Just Kidding, Right? On Brad Troemel's "CONTEMPORARY ART report"

Can irony actually save us from the "post-truth" apocalypse?

There is a running conversation in my house about the threat that AI-generated video and other online content poses to the integrity of elections. Notwithstanding the recent November 2025 contests and the hilariously tasteless AI gens offered by Andrew Cuomo’s NYC mayoral campaign, the idea is reasonable that political operatives could flood swing-state counties with fake stories that induce voters to cast their ballots in one direction or another, or what is more likely, not at all, because they see on their phones some “news” from an assumed personally-reputable source (friend, family member, or, really, Substacker, TikToker, X-poster, etc.) about, say, violence, or some other subtle or not-so-subtle confusion at their specific polling place so as to cause just enough hesitation or to raise the bar to participation just enough above one’s quotidian hassles and states of exhaustion as to make voting something less than worth it. You do this over enough channels and in enough precincts and you can move numbers in your favor, whatever favor that may be, particularly when races are decided by margins in the hundreds of votes, as many are in our highly polarized moment.

To this I always retort that this isn’t an election “integrity” issue, it’s a voter “dis/information” issue, and if that’s your metric, then (a) this has long been a problem, from John Kerry getting “Swiftboated” in 2004 to Hilary Clinton’s emails in 2016 to the entire Russiagate controversy and the collective hallucination of the 2020 “stolen election.” AI only adds a new tool to the oppo arsenal of frauds, fakes, and fabulations that have been the coin of the political realm since the birth of modern democracies (and of course even before that); and (b) as a tool, it’s available to every side. Its uses and abuses will inevitably cancel its advantages, thus returning the system to some kind of equilibrium, though to be sure swimming in seas of slop is going to have a deleterious effect on the social psyche, over time and thus overall, and yes, we may want to pay attention to that.

But more than this, I am just skeptical that we are in any kind of “post-truth” moment, and that the advent of easily generated AI videos and images are going to usher in the final apocalypse of the “trust in media” that so many today believe is the lynchpin of our capacity to function as a civic culture let alone a democracy, whether actual or, as some would have it, in name only. It seems to me that, yes, the firehose of more and less salutary irony — the shit and the Shinola — which has already been turned on the public will soon become a torrent of machine-manufactured fakery, but the result is not going to be some final schizophrenic breakdown in our contact with reality, which theorists have anticipated since the 1980s and today looks like the many tributaries of accelerationism, nor is it going to be the return of earnestness and sincerity, called forth from the depths of individual human feeling and no small amount of religious nostalgia, which today’s neo-Romantics imagine will be their province.

My bet is that we are in for a vast increase in salubrious skepticism itself, the honing and harnessing of our ability to call bullshit on the world of representations — both text and image, moving and still — that is delivered to us on any given digital surface, and which is a necessary precursor to our getting to the truth of matters, and of what matters. Believing that we are getting things wrong, that what we see and read isn’t really equal to reality, is essential to getting things right.

Which is why Brad Troemel’s “The CONTEMPORARY ART report”¹ might just be the most relevant and necessary cultural artifact of our burgeoning AI-age.

I don’t have to crawl too far out on some speculative limb to call “The CONTEMPORARY ART report” (hereafter TCAR) an achievement of Swiftian proportions (that’s Jonathan Swift for you pop-presentist philistines), and it reaffirms my conviction that Troemel is our premiere satirist and critic of contemporary art and online culture more broadly. TCAR is a kind of summa of the roughly 20 “premium content” reports that Troemel has produced since 2020.² And in it he revisits much of the content from those prior reports, distilling their top-line takes — on idpolitics, Dimes Sqaure, hipsters, hustle culture, and much else — but now joins each of them to a specific example meant to highlight the absurdities and excesses of the cultural dynamics that have defined the past decade of contemporary art and culture — only, those examples are entirely fictional. They are narrated by Troemel via a cascade of screen-shotted headlines and websites, social-media posts and clips and reels, most of which have been created using AI-generated imagery and video that has then been Photoshopped into the necessary online frames and contexts. Though fake, in almost every instance the examples are, if not entirely believable, then more than effective conveyances of the kind of “truth” that only such fictions can be.

Still from Brad Troemel’s “The CONTEMPORARY ART report,” 2025.

As an example, one of the first clips from TCAR that Troemel shared on social media tells the story of Mark Jeffries an “artist/activist” who is introduced as one of the founders of the advocacy organization Downtown for Democracy. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Jeffries mounted a series of emergency exhibitions of Trump-satire art and then introduced the “resistance badge,” which could be affixed to any artwork in order to signal its, and the artist’s, correct politics. When those badges began to be bootlegged, Jeffries quit Downtown for Democracy and, in an act of extreme protest, pledged to cut off a finger for every six months that Trump remained in office. After four years and eight fingers, Jeffries mounted an exhibition of his severed digits, along with an image of his now lone middle finger casting a ballot for Joe Biden.

And here, dear reader, I must confess to being taken in, if however momentarily, but the interval doesn’t matter. I was got. I know, I know, laugh it up. How could I possibly believe this. “Ha ha, what a chump!” — but, what I’m arguing here is that my error and mild humiliation is the whole point.

So, the Mark Jeffries story? Of course none of it happened. But the organizations and enterprises and artists that are name-dropped or appear in the clip, such as Downtown for Democracy, Hyperallergic, NADA, and Coco Fusco? All very real. The clipped headlines, the social media posts of bad protest art, the screenshotted websites? They’re all utterly believable, not just because they are deftly done, but because they’re exactly like all of the evidentiary material that Troemel has marshaled over the past five years for his more than 20 very non-fictional, critical reports, all of which make serious contact with reality as valuable cultural critique. And the story about a stereotypically sanctimonious leftist artist/activist who is so utterly unhinged by Trump’s election in 2016 that no amount of #resistance escalation except self harm and bodily sacrifice could be equal to the total demise of American democracy and social justice that the Trump presidency represented for so many? I’m sorry, but yes, if you lived anywhere near the neighborhood of the art world around 2015, you know that dude is real.

Still from Brad Troemel’s “The CONTEMPORARY ART report,” 2025.

Only of course he’s not. I’m not quite sure at what point I began to question the story, though I’m sure it’s later than I should have. A quick Google of names and orgs and the veracity of the story quickly dissolves. That I had to double-check is the point. Once I watched the full TCAR, with its 20 chapters, the strategy became clearer. But as shared on social media, as a brief minute-and-thirty-second clip, and consumed in that distracted state of scrolling content, the delicate membrane between truth and falsity, the slash between the “dis” and “information,” was hard to see and feel.

And isn’t this just what it’s like to confront so much AI-generated content today?

With TCAR, Troemel has created a work that deals with AI on the terms of its own most popular/populist consumption, which is to say as social-media platform-bound content, but more importantly, as content bound to narratives about the world, which (at least at present) goes beyond how many other very capable artists have chosen to deal with the fact of AI as an apparatus of automation that promises political and cultural upheavals akin to those that followed the printing press and photography. And though TCAR marks an advance on, and a departure from, the “report” series that Troemel has been working on for the past half-decade, it is also a continuation of a longer running and rather abiding interest of Troemel’s in the confidence, or lack thereof, that we can have in images (broadly defined), a confidence that touches on some of the core conditions that make our modernity what it is.

Troemel has a well-earned reputation as an artist capable of playing the meme game as well as the best shitposters. But while most of the recognition that Troemel garnered in the 2010s focused on his capacity for trollish image making, audience building, and online virality, less attention has been given to all the ways that his work limns the limits of what we can and do consider “real” and/or “true” with regards to the images we see everyday and what we take those images to be of.

Troemel’s parody of an ad for the Biden 2020 presidential campaign offers a distillation of this dynamic. Based on an AP photo of then-candidate Joe Biden at a county fair, and reading “HIS BRAIN? NO. HIS HEART,” the ad was widely distributed by supporters of both campaigns before the truth of its message (that Biden was old, and potentially senile) was overshadowed by the truth of the medium (that the ad was fake, and potentially disinformation) resulting in the blocking of the “ad” by Twitter and other platforms. In writing about the episode, Ali Breland, a reporter for Mother Jones, noted that “Troemel’s Biden meme apparently blurs the line between parody and misinformation so much that the more gullible and the less steeped in internet irony have a hard time seeing the joke, to the point where some critics wonder if he’s gone too far.” But in fact what those critics actually didn’t like about Troemel’s work is that it didin’t go far enough in being legible as one or the other thing, parody or propaganda. When Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University, is quoted in Breland’s article as saying that Troemel had “lost control of his art,” she gets it exactly wrong. Troemel’s Biden ad demonstrated his total grasp of the communications landscape at that particular moment, such that a remarkably economical intervention — one image, five words — could make explicit what the Biden campaign was trying to hide and so reflect the truth of Democratic voters’ actual commitments rather than their imagined ones.

Troemel’s attunement to the unstable divide between truth and fiction threads through his work. Indeed, one of Troemel’s first reports was on QAnon, which at the time he identified as the “strongest social-media poster culture in all of America,” an assessment that would be difficult to dispute, even as that “culture” only served a collective fiction. “The CIA ab/ex Psyop report” rehearses the now well-established history of how the U.S. government funded and promoted American arts and letters as an essential weapon in fighting the cold-war with Soviet Russia and its satellites.³ The “triumph” of American Painting in the 1950s was in fact — also — engineered as a triumph of American soft power. And “The KAYFABE report” covers the development of professional wrestling and comedian Andy Kaufman’s brilliant interventions in it, and so serves as both prehistory and primer for understanding the performance art of the Trump era.

Still from Brad Troemel’s “the KAYFABE report,” 2022, showing Andy Kaufman and Jerry Lawler’s legendary appearance on The David Letterman Show, 1982.

It is in “the POST INTERNET ART report,” though, that Troemel self-consciously constructs the brief genealogy of art works to which TCAR belongs. The early “net artists,” whose efforts built on the legacy of institutional critique, led the way to a group of practitioners that Troemel calls “the tricksters,” who he describes as “pioneers of misinformation.” The objects of Troemel’s admiration include UBERMORGEN, whose “vote auction” website and intervention into the 2000 U.S. election Troemel situates as part of the “end of history” moment of internet-driven enthusiasm around markets for everything online and otherwise. He covers RTMark, a fully incorporated project of artists/activists (notably Jacques Servin) whose mission was the subversion of commercial corporate power, and who later became better known as The Yes Men, with their impersonations of corporate PR stooges who managed to book actual interviews on mainstream media in the early 2000s. Troemel also points to Eva and Franco Mattes, whose fabrication of Darko Maver (1998-1999), a fictional conflict-beleaguered Yugoslavian artist, gained real world traction including a showing at the 48th Venice Biennial.⁴

What Troemel highlights for each of these examples, and others that were to come later in the post-internet period, is how the image of something invented by an artist (broadly construed) and so fictional, finds purchase as something non-fictional and so “true” by its close approximations of the visual and textual codes that are taken to index reality. Hence the “trickery,” which has been a core condition of modernity itself. Indeed, to trace that history, one could draw a line back to trompe l’oeil painting of the 1880s, spirit photography and early manipulated photographs of the 1860s, the coining of the “confidence man” in the 1840s (and Herman Melville’s book of 1857), and even to the “automatons” of the late-18th century such as Kempelen’s “Mechanical Turk” or Vaucanson’s defecating duck.

These kinds of works, these “images,” have never made it to the center of any narrative of modern art’s historical development or advancement because they have always been regarded as too readily taking the world as it is on its own terms, and thus as only ever intervening on just those terms and nothing more. Not art. Just entertainments. Rather than staking out some claim to be fundamentally different, or other, and so autonomous from the world, such works are geared for their calculated effects on the viewer.⁵ There have been moments with the avant-gardes, as with Duchamp’s Fountain, Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit, and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, when that autonomy has been given to issue exactly from the work’s direct contact with the world, or its subsumption by it. But the “readymade” paradigm itself has served as a useful fiction for artists and publics alike, safely providing the conceptual and contextual kerning that keeps such works from being regarded as “tricks” that exceed the limits of modernism’s relatively short run.

More to the point, though, no one likes to be fooled, except when we do. The art that “tricks” us makes us feel, well, like fools, because that’s what we’ve been. But we also come away different. More aware. Less convinced by our selves. Troemel’s practice of skewering and savaging and so illuminating the absurd contradictions of the art world — it’s self-denying dependence on a billionaire class, its pretensions to theoretical high-mindedness, its continued obsession with who people are rather than what they make, its incapacity to see 99% of its wares as mere decoration, the perpetually false promises of credentialing, etc. etc. — is directed at alleviating our foolishness. Troemel’s charge is that it’s the art world that has consistently patronized its audience with a didacticism and a politics it can’t possibly uphold.

Now, with TCAR, Troemel’s playing us (ever so slightly) for fools is a way of testing whether we’re putting our skepticism into practice. Rather than accepting overtures from the institutions — the schools, museums, markets, media — that have long since given up on their audiences, TCAR counsels us to reflect on that moment when what’s true shades into what’s false, but also, importantly, how what’s being given to us as false, because ironic, carries truth forward.⁶

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A brief closing note: Andrea Pinotti’s At the Threshold of the Image: From Narcissus to Virtual Reality makes a compelling case for a long-running desire that humans have to breach the image “threshold” between representation and reality, a desire she finds culminating in the current drive toward immersive 3D virtual reality experiences of the kind offered by Meta’s Quest and Apple’s Vision Pro headsets. From the myth of Narcissus itself, to Alice in Wonderland, to Westworld and beyond, Pinotti explores all the ways that we both self-consciously and naively desire to join with, or enter into, images that are in one way or another reflections of ourselves. In Pinotti’s telling, this desire for the image, which has established itself as its own world — an “island” she calls it — is tantamount to wanting to “surpass the human.” Though the advent of VR technology is the motivating technology for her study, it’s quite clear that AI is the anxiety to which it speaks.

“The CONTEMPORARY ART report,” I want to say, offers the counter narrative to the many examples of image breach Pinotti puts forward. It constructs an alternative series of “virtual realites” in which contemporary social and aesthetic logics are ever so slightly accelerated as a means to warn us off those logics as they operate in the here and now. There is a difference, after all, between being tricked and getting taken, between not being in on a joke and being swept away by a world that has been engineered exactly for you, such that you see and hear and feel only what you are meant to. The former has a lesson to teach about truth, the latter just leaves you dumb and wondering.⁷

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1. I’m not sure of the correct style-guide protocol’s here so I’m going with what’s closest to the way Troemel himself writes and presents these titles, and placing it in quotes rather than italics is not meant to suggest that Troemel’s work is something less than a work of art, which will be the question that many may of have of this work and of Troemel’s work in general. I for one think it is art, but it is so in a time when our collective understanding of that term and its practice, especially in the populist mode (of which Troemel is a master practitioner), is under revision. And all of this might seem to come off as an utterly neurotic note to add, but it goes to the core of what Troemel’s work is trying to get at, which is how the neurosis of skepticism in the face of accelerated irony is perhaps our only hope for meeting the age of intelligence-on-tap without losing our minds.

2. In each “Report” Troemel unpacks, always humorously and insightfully, some memetic aspect of contemporary politics and culture, often with the pieties of the art world and its self-anointed priests as targets. So, for example, NFTs, celebrity artists, MFA programs, and “international art English” all come in for savagings. But Troemel is nothing if not self-reflective, so Troemel’s generation, millennials, and their aesthetics, get a report, as does “post-internet art,” with which Troemel is regularly (and self-admittedly) identified. The “Reports” format will be familiar to anyone who has spent any time with the proliferation of talking-head monologuing on YouTube and cable comedy shows, though Troemel’s highly-developed meme and image intelligence is often marshaled in the service of reflective and biting critique, often fueled by no small amount of class politics, if not rage, rather than outright conspiracy.

3. Johan Gimonprez’s Oscar-nominated Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024) is another recent entry in this history.

4. To Troemel’s examples one would want to add Joe Scanlan’s many “fictions,” most notoriously Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford (2007-2014) project, for which the artist created an emerging black artist as a “character,” cast the role with two professionally trained actors, and then “staged” various shows and interventions, which ultimately gained Scanlan’s “Woolford” inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as well as an attendant controversy. Of course a more comprehensive look at the creative offerings that took up residence on the continental divide of fiction and reality in the 2000s might also include Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and it’s unspoken filmic quasi-adaptation in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), as well as Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” essay in Harper’s (2007) as well as David Shield’s theorizing of such offerings in Reality Hunger (2010).

5. There is an entire line of thought to unpack here that goes to what Michael Fried long ago identified as the “theatrical,” which he opposed to modernist art’s denial of its own audience. While Fried’s ideas have endured and now fare better than those of his many detractors, there is an argument for how some theatrical work goes far enough in the opposite direction so as to regain the autonomy that would be denied it on the modernist account. I haven’t thought this one through yet, but it’s thanks to Troemel’s work that it seems worth pursuing. For an updated account that gets its direction from Fried see Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy (Duke 2019).

6. It’s also, self-reflexively, a way for Troemel to warn his audience off taking him as a new “institutional” authority. He may, after all, be bullshitting us, and we should keep this in mind. In this respect, TCAR also continues the project Troemel began with @maincharactersandevents on Instagram, a feed which regularly posted images that appeared like real screencaps of articles or event announcements related to various attention aggregating figures in the worlds of art (KAWS) and politics (Hunter Biden), but with their headlines or messaging altered so as to straddle the line of the believable and the bullshit. But whereas the work of @maincharactersandevents remained at the level of individual memes and so is defined by how those memes circulate and replicate — that is, they are defined and determined by their reception — TCAR, in contrast, establishes Troemel’s authority over the work, even as the form the work takes (20 chapters, each narrating a real cultural logic via an acceleration of that logic) calls that authority into question by an acceleration of its own logic.

7. Most artists who are deploying AI in more and less sophisticated ways do so in the manner of “critique” (through attempts to reveal the technology for the depredations they feel it encodes and the injustices it cannot but perpetuate) or in the manner of “affirmation” (as a tool marshaled exactly for its capacities to exceed human agency and thus, presumably, humanist values). Almost all of these deployments are afforded by the institutional networks of art galleries, museums, philanthropies, and art commissions in which their legibility as “art” is secured in advance as it were, insofar as the artist operates according to a well-established set of recognitions in and through which both they and others see what they’re doing as coextensive with, in alignment with, and so extending the legacy of modern liberalism for which artistic practices and “the artist” have served as longstanding emblems if not ideals.

Thus, for example, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, on the occasion of his recent show Peace Core at Gagosian, can discuss his work with Joshua Citarella in terms that suggest a challenge to the tradition of Western “individualism” and the idea of “freedom” that it is given by them to uphold. Kulendran Thomas regards the “individual” as a “fiction,” as “the greatest story ever told,” and even goes so far to say:

I think it might become increasingly hard for Western civilization to hang on to this one single idea of freedom. The idea of the individual that it’s based on is unraveling, not just through the technological platform shift with AI, but also perhaps through a shift in the balance of power from the West to the East. I would love for our civilization to get a little bit more comfortable with other civilizations living by their own values, even if we don’t share the same values. [full convo here]

If by “East” Thomas imagines here, say, the values of the Chinese Communist Party, Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalism, or the range of Islamisms that dominate the Middle East and South Asia — the three largest (applied by population) political and cultural ideologies that stand apart if not opposed to Western-style “liberalism” — then it would be very interesting to hear what Kulendran Thomas imagines getting “comfortable” with one or the other (or all of them) would look like in practice, especially if such getting comfortable isn’t meant to look like the tolerance of difference that underwrites the Western liberalism that both he and Citarella appear so quick to cashier. It is ironic, and so illuminating, that Kulendran Thomas reproduces by his comments the very liberalism that he claims to disown or at least to be discomfited by. Both he and Citarella seem to have forgotten that the core philosophies of the Western tradition, from Hegel to Rawls, are not philosophies of the individual, but of attempting to reconcile the individual with, and within, the group, the community, the collective, or as Hegel put it all the way back in 1807, “The I that is we and the we that is I.”

And as for “freedom,” one has to wonder what not hanging onto that idea could entail. I would argue that it is exactly when and where the Western liberal tradition has not hung onto the idea and ideal of freedom strongly enough that you find the worst atrocities of the modern era.