The Art of Public Secrecy

Abstract

Secrets have been conventionally constructed as existing in the margins of governmental functioning, oscillating between the open and the hidden. But secrecy is in fact enfolded within everyday life: contemporary polities have expanded the boundaries of routine secrecy so that it permeates civil society, resulting in the ‘open secret’ or ‘public secret’ as a structural aspect of contemporary social relations. In this article, I examine two aesthetic enterprises, the artworks of American photographer Taryn Simon and French street artist JR, arguing that they provide an occasion for thinking through both the form and place of the public secret in our experience of everyday life, and the intimate connections between public secrecy and law and social order.