t come here thinking that would happen. And now it’s just like, that’s all that there is in my world,” she says.
Much of Artless comes from observations at parties, or events that could be called parties. “I wonder if I come off as somebody who dislikes going to parties, because I actually really love going to parties.” Stagg uses the word “party” broadly, because there are different types of parties in the creative industries, and the ones that we’re talking about are the “blatantly transactional” ones with sponsors and signature cocktails and, sometimes branded tote bags, where the unspoken price of admission is documentation.
“There’s just this layer of it that’s like, When are we gonna get to the real party?,” Stagg says. Many of the stories in Artless exist in the space between the “party” and “the real party,” on the spectrum between the optimism that “maybe this is going to be something” and the awareness that “no, it’s actually nothing.” After you’ve attended enough of these parties, it becomes easier to figure out “what part of your job is your job, and what part of your social life is just there for socializing and not to get more jobs,” Stagg says.
Her “like”s and “whatever”s actually make her sentences more meaningful because they reveal an awareness of inhabiting the same world she critiques.
Some of the gatherings Stagg includes seem almost too on the nose to have happened—but did, in fact, happen. At one such dinner party, Alex Auder stands up and takes the microphone to guide the group in a collective ritual. “I invite you to take part in this neoliberal meditation manifestation,” she says. “Allow yourself to let go, into the clingy hand of the free market. Do you feel it?”
“No,” answered Debbie Harry.
“I feel it,” said Cindy Sherman, arms raised.
“You are now dissolving into little bits of human capital.”
Consider the person you knew in high school who sells hand-poured candles on Etsy and has a separate Instagram account devoted to them. Or the person live-blogging their weekend to 400 followers using a front-facing camera. “Every person everywhere has now kind of had this thought placed in their head that’s like, Maybe none of it is not worth money,” Stagg says. “Like, everything I’ve ever done might have a price on it, you know?
“So if you have that idea hovering above you,” she asks, “how do you live an authentic life? How do you even have the idea of authenticity, like, mean anything anymore?”
Where, then, does Stagg find true authenticity? “I’ve definitely met people that I just feel so in touch with, and I feel like that’s the meaning of it,” she says, reaching for a fry. “I don’t know if anybody can be more authentic than anybody else. But relationships can feel more authentic between people.”
“You can be so involved with your own artifice, and then find somebody else who feels that way, too, or looks at you and says, ‘This is why you’re doing that,’” Stagg says. “That’s still an authentic relationship.”
Artless: Stories, 2019–2023, by Natasha Stagg, will be published on October 24 by Semiotext(e)
Kate Dwyer is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Cut, and elsewhere