Real Fake Artistry
manuel arturo abreu
manuel arturo abreu, the monarch, 2015 (detail). Summer chard, rubber band, Venture Bros patch. From the exhibition recipes held in 2015 as part of the garage residency (2014-19).
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.—Pier Paolo Pasolini1
This text originated as a talk I gave in 2019 as part of the Schemers, Scammers, and Subverters Symposium, a public project by Roz Crews and Ralph Pugay held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Portland, Oregon.2 I often recycle and transpose previous works in my practice 3—as such, I offer this textual version of my original performative lecture as a way of distributing its content more widely, and to explore whether a “real” essay can emerge from a messy group of slides.—manuel arturo abreu
There’s fake artists, then there’s real fake artists—a kind of aesthetic response to market demands around artistic production: I’m fake, undoubtedly, but I have a nostalgia for the real.
Anyone can be a real fake artist. Said another way, everyone must be a real fake artist. We see in this the impact of modernism4 and the market. Particularly since “anything can be art,” contemporary practice is by nature managerial, precarious, and involves social computing, global supply chains, and messy divisions between labor and the social. We also see the impact of critical analysis of the art world: “art is fake,” i.e. market-driven, a means for money laundering5 and gentrification,6 concealing operations of capitalism and colonialism while excluding a wide range of identities and standpoints.7 I consider how contemporary artists respond to this landscape by: (1) breaking down fakery in terms of contemporary art gestures; (2) exploring how internet distortion lets one self-curate; and (3) discussing various impacts of modernism, the market, and critical analyses via (1) and (2).
Many gestures within contemporary US art make more sense when considered against the context of the country’s gutted social safety net. Claire Bishop argues, for example, that social practice recasts the artist as a volunteer problem solver, doing art to “engage” a “social issue” that may actually be best engaged through equitable policy changes, direct action, and other forms of organization that aren’t primarily aesthetic (or whose aesthetic might be functional).8 Celebrated artist of the medium Suzanne Lacy called the gambit of social practice back in 1995: in a book she edited on the critical issues of “new genre public art,” as she called it then, she wrote that “critics must inevitably enter the discussion personally and philosophically when approaching work that intends toward social meaning.”9 Critique of such work necessarily becomes yoked to the critic’s subjective politics. Any attempt to get at ‘the work itself’ becomes a discussion about surrounding social issues, since the aesthetic content of the work lies precisely in these issues and a presumed engagement with them, in turn allowing a kind of do-gooder paper tiger to arise against critique or, perhaps worse, turn it into ‘part of the work.’
Related to Bishop’s argument, it seems that, after conceptualism, the contemporary artist must therefore be an entrepreneur or at least a power user—a creative, flexible, resilient problem solver and prosumer operating on a lean or agile model, developing advanced digital literacy and technological prowess, managing their branding and marketing. That’s a fuckton of stuff that I personally would rather fake, or at least disbelieve. As well, the contemporary currency of hi-res digital documentation drives feasible aesthetic choices toward such fakery, especially in a socially-distanced context. Further, at least in the US, where there is minimal state-sponsored capital for aesthetic production, people will fight over scraps of cultural capital, meaning that the politics of the market dictate perceived scarcity and hierarchy within the social contexts of aesthetic production. Affect becomes part of marketing yourself; sociality starts to feel like ambient work. And in a lot of ways, the dematerialization of the art object becomes the re-fetishization of discourse.10
Contemporary practice responds to this discursive landscape. It is brimming with “doubt-filled gestures, equivocal objects, bemused paradoxes, tentative projections, diffident proposals, or wishful anticipations.”11 It also involves ad hoc constructions of the contexts for such aesthetics. Some gestures I’m thinking of are indeed at work in my own practice: self-declared artist residencies with minimal resources, projects and spaces at marginal and ephemeral exhibition sites,12 alternative arts education projects, social engagement,13 and projects that consist solely of the circulation of cell phone photography made to mimic hi-res documentation, to name a few.
Contemporary artists’ ambivalent approach, medium non-specificity, and social engagement are not simply due to the long shadow of post-conceptualism and the seemingly-infinite set of options for making art today, but are also a result of attempts to navigate the landscape of market pressures, of doing whatever works and adapting as needed. In my case, the garage residency (2014-19) explored how precarity engenders slippage between inhabiting space and making work.14 And with Victoria Anne Reis I co-founded and co-run home school,15 a free pop-up art school that creates welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art, currently in its fifth year of genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum. Many alt arts education projects conceive themselves as art in a Beuysian social sculpture sense, but home school does not consider itself art. Nevertheless, the more I resist it being part of my practice, the more it becomes a part of my practice. Tortured artistry or bemused paradox?
manuel arturo abreu, hollow altar, 2021. Ink, canvas, wood, dried eggshell powder, lamp, audio composition, hardware. Image courtesy the artist and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna
A viral Twitter prank in a gallery.
Timothy James Kelly, To wash my eyelids in the rain, 2014. Becks beer, reading glasses, ground. Courtesy the artist and Lodos Gallery.
✸ These two are only superficially related as gestures, of course, as Kelly’s work does not have an additional social experiment / prank layer. I’m more interested in how the comparison shows us the different unseen machinations in the production of aesthetics (licit or not).
These gestures—particularly what Bishop terms “the educational turn” (including the rise of alt arts education projects)—also emerge from the marketization of US arts education. Consider, on another hand, software developers: Stack Overflow reported that by 2016, 69% of 50,000 surveyed developers were at least partially self-taught,16—whereas in the arts context, in the same year, an Artnet survey of the fifty highest-grossing artists on the secondary market born 1966 or later found that 53% had an MFA, 35% had no MFA but had primary higher education, and 12% were self-taught (held no art degrees).17 The market and the degree mill are in cahoots to gatekeep and privilege aesthetic mediocrity over the real fake art, some might be thinking. Others might be saying, More artists should be self-taught and break down the gates!
I couldn’t agree more. But also, funnily, this framing of the MFA industry as a racket also rhymes with the stereotypical public response to the avant-garde (“a five year old could do it”). I consider this hoi polloi response to art to always be relevant, but it must be said: yes, in one sense, a five-year-old could do it. In another sense, it’s impossible for a five-year-old to acquire that much student debt! (Eventually it will be possible, a ghostly Venture Capitalist presence intones.) Bad jokes aside, we may yet see a shift toward auto-didacticism in the art world akin to the software development world, and the gestures and project types I describe in this essay might be a precursor for that next moment.
Since now you can curate and network your digital presence with such granularity, many fake artists and fake arts endeavors are more able to cause harm in the interest of short-term gain. Their targets are generally ‘regular people.’ Fake art world socialite Anna Delvey, Billy McFarland and Ja Rule of the Fyre Festival, Joe Scanlan’s racist Donelle Woolford project (in which he “addressed racism” by inventing a fake Black woman artist), Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, CV Vitolo Hadad, and all the other fake Black people—we have come to recognize this trope as standard of modern American culture.18 This ‘deepfakery’ has some relation to the criminalized “cool” of Blackness as exported by US capitalist media. A historical context around minstrelsy shows us that Europeans used blackface in vaudeville to work out their various anxieties and affective states that weren’t allowed in respectable white society—such as perverse sexuality and, notably, feelings of class consciousness.19 Tying this to the digital, artist Keith Obadike argues that “Surely the net space just makes the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier.”20
In 2014, critic and editor Brian Droitcour wrote of post-internet art:
It’s boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space. It’s often frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive in networks.21
As network economies developed, and as high-speed internet access increased, high-quality documentation of work became a major currency (em)powering the global art world and its accoutrements of biennials, festivals, conferences, symposia, and so on. As circulation itself, as well as context and lack of context, became mediums, and memes became mainstream, post-internet became an outdated term to describe the state of art, but Droitcour’s concerns are still interesting. It’s only logical that artists responded by making work that accommodates this new marketized documentation gaze, while taking advantage of the sheen of social media to create our brands. Whatever the work does in physical space is arguably less interesting to some artists than the premise of value-creation.
The garage residency, 2014-19, Portland, OR.
Certain aspects of curating your online presence (i.e. to appear as something or somebody you’re not) border on unethical. This quality of being ‘right on the line’ is a necessary and unavoidable part of digital parasocial affect. That seed of deception can allow one to slip into the deepfake realm, where you “fake it ‘til you make it” and justify harm for some fantasy of greater good, such as corporate social justice. On the other hand, this inherently deceptive process can increase one’s access to resources via clout (i.e. perceived legitimacy and accelerated networking). The reality is that if resources won’t come to you, you have to invent them. If your goal is to get resources and spread them, these tools are available. But the ego is frail and it’s easy to end up in the deepfake lane right alongside one’s good intentions—as if catfishing yourself. It’s that feeling, perhaps, that you can’t express affect online without in some sense exaggerating it, due to the consciousness-altering nature of language use22 (and arguably, more broadly, the use of sound and gesture for symbolic communication). We are still figuring out how to navigate these platforms and their subsumption of our social lives, affect, and biome.
Due to this fine line, really anyone with a device that takes decent photos and connects to the internet can start an art gallery, art school, art museum, etc.—and doing so is arguably necessary for a lot of people. I certainly felt that way regarding my practice, and I felt that spirit in Portland.23 It’s obviously not fair that artists should be burdened with creatively problem-solving ad hoc social safety net replacements during the slow death of a nation. It’s also obvious that we are being trained to treat art as a way to generate value regardless. Why should we be surprised that artists adapt to market conditions in their aesthetic gestures?24
We should also reconsider the landscape I’ve painted. Lamenting the state of US social infrastructure risks too idyllic or untarnished an image of what it takes to construct “America.” Rather than some halcyon picture of quasi-communist WPA artist funding heaven, we have to give up hope of a better past—this is part of being an unbeliever with a nostalgia for belief, a monk or monger of certain rituals without belief, and of certain beliefs without ritual.25 We can consider how modernism itself was a colonization of Black and brown abstraction.26 David Joselit argues that western aesthetics and markets place non-western practitioners in a position of debt to modernism.27 Thus, the fake history of modernism as some ex nihilo artistic revolution resulting in a functionless, autonomous objet d’art conceals the colonial function of western aesthetics. In reality, all art is overtly or covertly functional. Western conceptualism represents, in a sense, a ‘return’ to Indigenous, African, and Asian functionalist, socially- and spiritually-embedded practices of making, thinking, and being together. Kaprow argued that contemporary art tends toward its own disappearance when its horizon includes all possible activity—to such an extent that, for him, “nonart is more Art than art art.”28 So there is obfuscation happening in the production of value and in the general maintenance of the white mediocrity of the global contemporary art market.
As time goes on we learn about the past: the CIA used the arts as a form of soft power during the Cold War. Declassified documents show that the global prominence of AbEx was a cold war CIA psyop promoted as a symbol of American freedom in light of Soviet opinion that modernism was degenerate.29 In literature, ironically, the opposite course was pursued: “with CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction.”30 The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom also funded jazz31 and European avant garde music, culminating in the 30-day Festival of Twentieth-Century Masterpieces of Modern Arts in Paris in 1952, which commissioned nine different orchestras to perform concertos, operas, and ballets by over 70 composers labeled by Soviet commissars as “degenerate” and “sterile,” including Britten, Satie, Schoenberg, Berg, Boulez, and Debussy.32 This epoch of state-sponsored art exported US cultural processes and contexts as imperial symbols of American freedom abroad—essentially a tool of McCarthyist anti-communism. What are the qualities of US state-sponsored art today in relation to this imperial exportation in the effort to Americanize the world, or as Cyrus Veeser might put it, make and re-make (in the face of unending resistance) “a world safe for capitalism”?
This isn’t to say that human creativity is a scam or something. It is real and vulnerable and powerful. We can look to the medium of performance to think through contemporary responses to the double pincers of the market and one’s own harmfulness. The idea of critiquing systems of power and the powerful, rather than the oppressed, is known as “punching up” in the art of comedy. Molly Ivins articulated the distinction in a 1991 People magazine interview: "There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity... The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel—it's vulgar."
Other comics claim this is a fake concept, or that they’re ‘equal-opportunity offenders.’ But let’s follow this, and think punching up in relation to real fake artistry, since there is more potential to reclaim value and/or redistribute resources if you’re scamming institutions and gubernatorial bodies to get money and give it to others, as opposed to scamming ‘regular people’ who are more likely to be in the same range of precarity as you. But how can I distinguish between real people and institutionally-deployed NPCs?,33 some may be asking. You may have to turn to the discourse of the philosophical zombie to cope with that quandary.34
Anyway, punching up. The cringey aesthetics of institutional critique and social practice are a kind of awkward transitional phase toward the always-arriving-but-never-there horizon of real fake artistry. Most often, they reduce to these institutions patting themselves on the back for their in-house critical production, while the basic equity-centered premise of “shut it down, give everything back, no more colonial spoils” is not really reached. Of course, I speak rhetorically, knowing that this kind of aesthetic stance is antithetical to the existence of an art market structured by heritage arts institutions, blue chip galleries, auction houses, and so on. Instead, we find neoliberal, individualized solutions presented by creative types, the ongoing viability of “zombie formalism,”35 and, in the US, a landscape of structural loneliness that pervades all of our surveilled and hyper-commodified expression. If the norms of the western consumer set the basis by which the deviance of the lumpenproletariat is algorithmically determined and punished, the body of the consumer-norm-setter (i.e. me, let’s say) starts to attack itself, knowing in the gut something has been wrong for a long time. Yes, but struggle has also been going on for a long time. Try to catch up.
manuel arturo abreu, Allan Kaprow asks for help, 2018. Digital collage
manuel arturo abreu, digital collage of first Google image results for "cia agents" and "abstract expressionism," 2019
manuel arturo abreu, A Zombie Reader for the Sevenths Athens Biennale: ECLIPSE, 2021. Zine, 55 pages. Image courtesy the artist and the Athens Biennale
Marcel Broodthaers, installation view of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972.
This whole phenomenon of real fake contemporary art and alt arts institutions emerging from a need for bootstrap actions hearkens to Marcel Broodthaers. This quirky-melancholic Belgian artist turned to conceptual art in 1964 because his poetry didn’t sell: “For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old. […] The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.”36 In 1968, he founded and directed a real fake conceptual museum called Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles). Starting at home, the work culminated in the exhibition of a massive amount of objects with images, motifs, or names of eagles. Broodthaers states:
This Museum is a fictitious museum. It plays the role of, on the one hand, a political parody of art shows, and on the other hand an artistic parody of political events. Which is in fact what official museums and institutions like documenta do. With the difference, however, that a work of fiction allows you to capture reality and at the same time what it conceals.37
The work is not so much institutional critique or institution-as-critique (or not just that), but a magical-thinking version of the institution as fixation, and as idée fixe, in order to engage the relationship between governmentality and creativity, as well as the melancholy of the failure of modernism’s radical proposals. Broodthaers said in 1972: “Whether it is a urinal signed by R. Mutt or a found object, any object can be elevated to be a piece of art. The artist defined the object in such a way that only the museum can be in its future.”38 This museum-determinism is sad indeed. Anything can be art, yes, but does that matter if it’s not in a museum? This reminds me of the tyranny of the digital. Yes, you can “do anything” but only as a user; and yes, things happen, but does it matter if there’s no online evidence? Further, if the so-called western objet d’art, ostensibly functionless and autonomous, is indeed doomed to the institution, what happens if functionless autonomous activity finds its way into one of these real fake institutions, coming out of an aesthetic response to market conditions?
Is the result of this line of thinking the reverse—that is, a determinism of the end of museums, a horizon of ethical repatriation of indigenous treasures? Would this be so bad? And even if western institutions are too invested in their imperial spoils to ever give up the ghost, so to speak, and decolonize, artists can at least imagine and make objects, processes, and concepts that don’t (as Broodthaers put it) “define the object in such a way…”39
There is a future other than institutions inside our imaginations. As the late great bell hooks put it: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”40
✸
manuel arturo abreu, good to know, 2015. Plastic
Performing Real Fake Artistry, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Portland. February 23, 2019
manuel arturo abreu is a Dominican non-disciplinary artist who works with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics.
1 1966 press conference with Pasolini; quoted in Maria and Gregory Pearse, “Pasolini: Quo Vadis?: The Fate of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cinema Seekers, n.d.
2 Funded by the Precipice Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Calligram Foundation.
3 Thanks to Laura Brown for previous exploration of this recycling process with Notes on the garage residency (digital video with sound, 11:18 minutes, 2018, commissioned for Accessions journal, no. 4), which turned an essay into captions for a new moving image work depicting Portland transit routes. See: https://accessions.org/article4/accessions-issue-4-translation/notes-on-the-garage-residency/.
4 Loosely defined, “Modernism” here being the concept found in cultural and aesthetic analyses used to describe a number of primarily European responses to industrialization, which in the eyes of many catalyzed the need for new aesthetic forms of action and contemplation.
5 See Fausto Martin De Sanctis, Money Laundering Through Art: A Criminal Justice Perspective (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2013). For a quick overview, see also: Peter D. Hardy, “Art and Money Laundering,” Ballard Spahr LLP (blog), March 19, 2019. https://www.moneylaunderingnews.com/2019/03/art-and-money-laundering/.
6 See Tyler Denmead, The Creative Underclass (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Johanna Beckmann, “The Aesthetics of Gentrification,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2021); Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), et al.
7 And so not able to “really” represent the state of human creativity nor even a sliver of its pinnacle as it pretends to.
8 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012).
9 Suzanne Lacy, Mapping The Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 182.
10 Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
11 Terry Smith, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’” October 130 (2009): 54.
12 An iterating garage residency project: I would mount private or photo-documented installations in recently-vacated rooms of the punk house I lived behind in Portland, OR, restricting myself only to detritus the former housemate had left behind, to explore whether any trace of the person remained in the abandoned stuff. For example, see recipes (2015).
13 manuel arturo abreu, “We need to talk about social practice,” Art Practical, March 6, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20200604084151/https://www.artpractical.com/column/we-need-to-talk-about-social-practice/.
14 manuel arturo abreu, “Notes on the Garage Residency,” SFMoma Open Space (blog), September 15, 2016. https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/09/notes-on-the-garage-residency/.
15 See homeschoolpdx.tumblr.com.
16 Karen Turner, “Lots of coders are self-taught, according to developer survey,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/30/lots-of-coders-are-self-taught-according-to-developer-survey/.
17 Ben Davis, “Is Getting an MFA Worth the Price?”, Artnet News, August 30, 2016. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mfa-degree-successful-artists-620891.
18 Catfishing, Blackfishing, scamming, breadcrumbing, sealioning, ghosting, etc.
19 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
20 Coco Fusco, “All Too Real: The Tale of Black Sale: Coco Fusco interviews Keith Townsend Obadike,” Thing Reviews (bbs.thing.net), September 2001.
21 Brian Droitcour, "The Perils of Post-Internet Art,” Art in America, October 29, 2014. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/.
22 manuel arturo abreu, “Consciousness, entheogeny, & colonization,” University of Oregon, Center for Art Research, March 2020. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/0/16706/files/2020/03/manuel-arturo-abreu.pdf.
23 Portland itself has many ongoing and defunct examples of this bootstrap approach. Albatross Gallery consists of a plastic sleeve into which exhibited work is placed, worn on the gallerist Michael Reinsch’s neck as he travels around town (pre-Covid), plus a web presence. The Nat Turner Project started in a Pacific Northwest College of Art bathroom when the co-curators were MFA students there. Bronco and My Scion Gallery were housed in gallerists’ cars. Appendix Project Space operated out of a garage in Portland before its founders (Travis Fitzgerald, Josh Pavlacky, and Daniel Wallace) moved to New York to start American Medium (which was started out of a Union Square loft owned by Fitzgerald’s father, before moving to Chelsea. Of course, It of course helps if your dad owns property. They closed in December 2018). Portland Museum of Modern Art was set within the stairwell and basement of the Mississippi Records compound. Various alt-arts education projects as well: home school (shameless plug), the Living School of Art, Conceptual Oregon Performance School, and Free School PDX. While there are funding initiatives like the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Precipice Fund and the Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, among others, there is not really a sustainable model in place for the bootstrap approach in the face of current city rents.
24 I can’t conclude this section without mentioning Amalia Ulman. Excellences and Perfections (2014) presages much of what I’m describing and really captures the tenor of the whole “let me critique something by embodying it” approach that is so annoying about various aspects of the contemporary art world and its gestures.
25 Phrasing here inspired by Evan Ifekoya’s Ritual Without Belief (2018), a six-hour sound piece the artist describes as a “black queer algorithm,” made in collaboration with family and friends.
26 manuel arturo abreu, “Against the supremacy of thought,” Rhizome, January 8, 2018. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jan/08/against-the-supremacy-of-thought/.
27 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).
28 Allan Kaprow, "The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I" (1971), in The Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
29 Former operative Donald Jameson revealed this in 1995. See the work of journalist Frances Stonor Saunders,. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999).
30 Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2014. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/.
31 See Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting American in the Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Danielle Folser-Lussier, "Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism," Diplomatic History Vol. 36, No.1 (January 2012): 53–64; Saito Yoshiomi, The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century Cultural Diplomacy and "American Music" (London: Routledge, 2020).
32 James Petras, “The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police,” Rebelión (2001).
33 A nonplayer character, in gaming, is one controlled by the computer rather than by the player.
34 Oxford philosopher Robert Kirk first used this term in the 1970s to map the shift, roughly, from a Cartesian immaterial theory of mind—where automata were clearly distinct from humans since they lacked language—to a ‘physicalist’ scientific theory—where everything reduces to a material or physical cause and thus opens the question of whether we can conceive of beings exactly like us except lacking mind (a material definition of mind, not immaterial).
35 A term popularized in 2014 by art critics Walter Robinson and Jerry Saltz to describe bland, market-ready abstract painting.
36 Brochure from Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective, MoMA, New York, Feb 14-May 15, 2016.
37 Marcel Broodthaers, “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Art Moderne et Publicité” (1972), in Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings, Gloria Moure and Marcel Broodthaers (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2012), 354.
38 Rainer Borgemeister and Chris Cullens, “‘Section des Figures’: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present,” October 42 (1987): 135-154.
39 Rainer Borgemeister and Chris Cullens, “‘Section des Figures’: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present,” October 42 (1987).
40 bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2012), 281.
January 15, 2022
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Real Fake Artistry
manuel arturo abreu
manuel arturo abreu, the monarch, 2015 (detail). Summer chard, rubber band, Venture Bros patch. From the exhibition recipes held in 2015 as part of the garage residency (2014-19).
If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.—Pier Paolo Pasolini1
This text originated as a talk I gave in 2019 as part of the Schemers, Scammers, and Subverters Symposium, a public project by Roz Crews and Ralph Pugay held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Portland, Oregon.2 I often recycle and transpose previous works in my practice 3—as such, I offer this textual version of my original performative lecture as a way of distributing its content more widely, and to explore whether a “real” essay can emerge from a messy group of slides.—manuel arturo abreu
There’s fake artists, then there’s real fake artists—a kind of aesthetic response to market demands around artistic production: I’m fake, undoubtedly, but I have a nostalgia for the real.
Anyone can be a real fake artist. Said another way, everyone must be a real fake artist. We see in this the impact of modernism4 and the market. Particularly since “anything can be art,” contemporary practice is by nature managerial, precarious, and involves social computing, global supply chains, and messy divisions between labor and the social. We also see the impact of critical analysis of the art world: “art is fake,” i.e. market-driven, a means for money laundering5 and gentrification,6 concealing operations of capitalism and colonialism while excluding a wide range of identities and standpoints.7 I consider how contemporary artists respond to this landscape by: (1) breaking down fakery in terms of contemporary art gestures; (2) exploring how internet distortion lets one self-curate; and (3) discussing various impacts of modernism, the market, and critical analyses via (1) and (2).
Many gestures within contemporary US art make more sense when considered against the context of the country’s gutted social safety net. Claire Bishop argues, for example, that social practice recasts the artist as a volunteer problem solver, doing art to “engage” a “social issue” that may actually be best engaged through equitable policy changes, direct action, and other forms of organization that aren’t primarily aesthetic (or whose aesthetic might be functional).8 Celebrated artist of the medium Suzanne Lacy called the gambit of social practice back in 1995: in a book she edited on the critical issues of “new genre public art,” as she called it then, she wrote that “critics must inevitably enter the discussion personally and philosophically when approaching work that intends toward social meaning.”9 Critique of such work necessarily becomes yoked to the critic’s subjective politics. Any attempt to get at ‘the work itself’ becomes a discussion about surrounding social issues, since the aesthetic content of the work lies precisely in these issues and a presumed engagement with them, in turn allowing a kind of do-gooder paper tiger to arise against critique or, perhaps worse, turn it into ‘part of the work.’
manuel arturo abreu, hollow altar, 2021. Ink, canvas, wood, dried eggshell powder, lamp, audio composition, hardware. Image courtesy the artist and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna
Related to Bishop’s argument, it seems that, after conceptualism, the contemporary artist must therefore be an entrepreneur or at least a power user—a creative, flexible, resilient problem solver and prosumer operating on a lean or agile model, developing advanced digital literacy and technological prowess, managing their branding and marketing. That’s a fuckton of stuff that I personally would rather fake, or at least disbelieve. As well, the contemporary currency of hi-res digital documentation drives feasible aesthetic choices toward such fakery, especially in a socially-distanced context. Further, at least in the US, where there is minimal state-sponsored capital for aesthetic production, people will fight over scraps of cultural capital, meaning that the politics of the market dictate perceived scarcity and hierarchy within the social contexts of aesthetic production. Affect becomes part of marketing yourself; sociality starts to feel like ambient work. And in a lot of ways, the dematerialization of the art object becomes the re-fetishization of discourse.10
Contemporary practice responds to this discursive landscape. It is brimming with “doubt-filled gestures, equivocal objects, bemused paradoxes, tentative projections, diffident proposals, or wishful anticipations.”11 It also involves ad hoc constructions of the contexts for such aesthetics. Some gestures I’m thinking of are indeed at work in my own practice: self-declared artist residencies with minimal resources, projects and spaces at marginal and ephemeral exhibition sites,12 alternative arts education projects, social engagement,13 and projects that consist solely of the circulation of cell phone photography made to mimic hi-res documentation, to name a few.
Contemporary artists’ ambivalent approach, medium non-specificity, and social engagement are not simply due to the long shadow of post-conceptualism and the seemingly-infinite set of options for making art today, but are also a result of attempts to navigate the landscape of market pressures, of doing whatever works and adapting as needed. In my case, the garage residency (2014-19) explored how precarity engenders slippage between inhabiting space and making work.14 And with Victoria Anne Reis I co-founded and co-run home school,15 a free pop-up art school that creates welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art, currently in its fifth year of genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum. Many alt arts education projects conceive themselves as art in a Beuysian social sculpture sense, but home school does not consider itself art. Nevertheless, the more I resist it being part of my practice, the more it becomes a part of my practice. Tortured artistry or bemused paradox?
A viral Twitter prank in a gallery.
Timothy James Kelly, To wash my eyelids in the rain, 2014. Becks beer, reading glasses, ground. Courtesy the artist and Lodos Gallery.
✸ These two are only superficially related as gestures, of course, as Kelly’s work does not have an additional social experiment / prank layer. I’m more interested in how the comparison shows us the different unseen machinations in the production of aesthetics (licit or not).
These gestures—particularly what Bishop terms “the educational turn” (including the rise of alt arts education projects)—also emerge from the marketization of US arts education. Consider, on another hand, software developers: Stack Overflow reported that by 2016, 69% of 50,000 surveyed developers were at least partially self-taught,16—whereas in the arts context, in the same year, an Artnet survey of the fifty highest-grossing artists on the secondary market born 1966 or later found that 53% had an MFA, 35% had no MFA but had primary higher education, and 12% were self-taught (held no art degrees).17 The market and the degree mill are in cahoots to gatekeep and privilege aesthetic mediocrity over the real fake art, some might be thinking. Others might be saying, More artists should be self-taught and break down the gates!
I couldn’t agree more. But also, funnily, this framing of the MFA industry as a racket also rhymes with the stereotypical public response to the avant-garde (“a five year old could do it”). I consider this hoi polloi response to art to always be relevant, but it must be said: yes, in one sense, a five-year-old could do it. In another sense, it’s impossible for a five-year-old to acquire that much student debt! (Eventually it will be possible, a ghostly Venture Capitalist presence intones.) Bad jokes aside, we may yet see a shift toward auto-didacticism in the art world akin to the software development world, and the gestures and project types I describe in this essay might be a precursor for that next moment.
Since now you can curate and network your digital presence with such granularity, many fake artists and fake arts endeavors are more able to cause harm in the interest of short-term gain. Their targets are generally ‘regular people.’ Fake art world socialite Anna Delvey, Billy McFarland and Ja Rule of the Fyre Festival, Joe Scanlan’s racist Donelle Woolford project (in which he “addressed racism” by inventing a fake Black woman artist), Rachel Dolezal, Jessica Krug, CV Vitolo Hadad, and all the other fake Black people—we have come to recognize this trope as standard of modern American culture.18 This ‘deepfakery’ has some relation to the criminalized “cool” of Blackness as exported by US capitalist media. A historical context around minstrelsy shows us that Europeans used blackface in vaudeville to work out their various anxieties and affective states that weren’t allowed in respectable white society—such as perverse sexuality and, notably, feelings of class consciousness.19 Tying this to the digital, artist Keith Obadike argues that “Surely the net space just makes the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier.”20
In 2014, critic and editor Brian Droitcour wrote of post-internet art:
It’s boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space. It’s often frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive in networks.21
As network economies developed, and as high-speed internet access increased, high-quality documentation of work became a major currency (em)powering the global art world and its accoutrements of biennials, festivals, conferences, symposia, and so on. As circulation itself, as well as context and lack of context, became mediums, and memes became mainstream, post-internet became an outdated term to describe the state of art, but Droitcour’s concerns are still interesting. It’s only logical that artists responded by making work that accommodates this new marketized documentation gaze, while taking advantage of the sheen of social media to create our brands. Whatever the work does in physical space is arguably less interesting to some artists than the premise of value-creation.
The garage residency, 2014-19, Portland, OR.
Certain aspects of curating your online presence (i.e. to appear as something or somebody you’re not) border on unethical. This quality of being ‘right on the line’ is a necessary and unavoidable part of digital parasocial affect. That seed of deception can allow one to slip into the deepfake realm, where you “fake it ‘til you make it” and justify harm for some fantasy of greater good, such as corporate social justice. On the other hand, this inherently deceptive process can increase one’s access to resources via clout (i.e. perceived legitimacy and accelerated networking). The reality is that if resources won’t come to you, you have to invent them. If your goal is to get resources and spread them, these tools are available. But the ego is frail and it’s easy to end up in the deepfake lane right alongside one’s good intentions—as if catfishing yourself. It’s that feeling, perhaps, that you can’t express affect online without in some sense exaggerating it, due to the consciousness-altering nature of language use22 (and arguably, more broadly, the use of sound and gesture for symbolic communication). We are still figuring out how to navigate these platforms and their subsumption of our social lives, affect, and biome.
Due to this fine line, really anyone with a device that takes decent photos and connects to the internet can start an art gallery, art school, art museum, etc.—and doing so is arguably necessary for a lot of people. I certainly felt that way regarding my practice, and I felt that spirit in Portland.23 It’s obviously not fair that artists should be burdened with creatively problem-solving ad hoc social safety net replacements during the slow death of a nation. It’s also obvious that we are being trained to treat art as a way to generate value regardless. Why should we be surprised that artists adapt to market conditions in their aesthetic gestures?24
We should also reconsider the landscape I’ve painted. Lamenting the state of US social infrastructure risks too idyllic or untarnished an image of what it takes to construct “America.” Rather than some halcyon picture of quasi-communist WPA artist funding heaven, we have to give up hope of a better past—this is part of being an unbeliever with a nostalgia for belief, a monk or monger of certain rituals without belief, and of certain beliefs without ritual.25 We can consider how modernism itself was a colonization of Black and brown abstraction.26 David Joselit argues that western aesthetics and markets place non-western practitioners in a position of debt to modernism.27 Thus, the fake history of modernism as some ex nihilo artistic revolution resulting in a functionless, autonomous objet d’art conceals the colonial function of western aesthetics. In reality, all art is overtly or covertly functional. Western conceptualism represents, in a sense, a ‘return’ to Indigenous, African, and Asian functionalist, socially- and spiritually-embedded practices of making, thinking, and being together. Kaprow argued that contemporary art tends toward its own disappearance when its horizon includes all possible activity—to such an extent that, for him, “nonart is more Art than art art.”28 So there is obfuscation happening in the production of value and in the general maintenance of the white mediocrity of the global contemporary art market.
manuel arturo abreu, Allan Kaprow asks for help, 2018. Digital collage
manuel arturo abreu, digital collage of first Google image results for "cia agents" and "abstract expressionism," 2019
As time goes on we learn about the past: the CIA used the arts as a form of soft power during the Cold War. Declassified documents show that the global prominence of AbEx was a cold war CIA psyop promoted as a symbol of American freedom in light of Soviet opinion that modernism was degenerate.29 In literature, ironically, the opposite course was pursued: “with CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction.”30 The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom also funded jazz31 and European avant garde music, culminating in the 30-day Festival of Twentieth-Century Masterpieces of Modern Arts in Paris in 1952, which commissioned nine different orchestras to perform concertos, operas, and ballets by over 70 composers labeled by Soviet commissars as “degenerate” and “sterile,” including Britten, Satie, Schoenberg, Berg, Boulez, and Debussy.32 This epoch of state-sponsored art exported US cultural processes and contexts as imperial symbols of American freedom abroad—essentially a tool of McCarthyist anti-communism. What are the qualities of US state-sponsored art today in relation to this imperial exportation in the effort to Americanize the world, or as Cyrus Veeser might put it, make and re-make (in the face of unending resistance) “a world safe for capitalism”?
This isn’t to say that human creativity is a scam or something. It is real and vulnerable and powerful. We can look to the medium of performance to think through contemporary responses to the double pincers of the market and one’s own harmfulness. The idea of critiquing systems of power and the powerful, rather than the oppressed, is known as “punching up” in the art of comedy. Molly Ivins articulated the distinction in a 1991 People magazine interview: "There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity... The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel—it's vulgar."
Other comics claim this is a fake concept, or that they’re ‘equal-opportunity offenders.’ But let’s follow this, and think punching up in relation to real fake artistry, since there is more potential to reclaim value and/or redistribute resources if you’re scamming institutions and gubernatorial bodies to get money and give it to others, as opposed to scamming ‘regular people’ who are more likely to be in the same range of precarity as you. But how can I distinguish between real people and institutionally-deployed NPCs?,33 some may be asking. You may have to turn to the discourse of the philosophical zombie to cope with that quandary.34
manuel arturo abreu, A Zombie Reader for the Sevenths Athens Biennale: ECLIPSE, 2021. Zine, 55 pages. Image courtesy the artist and the Athens Biennale
Anyway, punching up. The cringey aesthetics of institutional critique and social practice are a kind of awkward transitional phase toward the always-arriving-but-never-there horizon of real fake artistry. Most often, they reduce to these institutions patting themselves on the back for their in-house critical production, while the basic equity-centered premise of “shut it down, give everything back, no more colonial spoils” is not really reached. Of course, I speak rhetorically, knowing that this kind of aesthetic stance is antithetical to the existence of an art market structured by heritage arts institutions, blue chip galleries, auction houses, and so on. Instead, we find neoliberal, individualized solutions presented by creative types, the ongoing viability of “zombie formalism,”35 and, in the US, a landscape of structural loneliness that pervades all of our surveilled and hyper-commodified expression. If the norms of the western consumer set the basis by which the deviance of the lumpenproletariat is algorithmically determined and punished, the body of the consumer-norm-setter (i.e. me, let’s say) starts to attack itself, knowing in the gut something has been wrong for a long time. Yes, but struggle has also been going on for a long time. Try to catch up.
This whole phenomenon of real fake contemporary art and alt arts institutions emerging from a need for bootstrap actions hearkens to Marcel Broodthaers. This quirky-melancholic Belgian artist turned to conceptual art in 1964 because his poetry didn’t sell: “For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old. […] The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.”36 In 1968, he founded and directed a real fake conceptual museum called Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles). Starting at home, the work culminated in the exhibition of a massive amount of objects with images, motifs, or names of eagles. Broodthaers states:
This Museum is a fictitious museum. It plays the role of, on the one hand, a political parody of art shows, and on the other hand an artistic parody of political events. Which is in fact what official museums and institutions like documenta do. With the difference, however, that a work of fiction allows you to capture reality and at the same time what it conceals.37
Marcel Broodthaers, installation view of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1972.
The work is not so much institutional critique or institution-as-critique (or not just that), but a magical-thinking version of the institution as fixation, and as idée fixe, in order to engage the relationship between governmentality and creativity, as well as the melancholy of the failure of modernism’s radical proposals. Broodthaers said in 1972: “Whether it is a urinal signed by R. Mutt or a found object, any object can be elevated to be a piece of art. The artist defined the object in such a way that only the museum can be in its future.”38 This museum-determinism is sad indeed. Anything can be art, yes, but does that matter if it’s not in a museum? This reminds me of the tyranny of the digital. Yes, you can “do anything” but only as a user; and yes, things happen, but does it matter if there’s no online evidence? Further, if the so-called western objet d’art, ostensibly functionless and autonomous, is indeed doomed to the institution, what happens if functionless autonomous activity finds its way into one of these real fake institutions, coming out of an aesthetic response to market conditions?
Is the result of this line of thinking the reverse—that is, a determinism of the end of museums, a horizon of ethical repatriation of indigenous treasures? Would this be so bad? And even if western institutions are too invested in their imperial spoils to ever give up the ghost, so to speak, and decolonize, artists can at least imagine and make objects, processes, and concepts that don’t (as Broodthaers put it) “define the object in such a way…”39
There is a future other than institutions inside our imaginations. As the late great bell hooks put it: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”40
✸
manuel arturo abreu, good to know, 2015. Plastic
manuel arturo abreu is a Dominican non-disciplinary artist who works with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics.
1 1966 press conference with Pasolini; quoted in Maria and Gregory Pearse, “Pasolini: Quo Vadis?: The Fate of Pier Paolo Pasolini,” Cinema Seekers, n.d.
2 Funded by the Precipice Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Calligram Foundation.
3 Thanks to Laura Brown for previous exploration of this recycling process with Notes on the garage residency (digital video with sound, 11:18 minutes, 2018, commissioned for Accessions journal, no. 4), which turned an essay into captions for a new moving image work depicting Portland transit routes. See: https://accessions.org/article4/accessions-issue-4-translation/notes-on-the-garage-residency/.
4 Loosely defined, “Modernism” here being the concept found in cultural and aesthetic analyses used to describe a number of primarily European responses to industrialization, which in the eyes of many catalyzed the need for new aesthetic forms of action and contemplation.
5 See Fausto Martin De Sanctis, Money Laundering Through Art: A Criminal Justice Perspective (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2013). For a quick overview, see also: Peter D. Hardy, “Art and Money Laundering,” Ballard Spahr LLP (blog), March 19, 2019. https://www.moneylaunderingnews.com/2019/03/art-and-money-laundering/.
6 See Tyler Denmead, The Creative Underclass (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Johanna Beckmann, “The Aesthetics of Gentrification,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2021); Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), et al.
7 And so not able to “really” represent the state of human creativity nor even a sliver of its pinnacle as it pretends to.
8 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012).
9 Suzanne Lacy, Mapping The Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 182.
10 Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
11 Terry Smith, “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’” October 130 (2009): 54.
12 An iterating garage residency project: I would mount private or photo-documented installations in recently-vacated rooms of the punk house I lived behind in Portland, OR, restricting myself only to detritus the former housemate had left behind, to explore whether any trace of the person remained in the abandoned stuff. For example, see recipes (2015).
13 manuel arturo abreu, “We need to talk about social practice,” Art Practical, March 6, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20200604084151/https://www.artpractical.com/column/we-need-to-talk-about-social-practice/.
14 manuel arturo abreu, “Notes on the Garage Residency,” SFMoma Open Space (blog), September 15, 2016. https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/09/notes-on-the-garage-residency/.
15 See homeschoolpdx.tumblr.com.
16 Karen Turner, “Lots of coders are self-taught, according to developer survey,” The Washington Post, March 30, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/30/lots-of-coders-are-self-taught-according-to-developer-survey/.
17 Ben Davis, “Is Getting an MFA Worth the Price?”, Artnet News, August 30, 2016. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mfa-degree-successful-artists-620891.
18 Catfishing, Blackfishing, scamming, breadcrumbing, sealioning, ghosting, etc.
19 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
20 Coco Fusco, “All Too Real: The Tale of Black Sale: Coco Fusco interviews Keith Townsend Obadike,” Thing Reviews (bbs.thing.net), September 2001.
21 Brian Droitcour, "The Perils of Post-Internet Art,” Art in America, October 29, 2014. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/.
22 manuel arturo abreu, “Consciousness, entheogeny, & colonization,” University of Oregon, Center for Art Research, March 2020. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/0/16706/files/2020/03/manuel-arturo-abreu.pdf.
23 Portland itself has many ongoing and defunct examples of this bootstrap approach. Albatross Gallery consists of a plastic sleeve into which exhibited work is placed, worn on the gallerist Michael Reinsch’s neck as he travels around town (pre-Covid), plus a web presence. The Nat Turner Project started in a Pacific Northwest College of Art bathroom when the co-curators were MFA students there. Bronco and My Scion Gallery were housed in gallerists’ cars. Appendix Project Space operated out of a garage in Portland before its founders (Travis Fitzgerald, Josh Pavlacky, and Daniel Wallace) moved to New York to start American Medium (which was started out of a Union Square loft owned by Fitzgerald’s father, before moving to Chelsea. Of course, It of course helps if your dad owns property. They closed in December 2018). Portland Museum of Modern Art was set within the stairwell and basement of the Mississippi Records compound. Various alt-arts education projects as well: home school (shameless plug), the Living School of Art, Conceptual Oregon Performance School, and Free School PDX. While there are funding initiatives like the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Precipice Fund and the Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant, among others, there is not really a sustainable model in place for the bootstrap approach in the face of current city rents.
24 I can’t conclude this section without mentioning Amalia Ulman. Excellences and Perfections (2014) presages much of what I’m describing and really captures the tenor of the whole “let me critique something by embodying it” approach that is so annoying about various aspects of the contemporary art world and its gestures.
25 Phrasing here inspired by Evan Ifekoya’s Ritual Without Belief (2018), a six-hour sound piece the artist describes as a “black queer algorithm,” made in collaboration with family and friends.
26 manuel arturo abreu, “Against the supremacy of thought,” Rhizome, January 8, 2018. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jan/08/against-the-supremacy-of-thought/.
27 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).
28 Allan Kaprow, "The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I" (1971), in The Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
29 Former operative Donald Jameson revealed this in 1995. See the work of journalist Frances Stonor Saunders,. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999).
30 Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2014. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-iowa-flattened-literature/.
31 See Lisa E. Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting American in the Cold War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Danielle Folser-Lussier, "Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism," Diplomatic History Vol. 36, No.1 (January 2012): 53–64; Saito Yoshiomi, The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century Cultural Diplomacy and "American Music" (London: Routledge, 2020).
32 James Petras, “The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police,” Rebelión (2001).
33 A nonplayer character, in gaming, is one controlled by the computer rather than by the player.
34 Oxford philosopher Robert Kirk first used this term in the 1970s to map the shift, roughly, from a Cartesian immaterial theory of mind—where automata were clearly distinct from humans since they lacked language—to a ‘physicalist’ scientific theory—where everything reduces to a material or physical cause and thus opens the question of whether we can conceive of beings exactly like us except lacking mind (a material definition of mind, not immaterial).
35 A term popularized in 2014 by art critics Walter Robinson and Jerry Saltz to describe bland, market-ready abstract painting.
36 Brochure from Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective, MoMA, New York, Feb 14-May 15, 2016.
37 Marcel Broodthaers, “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Art Moderne et Publicité” (1972), in Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings, Gloria Moure and Marcel Broodthaers (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2012), 354.
38 Rainer Borgemeister and Chris Cullens, “‘Section des Figures’: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present,” October 42 (1987): 135-154.
39 Rainer Borgemeister and Chris Cullens, “‘Section des Figures’: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present,” October 42 (1987).
40 bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2012), 281.
Performing Real Fake Artistry, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Portland. February 23, 2019
January 15, 2022
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