Seattle Arts News and Reviews


Messing With The Record


Artists and journalists are both in the business of questioning authority. Unfortunately for journalists, they are just one more authority artists like to question.

Anyone lucky enough to score an interview with Maurizio Cattelan has to be prepared to recognize him through disguises. Sometimes he sends other people to be him for the interview. And even if it’s actually him who sits down as a tape-recorder is running, he may choose to be a bumpkin or reveal his corrosive brilliance.

He chose the latter for the New Yorker’s Calvin Tompkins, who talked with Cattelan right after images of U.S. torture chambers in Abu Ghraib were being internationally circulated. As Tompkins turned on his tape recorder, Cattelan said, “Is this going to be an American-style interview, with hoods?”

What a finger-on-the-pulse moment. American-style interviews now come with hoods.

PDL is a fairly recent development on the Seattle scene, but its members, Jason Puccinelli, Jed Dunkerley and Greg Lundgren, have managed to embarrass the press with some regularity.

First, they show up at the Tacoma Art Museum pretending to be SuttonBeresCuller, another artist team that happened to be installing a sailboat in the museum’s courtyard. A photographer from the Tacoma News Tribune accepted the reality in front of his eyes, artist name tags, snapped a picture of the impostors and had the paper run it as the real thing.

PDL is now messing with Crosscut, a new online-only Northwest news journal. PDL member Lundgren wrote up a report on the group’s latest exploit and sent it to Crosscut, which ran it without identifying Lundgren as a participant, because Crosscut didn’t know he was. According to Crosscut editor Chuck Taylor, the folks at Crosscut mistook him for a bystander. A correction followed.

What happened in Tacoma could have happened anywhere. News photographers aren’t necessarily up on who the artists are. Guys standing in an art museum wearing name tags of the artists the photographer came to shoot are easily mistaken for those artists. The fraud had the appearance of being sanctioned by the museum, which is why the museum had to apologize to the newspaper, which in turn had to explain itself to its readers.

The artists don’t owe anybody an apology. It’s not their job to keep the facts straight. For artists such as PDL, the job is the opposite, to scrape the scab of assumption off what passes for fact and press their fingers into the wound.

What happened at Crosscut is the fault of the business model. It relies on what’s called “citizen journalists” to provide news and features, with journalists thrown into the mix as anchors. That means a story about an art project written by a guy best known for polishing his Harley and watching mud wrestling on TV could easily appear instead of something written by a real reporter or a critic.

Crosscut is using just about anybody for a good reason. Citizen journalists work cheap. Dirt cheap. In fact, they’re rarely paid at all.

Combine that business model with a group such as PDL, and you’ve got disaster for journalism and a score for PDL.

Categories: Uncategorized
Regina Hackett

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