The Fama-Effect: Navigating Fact and Fiction in Times of Fame
March 18, 2020, 6 pm (cancelled due to the COVID-19 order)
Contribution to the lecture series (Ringvorlesung) Kunst – Forschung – Geschlecht: Let’s fabulate! – Art Sciences, University of Applied Arts Vienna, by Hannah Bruckmüller & Lisa Stuckey
The first descriptions of Fama are found in Vergil’s Aeneis (ca. 29 BC) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ca. 3–8 AC): she resides on roof gables, in transit zones, and at the passageways of messages. With her thousand mouths, she is busy telling everything: fact and fiction, lies and deception, truth and rumor. This Roman allegory is the etymological predecessor of the much-conjured fame, closely relating glory to gossip. In the age of dissemination technologies and eavesdropping debates, she is more relevant than ever. How does Fama operate? Who spreads the news? What is being told? Whether in street talk or scientific method, Fama has her media transmitters, her thousand ears and broadcasting tongues everywhere. Can we ever be sure? The lecture inspects “rumorological” milieus ranging from art market and academia to the boulevard. Accompanied by Avital Ronell’s writings, Fama enables us to think new genealogies of thought, destabilizing dominantly male canons. But her effects are tricky: while we illuminate the multivocal “sound referential ground”.
