What makes an artist? Kafka’s hunger artist vs Margo’s Hungry Ghost

“I feel nothing, / keep touching me, / I feel nothing. / I’m a hungry ghost,” her professor, the father of her child wrote.

But much like the Hungry Ghost, her throat is also constricted, and she cannot feed as much as she would like as she does not get to keep all the money she makes. She has to pay a 20 per cent platform fee, so her belly is never full. The little she manages to eat, ultimately amplifies her hunger. After three weeks she has just 20 subscribers, and after the platform takes its cut, she makes less than she would have in a single night waitressing. But she cannot go back to her former job as she cannot afford childcare, and she cannot work unless someone looks after her child in an infite loop. Pushed in a corner, she knows she must make OnlyFans work.

What is art?

Only Margo really is not selling nudity, she is performing for her audience with a costume and script. Margo’s alter ego is a sardonic alien, proficient in delivering Pokémon-themed critiques of her subscribers’ appendages. If the man starving himself in a cage is an artist? Could what Margo was doing selling her words, albeit adult themed, also be art? If yes, what qualifies as art?

First, the labour of original construction elevates performance into art. Second, both the hunger artist and Margo pursue their vocation with intent–though Margo’s choices are constrained by poverty, she still refuses to sell nudity, which is an artistic decision.

Franz Kafka literally starved to death in 1924 at age 40 because tuberculosis ravaged his throat, making eating too painful. (Source: amazon.in)

Third, all artists have an aesthetic ideal. Even after 40 days, the hunger artist feels he has not fasted long enough. That gap between what can be imagined and what can be achieved is testament to an artistic temperament. As Kafka himself put it, “There is passion behind every art. That is why you fight and suffer… But in art that is always the way. One must throw one’s life away in order to gain it.”

Margo, after studying the platform like any entrepreneur, learns that the platform, which is eating into 20 per cent of her earnings, does not have a discover feed that might connect her to potential customers, so she learns to cross-promote her account. She also sketches and fleshes out her Hungry Ghost persona. Her Hungry Ghost is no otherworldly nightmare. Her fans are not paying for nudity, they are paying for a persona that delights them, making Margo a performing artist.

As Leo Tolstoy wrote, art is “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings.” Oscar Wilde called it “the most intense mode of individualism.” By both measures, Margo’s constructed persona – the Hungry Ghost – is art as it allows her to connect to patrons who admire her wit.

When Margo’s investor JB first grasps what she has built, he congratulates Margo for being gifted as a writer. This is the novel’s central claim: what Margo is doing is art, and the platform is as indifferent as any market has ever been to any artist. That Margo generates subscription revenue through genuine creative labour—a constructed self and developed voice—is her achievement, not the platform’s.

The Hungry Ghost, Margo concludes, is a creature that longs for the food it can no longer eat—that wants, above all, is to be part of life again. What Thorpe is establishing is that the hunger Margo has been monetising—the hunger of her subscribers to feel seen and connected—is what people have always gone to art for. Ironically, the labour is the hunger itself.

Labour Day was observed on May 1 to honour the worker. But what is a worker when the product is oneself? Margo’s body is not the commodity; her art—her capacity to make a man feel that someone sees him—is what she sells.

Becoming the pimp

Later JB proposes that the two of them start a consulting firm where she  will advise other creators—for a percentage of their earnings, of course. Are they becoming pimps? Hell yeah, we are, she says. But, Margo has moved from artist to manager of artists. The system still exists, the throat remains constricted, and Margo is one of the people constricting the throat.

Standing in a car park, shaking hands with her new partner, Margo hears the novel articulate its own thesis: “Look at me! Look at the beautiful, insane things I can do with my body! Look at me! Love me! Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.”

Thorpe collapses the distance between the OnlyFans creator and the novelist, between Margo’s subscribers and the reader holding this book. Whatever the medium, the hunger is the same.

Kafka’s hunger artist, found dying in his cage, in the end confesses that he fasted because he could never find a food he liked. Margo, in the other hand, knows exactly what she is hungry for.

(As I See It  is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)