Here is a – fictitious – joke by the Bruces: two young artists meet in a bar in New York and talk about their work. One of them explains that he is working on a project in which art history functions as an object of (self) ridicule, to which the other responds, ‘Don’t tell me you are still interested in the past?! That is sooooooo five minutes ago!!!’
Irony is the key word in the artistic practice of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, an anonymous artists’ collective of alumni from New York’s Cooper Union, which manages the legacy of the fictional artist, Bruce High Quality. ‘Bruce’ arose from Ground Zero’s ashes, in February, 2005, as a foam rubber head on wheels (in which several of the Bruces could be found), in order to audition for Artstar, a television reality show on artists organized by Jeffrey Deitch. By means of a computer voice, the Bruces, now in broken English, now in (satirically) poetically complete sentences, offer their delightful and disarming commentary on gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch and the commercialization of art (‘When I hear the word culture, I bring out my checkbook’), and on the opportunism of the auditioning candidates (‘Yous is a bunch of geezas, yo. We gots to have integrity’) and, last but not least, on themselves (‘This is the beginning of my high quality, reality, high definition movie, yo. I be the Bruce High Quality, bee-otch. Artstar be my shit, man’).
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