Artistic Fever: Archival Subjectivity and the Politics of Aesthetic Desire in the Age of Social Media

In the age of social media, users increasingly organize and stage their everyday lives in aestheticized ways, appropriating artistic modes of self-presentation in a phenomenon this paper terms 'Artistic Fever.' This tendency simultaneously blurs the practical boundary between artist and non-artist and compels professional artists to internalize the platform logic of visibility. The paper situates the phenomenon as the digital afterlife of the archival impulse Hal Foster identified in contemporary art: where Foster's archive remained material, interpretive, and institutive, Artistic Fever marks its migration into the database-driven, machinic, platform-mediated mode he had set it against. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of archive fever and Lev Manovich's theory of software subjectivity — supplemented by Walter Benjamin's account of exhibition value, Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the transparency society, and Bernard Stiegler's notion of tertiary retention — it develops a theoretical framework that articulates the compulsion to inscribe with the techno-aesthetic conditions of the platform. The analysis identifies three strategic modes through which contemporary artists deploy social media (process-sharing, branding, and relationship-building) and shows that user and artist practices converge within the same economy of platform visibility, structured by algorithms, data capitalism, and the politics of deletion. It argues, however, that this convergence does not abolish the artist/non-artist distinction but displaces it from the register of practice to that of symbolic capital, where it persists as a struggle over recognition. Reading the practice non-deterministically, the paper holds the meaning of Artistic Fever to be dialectically undecided — neither a disease to be cured nor a freedom to be celebrated — and treats counter-practices of tactical appropriation and opacity, including the socially engaged art of recent civic movements, as the residue of agency that keeps it a field of struggle. The paper concludes that 'Artistic Fever' is not a transient cultural phenomenon but a structural symptom of contemporary subjectivity formed at the intersection of archival desire, algorithmic power, and platform capitalism — one that poses new ethical and ontological questions about self-constitution in the digital age.