Claim to fame is an on going venture developed by Sara & André since 2004, along with other projects such as Sara & André Foundation, whereby many Portuguese artists, musicians and performers have contributed with commissioned works, based on contractual instructions rooted in previous works by those artists.
Claim to fame shares an a priori principle of success with Sara & André Foundation, and with the concept of the duo itself. Rather than moving toward fame, the production of the works results from the critical materialization of fame itself, conveyed through a rigorous fabrication by the media spectacle and its exacerbation of social networks, physical or virtual.
Claim to Fame is the construction of an opportunistic collection composed by excerpts of texts on art or by well known artists, which they appropriate and manifest into their own production; the deliberate call for paparazzi, to create an illusion of the daily life of two super stars and the aesthetic use of the camera’s flashes; the exercise of convincing other artists to include the image of the duo in their work; the inciting of fans to do public intervention with statements of superiority in relation to artists such as Nauman, Duchamp, Beuys or Graham; the reinterpretation of the song "Fame" by Irene Cara or by a programmatic and megalomaniacal invasion of the web.
Claim to fame online is a project under construction. As a set of parasitic actions, it depends on the unpredictability, vulnerability, longevity and salubrity of the successive hosts. To the strictly calculated submission of an image, graphic or diagram, there is the expectation of its postage and the risk of not divulgation. The success of the project also depends on the imponderability of the willingness and approval of administrators in control, the randomness of updates or cancellation actions, the characteristic impermanence of the virtual support system, the almost impossibility of planning, the surprising result of the contextual insertion, the confusing or denying utility of search tools or the variability and sudden change of each platform.
The investigation of Sara & André is broad, comprehensive and pragmatic, driven by their personal taste and the possibility of production and fitting. Claim to fame online proposes works of authorship for sites, blogs or pre-existing search engines by direct submission of images or graphic manipulation of their contents, internal or external. The hosts become interactive by making available construction tools from a matrix source; promoters of competitive rankings, by public vote or administrative preference; corporative, in the service of advertising and branding systems, through smart entertainments; archivist, as they manage and provide a specific type of information; thematic, with their popularity eventually translated into publications with several volumes; or artistic when they give priority to the intention and aesthetic quality of the submissions.
Claim to fame online underlines, in its essence and in relation to previous works, a change in the perception of the phenomenon of fame and its mechanisms. Claim to fame online is a project that associating itself with numerous others and supported on them, moves to infinity, in a deliberate exercise of self-promotion, camouflaged in a spontaneous, alternative, untitled and not inserted creativity.
Lígia Afonso, Lisbon, January 2010
(Translation by Rachel Korman)