THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION TAKES ON ART, MONEY, AND THE FAME GAME
"It's up to artists to make the art world they want." On the Acela Express from Penn Station to Providence, Rhode Island, with two members of The Bruce High Quality Foundation, it suddenly feels like the sealed windows are thrown open and a gust of cold air rushes into the rolling train. The effect of these words, spoken mid-interview, is like a sharp slap in the face. In a year that has seen wealth and power consolidate ever more—bigger galleries, the transformation of art into financial instruments, concentrated global wealth, the unmasking of Big Data—there is, apparently, at least one group of artists in New York determined to raise whirlwinds by imagining that the world can be different. Created, according to its insistently puckish literature, "to foster an alternative to everything," The Bruce High Quality Foundation has taken the art world by storm since its founding in 2004. An artist collective that revels in anonymity
—they've hidden their faces behind everything from their trademark cigarette-dangling Kabuki masks to copies of the Village Voice—the Bruces have rewritten a number of cultural scripts, among them the rules of art celebrity.
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