“There’s a tacit understanding amongst those who can claim an institutional memory that conversations about the “death of art” started happening just after women (and by inclusion, others) started making it. That said, in the weeks leading up to the Last Brucennial, we were all careful not to blow the gag: ask any of the 661 artists involved and there’d be nothing unusual about that year’s effort to troll the Whitney Biennial with a massive tailgate party and something of art’s utopian longing. Ask anyone and the only thing that distinguished the Last Brucennial from the previous editions (the 2012 one being “Harderer, Betterer, Fasterer, Stronger”, which debuted an off-off-off Broadway revival of Animal Farm) was that it’d be the last and arguably the most exclusive. Like the previ- ous four Brucennials (2008/09/10/12) participants could look forward to no curatorial strategy, no press release, no credentials, and an unprecedented amount of art historical involvement for a pop-up art show: Marina Abramović, Barbara Kruger, and the late Sarah Charlesworth representing only a fraction of the institutional capital leveraged.”

– The full text appears in Spike #66 . You can buy it in our online shop –