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 naĄve, 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.