The artwork of Matthew Barney is highly abstract and conceptual. Even for modern art, it pushes the envelope of weird. For instance, his series of films titled
The Cremaster Cycle involves,
among other things,
"a half-vegetable, half-man creature with a fleet of Jacobin pigeons attached to his gonads." Not exactly the kind of stuff to appeal to a mass audience. And yet he has a fan page,
Cremaster Fanatic, similar to the kind of fan pages you find devoted to teen stars such as Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff. But as
an article in yesterday's NY Times reveals, the fan site is actually an elaborate deadpan-style joke:
Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it's a parallel work of art. "I'm pretending to be a fan," said its creator, the New York artist Eric Doeringer. If you were casually perusing the site, you would probably never guess that it was a spoof, but it does get funnier once you learn that it's not for real.
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