by Ben Lerner
First published 2016
Adam Gordon—poet, teacher, reluctant provocateur—arrives at a Brooklyn gallery with an outrageous performance piece that simultaneously critiques and inhabits contemporary art culture. His elaborate fake installation about "no art" threatens to expose the fragile boundaries between satire, creation, and pure intellectual fraud. As his conceptual prank gains unexpected traction in New York's hypercompetitive art scene, Adam must navigate the consequences of his own performative critique, risking his academic position and artistic reputation. The more seriously his parody is taken, the more dangerous his intellectual game becomes. What begins as a sardonic experiment in institutional critique transforms into a high-stakes confrontation with authenticity, representation, and the very nature of artistic meaning.
Genres: fiction, art, literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: satire, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Brooklyn, New York
Period: Contemporary
279 pages · Hardcover · Granta Books