The Bruce High Quality Foundation, a collective of seven to twelve anonymous young men (debatable), founded the Bruce High Quality Foundation University on September 11, 2009, as a free university conceived in counterpoint to the dominant system of expensive art schools, and devoted to formulating “new histories of art,” or parallel accounts of recent work, using irony and criticism as methodological tools. The BHQFU presented one such “history” at X Initiative as a half-hour lecture staged twice in a row on one evening. Slides were projected on a wall behind a small stage, on which three men sat—all wearing jeans and matching aviator sunglasses—and took turns reading from an accompanying text to the crowded room of 150-plus people. The text was a personal recollection of the relationships between artists and their patrons, intertwined with case studies and quotations taken from various sources, ranging from retail researcher Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (2000), to German playwright Georg Büchner’s politically charged Danton’s Death (1835), to congressional records from the NEA debates of the late ’80s. The projected images alternated art icons with pop culture: we saw Peggy Guggenheim and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andrea Fraser and Robert Mapplethorpe, but also Mariah Carey and George Michael. Toward the end, music started to play, and the performers began singing along to Michael’s “Father Figure”—“I will be your father figure / Put your tiny hand in mine / I will be your preacher teacher / Anything you have in mind”—in this setting, an ironic hymn to art and its intrinsically commercial nature. —Cecilia Alemani
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