Lily Kensington: Diva as Dialectic
Multimodal Practice Archive. 2025, Vol. 3(2): 9
https://doi.org/10.65621/JSYN3383
ABOUT THE PERFORMER
Jacob Spivack is a Berlin-based conceptual artist exploring queer embodiment, neurodivergence, and diasporic identity. Raised in a Reform Jewish household between New York and LA, they use performance to resist containment and coherence. Their alter ego, Lily Kensington, has appeared in performances across Berlin, New York, and beyond.
KEY WORDS
culture, performance, identity, queer, auto-mythology
‘I no longer believe in authenticity. I believe in staging‘.
In the city, performance is survival. Urban life demands constant shapeshifting — professional, cultural, social. We adapt, project, and curate just to stay visible. Even ‘authenticity’ begins to feel like another costume.
But what happens when the act fractures? When the mask slips and the persona unravels? For Lily Kensington, performance is no longer about constructing identity — it’s about exposing its collapse. In a city of endless facades, she’s not a character but a shimmering error, a post-diva whose purpose is to unsettle.
Lily isn’t a persona. She’s an auto-mythology — assembled from queer nostalgia, neurodivergence, and pharmaceutical malaise. A drag on the myth of coherence. A refusal.
Diva as Glitch, Commodity, Self-Critique
The diva has always been both subversive and commercial — glamorous, volatile, endlessly consumed. Today, stardom is horizontal. Everyone is performing, watching, and being watched. Authenticity is now a spectacle. Vulnerability is monetized.
In this loop, Lily isn’t the center — she’s the static. Fragmented by algorithmic culture, she exposes the exhaustion beneath constant self-reinvention. She is not transcendent; she’s the glitch that resists optimization.
Collapse, AI, and Refusal
The wildfires in Pacific Palisades — my hometown — felt like more than disaster. They were metaphors. Hollywood is burning, and AI is accelerating its collapse. Deepfakes, synthetic voices, generated scripts — the industry is phasing out the human.
But in the ruins, something new stirs. With centralized fame fading, identity becomes distributed: micro-performances, glitches, refusals. Live performance becomes insurgent. And Lily Kensington lingers here — unscalable, unreadable, unreplicable.
To perform Lily in the twilight of empire is to ask: What else can performance do? Not affirmed. But resisted. Disrupted. Refused.
I believe in performance as refusal.
Long live the diva.
Long live the glitch.
©Spivack, Jacob 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
SEXTANT: masculinities, sexualities & decolonialities 