Resisting the Urge to Solve the Riddle

Humans are compulsive pattern-finders. Faced with the unknown, we invent narratives to fill the gaps. In the case of anonymous art, this often takes the form of attribution fantasies. “It sounds Franco-Flemish, doesn’t it?” or “This must be a student of Titian.” We sniff out stylistic clues, try to match style to school, speculate about character, intention, ideology. We want someone to blame. Or to praise. Or at least someone to Google.

It’s rarely long before we’ve constructed an plausible lineage, an imaginary pupil of this or that maestro, trained in such-and-such a chapel. But in doing this, we risk replacing mystery with myth. Attribution becomes a kind of comfort blanket—a way of making the unknowable seem knowable. It’s not inherently wrong to speculate. But when we rush to fill the void, we may fail to listen to what the void itself is telling us.

Anonymity by choice, or by force.

Some artists have embraced anonymity as an aesthetic or ethical gesture. Medieval monastics, whose humility forbade self-promotion. The composer of the Gioiello Artificioso, who simply signed himself “a devout and pious follower of St Francis.” Or more recently as a political act, as with the feminist collective ‘the Guerrilla Girls’, or as a game of mystification, as with Banksy and Daft Punk. For these artists, anonymity its an artistic statement: a rejection of commodification and lionisation, a refusal to play by the market’s rules, or a critique of the cult of personality.

But let’s not get too romantic. For every artist who chose anonymity, there are many more upon whom it was imposed. Women whose works were attributed to husbands. Queer or heretical composers whose names were scratched from manuscripts. People too poor to afford publication, too far from the centres of power to enter the networks of prestige, or simply caught on the wrong side of agreeable politics, race, or religion.

This is where Foucault becomes especially urgent. In Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?, he notes that the “author-function” only emerges in societies where authorship becomes a site of power, and to have your name remembered is to be recognised as a ‘legitimate producer of culture.’ But those systems are historically contingent, and often cruelly narrow in scope. Anonymity in this light becomes a record of exclusion and marginalisation; the void left by the gatekeepers who decided whose names ‘count’ and whose don’t.

Why Does It Matter?

First, because it reminds us that greatness often goes unsigned. The inherited lists of “Great Composers,” “Important Artists,” and “Top 10 People You’re Supposed to Care About” are full of blind spots. Anonymous music tells us there is more than we were told. It encourages us not to discard the canon, but to expand it, to define greatness more generously.

Secondly, because it asks us to confront our own habits of artistic interpretation. It tests our ability to respond to the work itself, without leaning on celebrity, reputation, or what Edward T. Cone called “the composer’s voice.” We are left to make our interpretative decisions from the inside out. What is the music doing? What is it asking for? What kind of world does it conjure, and how do we inhabit that world with care and integrity?

Thirdly, because it forces us to reckon with historical justice. And perhaps growing more attuned to these historical silences, we sharpen our eyes to the exclusions of our own time. Who gets commissioned? Who gets published? Who gets reviewed? Who are we not hearing? Whose names are being written out of future histories, even now?

And finally, if you’ll allow a moment of existential flair, anonymity brings us face to face with the contingency of all identity. It exposes how we as humans treat attribution: the assumptions we make, the value we confer, the power we give to names. It shows us how dependent we are on knowing who is speaking before we decide whether to listen.

So yes, it matters. Not because anonymity is a riddle to be solved, or a gimmick to be exploited — but because it is a condition that asks something of us.

And let’s be honest. Sometimes it’s a relief not to have to pretend we care about the composer’s personal trauma, which archduke they were trying to impress, or how many extramarital affairs they had in Florence, before we can enjoy the work.

Further Reading

If Barthes and Foucault are the patron saints of postmodern anonymity, there are many others worth inviting to the dinner party. Judith Butler’s work on performativity could be marshalled to understand anonymity as a gendered mark. Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste explains why known names accumulate cultural capital, while the anonymous remain invisible. In a world where taste is shaped by prestige, no name means no currency. Contemporary neuropsychologist Paul Bloom explains in How Pleasure Works that our aesthetic judgments are shaped more by backstory than by sensory input. The wine tastes better because we think it’s expensive, Bloom would claim. Kwame Anthony Appiah is an essential companion to Foucault’s ideas of identity as a construct within a closed system and that someone whose name was never preserved may never have been admitted to that network in the first place. We might also include Levinas on the ethical encounter with the unknown, Derrida on the instability of authorship, or Tia DeNora on music as social practice.

But perhaps that’s enough for now. The dinner party is getting a little tense, and someone is about to bring up Schoenberg.

Anon.
June 2025