Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility

Citation:

Lambert-Beatty C. Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility. October. 2009;129 :51-84.

Abstract:

"Between 1998 and 2008, artists gave us advertising campaigns for imaginary products, a not-really-censored exhibition, hacked museum audio tours, several never-made movies, a sham supermarket, nonexistent video installations, dubious abortions, a staged marriage proposal, an impersonated Pope, ersatz archives, ques- tionable military units, a faked vacation, an invented critic, a fictional historian, a made-up monkey, an arguably authentic rabbit, a projected penguin, and legions of fake artists, both historical and contemporary (twenty-seven in the recent pseudo- collaborative EU portrait by Czech artist David Cerny alone).14 More generally, we’ve seen the term “intervention” supersede “resistance” in discussions of political art, valorizing modes like the parafictional that act disruptively outside the artistic con- text,15 while in the wider culture, fiction-in-the-real has become the characteristic mode of political humor for our time, with Sasha Baron Cohen, The Daily Show, and Brass Eye perfecting a technique in which parodists pass as their real counterparts, interacting with unsuspecting subjects whose gullibility, pompousness, stupidity, racism, extremism, or simple greed for the spotlight is then mercilessly exposed."

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 10/09/2015