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Here is a – fictitious – joke by the Bruces: two young artists meet in a café 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, at which point 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’). In the same year, Robert Smithson’s Floating Island – a floating miniature of Central Park that sailed around Manhattan for a week – was completed, posthumously. The Bruces coincidentally made the arts pages of the New York Times with a ‘guerrilla action’ in which they pursued the floating island with a miniature replica of one of Christo’s orange Gates. This public intervention by the Bruces, entitled The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing but the Thing Itself (2005) , was a critique of the ‘institution’ of art in New York, where truly public space has long since disappeared and ‘public artworks’ have price tags of two hundred thousand (Floating Island) or even two million dollars (Christo’s Gates). This was not the only time that the collective has poked fun at existing works of art. The year 2007 witnessed, amongst others, Public Sculpture Tackle, in which the Bruces began a physical attack on public art in New York, and Heaven Forbid (2007), a public middle finger raised at the elitism of the New Museum in the form of a satire of Ugo Rondinone’s Hell, Yes! (2001), which has adorned the facade of the museum since it reopened that year. With actions like these, the Bruces are no doubt taking shots at an unguarded goalpost, with an objective that, so it seems, leaves the playing field of the market-driven art world utterly unmoved, for various conceivable reasons. The charm and the success of the Bruce High Quality Foundation is consequently thanks to its capacity, as an apparently unguided projectile and with quasi-amateurish do-it-yourself actions, to actually touch the heart of art in New York and its associated issues.At the same time, and it is no doubt here that the Bruces’ true irony lies, they have meanwhile become the focus of real hype in the New York art scene. Because the so-called institutional bulwark (of numerous recent presentations in, amongst others, the commercial Susan Inglett Gallery in Chelsea and the prestigious PS1) is having difficulty keeping the spontaneity and ridicule of the collective afloat, the result is a collection of literally and figuratively ramshackle artworks, shadowed by the disdain of institutional criticism.The Bruces broach a problem to which they themselves can easily fall victim: if you are a young pup kicking up the dust, what do you do when you suddenly become the focus of the institution you are making fun of? There is the risk that the spontaneous irony becomes mired in propaganda and orchestrated, readymade radicalism. Now that the collective has been openly embraced by a range of museums and galleries, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has set its sights on the contemporary art education system in the United States. With the establishment in 2009 of a free open university (financed by Creative Time), where once again, the dominant tone is irony, the collective hopes to spark a critical discourse about high tuition and how art is made academic. Only time will tell where this project will lead and where the foundation will land, but somewhere, there lurks a feeling, as has often been the case for exceptional phenomena in New York, that for the Bruces, the magic moment has already flown, at some point already passed. About ‘five minutes ago’, to be precise, when a foam rubber Bruce announced that this was just the beginning: bee-otch. Moosje Goosen is a writer based in Rotterdam and New York. The work of the Bruce High Quality Foundation is included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 25 February through 30 May. translation: Mari Shields