Circus, anyone?

The hunger artist is a kind of circus freak whose true value has been co-opted by commercialization. The hunger artist is powerless to do as he believes because he must follow the dictates of his employer, the impresario, who tries to control the artist's act by using logical fallacies that dishearten the artist. He cannot resist the force of that propaganda machine which aims to keep him in business, regardless of the loss of "truth." Subjectively, the artist feels like a martyr to this form of commercialization. Howeer, it ironically enables him to starve himself, albeit for a "greater purpose." We seem to arrive at a point of intersection between two major paradigms: art, spirituality, and the moral life, on the one hand; and the profit motive, on the other. The conflict is born between the artist’s desire to overreach himself and break his old record in order to further develop his inner spirituality, a course which however does not garner him any militant “power;” and the changing tastes of his audience, to which the impresario caters, that make him appear as an old washed up artist whose ambition pushes him further and further into a world of fantasy. The clash of these two paradigms creates the hunger artist's conflict and may imply that the artist’s practice is ill-suited, not only for the times, but for his spiritual purpose as well. Of this, the hunger artist is painfully aware, in stark contrast to a character like Young Goodman Brown. Moreover, his inchoate awareness of history leads him to make a deathbed confession that undermines the reason for which he should have been admired as a great hunger artist, namely that he couldn't find the food he liked, so consequently fasting came easy for him. Therefore, he acknowledges that he is unworthy of admiration. He is a fraud, not because he ate when he shouldn't have, but because he didn't when he could have. But this is not the reason that his audience's tastes changed.