C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

What do these people (and paintings) have in common?

Ziggy Stardust (David Bowie) was one of the innovators of the modern notion that as an entertainer you are allowed (and can profit by) a series of persona changes. Madonna, too, cashed in on this. Ali G (and Borat and Bruno), all creations of Sacha Baron Cohen, pushed the “hidden identity” issue further. Many people, including the officials in Khazakstan, thought Borat was real. At first they were outraged, then they saw it as a way of making money and were less so. Ali G became famous putting people on. He would “interview” famous people from John Glen, to Boutrous Boutrous Galli, to Donald Trump and, using his “Brit mixed-race, hip-hop, barely literate” style attempt to trip them out. Amazingly, one of this characters, Bruno, the fey Austrian fashion aficionado, manages to get New York fashion designers to admit they like to “round up” unfashionable people and “ship them to camps.” Borat gets people to admit they hate Jews (though Cohen is Jewish). It seems many celebs don’t know what to make of Ali G. I suspect they thought (the phenomenon has to be over now that Borat made Cohen so famous) they were showing their ‘hip’ side by being able to talk and engage a character like Ali G.
In literature, the pen name is ubiquitous. Once perhaps pen names were secret though today many writers, like John Banville who uses the name Benjamin Black on his thrillers, seem to use the pen name now as a brand extension. Banville writes pensive literature worth of Booker Prize consideration, and his alter ego Black writes (apparently) crowd-pleasing thrillers.
I haven’t seen the “pen name” used much in the art world. Perhaps it’s a phenomenon I’ve missed. There’s probably some of it around the issue of “illustrator versus artist.” So many illustrators are accomplished artists and overlap the world of “fine art.” But there is still a taboo about crossing over, now minimized by the “street movement” of Low Brow art (see Juxtapoz Magazine), but still present. The fact that Warhol was an illustrator first didn’t seem to do anything for this problem of commercialism being “non artistic” in some odd way. Warhol was also a radical for being so blatantly disrespectful of other art sacred tenets: doing it yourself (hire others!), considering yourself original (no, I’m boring!), being called pornography (Isn’t it great?), and being into “glamour” and “superstardom.”
Stephen Colbert is a faux conservative comedian. I got to thinking what would be a faux liberal? How would it be funny and to whom? Randi Rhodes and Al Franken are already comedians—how would one parody them?