Open pop star

The introduction of the "open pop star" device, a pseudonym to be used collectively, at will and without prior permission, is cited as the founding action of Neoism, an anti-art movement that has since become widely known for its experimentation with identity, history, authenticity via the use of pseudonyms.
The "open pop star" was a conceptual creation of the American mail artist David Zack (born in New Orleans, June 12, 1938, died mysteriously in Texas ca. 1995) in Canada in the mid to late 1970s. Zack's creation specified an open role that could be filled by anyone, including any number of artists doing any number of things at any particular time, resulting in an evolving oeuvre of anonymous works being created in various media under the name of a single fictitious creator and controlled by no one. In the mid to late 1970s, Zack reportedly combined names of his friends, the Latvian born poet and singer Maris Kudzins and the Hungarian Istvan Kantor to create the name of the first Open Pop Star, Monty Cantsin. While created as a joke in the spirit of Dada, it had the unintended consequences of anticipating aspects of the free software and open source movements and focusing attention on issues surrounding identity by calling into question commonly held assumptions about anonymity, stereotypes, self-awareness, ego, fame, and what it means to be an individual and an artist.
In the mid-1980s, questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin moniker was being overly associated with one or more individuals, leading to the eventual creation of a new generation of open pop star names such as Karen Eliot, who then inadvertently also extended the tradition of over-identification with one individual during the years of the mail art art strike until the successful creation of the name Luther Blissett broke the mold as the Internet began to spread in the 1990s. Today the monikers Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot, Luther Blissett and others are used freely and sometimes interchangeably by Neoists and non-Neoists internationally.
The open pop star was the original and central organizing principle of Neoist activity which then spread throughout the Mail Art network and continued to morph with the advent of the World Wide Web. Neoism is currently disputed due to continual splits within the Neoist network, creating vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of the manifestation of Zack's original concept and its history. Undisputed, however, are the origins of the movement in the mid to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity "open pop star" Monty Cantsin.

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