Influencer homes serve as image assets that must also pass as authentic domestic life
Evidence
A Beautiful Mess reveals two contradictory trends. On one hand, there is the demand to continuously generate “content,” which, in the case when home renovations are a featured and popular focus, involves a constant churn of purchasing houses and figuring out what to do with them. The audience demands more; capital demands more. On the other hand, this “more” must be articulated with some sense of genuine “real life.” This is not only because the link between image and person must be maintained but also because the house, as part of the image of the influencer, becomes that which represents the person. Thus, there is a need to purchase and offload houses that both are and are not intimate, domestic spaces. The donation of houses to Habitat for Humanity is explained in a somewhat perplexing fashion, addressing obliquely some audience comments: “So, we wanted to find a way to makeover a smaller home, but how could we do this? Could we just invade someone’s home? Or buy one? We didn’t want to buy a house that would ultimately just sit empty, and we didn’t envision ourselves in the house flipping business.” The sisters were criticized for owning houses too expensive and too large; readers could not identify with or see themselves living in these houses. But business ventures, especially in Springfield, were not successful. They could not pivot renovations to rentals; they could not make physical retail profitable. The artifice that separates image and person, here, cannot be fully acknowledged. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 154
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated reading goal: house as one of the four Corpocene infrastructures — this passage shows the house as image-capital in tension with the house as lived intimacy.
- DEFINE: Illustrates how the house-as-infrastructure works concretely: a purchased domestic space whose primary function is representational, not residential.