War of the Words: Ersatz E-Mail Tilts at Art. By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL This is not Amerika. That was my reaction after receiving an e-mail message early last week from Mark Amerika, the author of the Web-fiction work Grammatron and the founder of the Alt-X Internet-publishing venture. Addressed to nearly 30 denizens of the digital-art world, including a dozen journalists, the message denied that Amerika had written an essay appearing under his byline in Telepolis, a Germany-based e-zine of electronic culture. The blunt-toned note even argued that Amerika could not have crafted the column because it contradicted his own aesthetic. The message also supplied a URL for the supposedly suspect "Amerika Online" column. Loading the link, one finds a pensive piece asserting gently that how art is presented on the Internet is as important as what is being presented. Unlike the e-mail message, which contains a jumble of cumbersome phrases, the column is written in Amerika's typically fluid prose style. I quickly queried Amerika and, a few hours later, he confirmed that he was the source of the online essay, but not of its subsequent disavowal. "I don't want to make it sound too dramatic or serious, but nonetheless it can't help but bother you," Amerika acknowledged during a telephone interview on Monday from his home in Boulder, Colo. He rejected suggestions that he was responsible in any way for the phony missive, and said he had no clue as to who had drafted it. Amerika was not the first member of the electronic-art world to be victimized recently by an unknown e-mail impostor. One week prior, two other high-profile cybercitizens learned that their identities had been appropriated for the posting of bogus notes carrying similar art-theory themes. Timothy Druckrey, a curator and critic in New York who specializes in technology, saw his name affixed to a screed claiming to take issue with a magazine's feature story on Heath Bunting, a London-based artist who is active on the Web. Less than hour later, a dissertation dryly dissecting the meaning of a new Web-art project arrived on the Internet bearing the name of Peter Weibel, an influential artist and thinker who served for a decade as the head of the Ars Electronica conference in Linz, Austria. Both ersatz e-mails were sent to 7-11, an electronic mailing list launched last year as a home for playful discussions of "net.art" topics. The list is maintained on a Web site in Europe that is itself a less-than-exact facsimile of the convenience-store site. "Keiko Suzuki," the list's pseudonymous "hostess," deflected e-mailed questions about "her" identity and involvement in the faux postings. The Druckrey and Weibel postings were discredited almost immediately, but not before they were redistributed on a mailing list hosted by Rhizome, the popular electronic-art resource with Manhattan headquarters, and elsewhere, provoking a mix of outrage, amusement and sighs of resignation. While fraudulent manuscripts with the sole intent of reaping a profit have been turning up for centuries, assuming a false identity to make an aesthetic statement would seem to be a fairly contemporary invention, from Orson Welles's misleadingly realistic radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" in 1938 to more recent performances by the media-hoax artist Joey Skaggs. Was making art what the perpetrator or perpetrators of the fishy e-mails had in mind? Or was this merely a silly prank, perhaps designed to attract a little attention to a tiny community of net.artists laboring in virtual obscurity? Druckrey declined to comment on the affair, and Weibel did not respond in time to an e-mail query. Web-art observers were willing to identify likely suspects, but not for the record, and those who were contacted did not reply in a substantive manner. Amerika, who explores issues of electronic identity in his writings, aspired to be generous in his assessment. "Part of what they're doing is a little na¥ve, as if they don't realize the full implications of what they're doing," he explained. "And they're having fun, probably feeling that 'Mark Amerika's a fun guy and he's playing around with all this stuff. He'll get it.' And some of it I do, actually; it does play into my work." "But back to the question of art. It desperately wants to be an act of art. Is it that? Is it good? Does it pull it off? No." Rachel Greene, the editor of Rhizome, agreed that the faux postings did not accurately convey their victims' editorial voices. "Generally, they're pretty mediocre," she said. "Tim Druckrey is a much better writer than whoever was posing as Tim Druckrey." But she asserted that the messages were "not simply an investigation of how easy it is to appropriate or misappropriate identity online," noting that, during the early days of the 7-11 list, its members would post as the artist Jeff Koons and other culture-world celebrities. "A lot of these faux-critical posts are a reaction to communities that are so interested in defining their terminology and so interested in defining themselves," Green continued. "Artists can get very tired of theoretical and critical discussion and tend to enjoy making fun of it." "There have been all sorts of discussions recently [in Rhizome] about net.art, and what is it, and what is its relationship to art history, and is it too soon to be criticizing it. A lot of people find these discussions to be valuable and really useful, but other people at a certain point say, 'What are you talking about? Why don't you make something?.'" Amerika believes that the duplicitous dispatches were meant to raise U.S. awareness of electronic artists in Europe, and may even contain an element of jealousy. Druckrey and he are Americans, but both are well-known in continental electronic art circles. "I think it's a European-American thing," Amerika said. "Even though the intellectual elite in the new-media communities there are very territorialized and very closed, we're making inroads in their culture." "Here, though, they're not. If you go to people in the art world here and ask if they know about the 7-11 list, they don't. In Europe, Tim and myself -- our work and our physical selves -- are circulating quite a bit, so they're trying to have some effect through us." So, if this was a promotional stunt, and one that "arts@large" is sustaining by reporting on, does that diminish its value as art? Not necessarily, Greene said. "There are lots of reasons that one could say this is art," she said. "If you are going to call the work of Lawrence Weiner and other early conceptual artists who played with criticism „ and the idea of art-criticism „ art, this could be seen as part of that tradition." "I also think the person who is responsible is a kind of art terrorist. Yes, it's art. But that doesn't mean that it's not irresponsible, or hurtful, or even illegal," she said. And the terrorist has struck again. On Tuesday, an e-mail message ostensibly written by Joshua Decter, a critic and curator in New York, was delivered to about 20 wired readers, disclaiming authorship of a non-existent online review. This time, many of the recipients were art galleries, but few were likely to be snookered since Decter's name was misspelled "Deckter." If this is art, it should be remembered that the success of Milli Vanilli's charade depended on the duo's ability to lip-sync perfectly.