I’m not sure what Harris is trying to do by calling a failed/fake/fraudulent company “performance art.” Perhaps he’s trying to clear his conscience in a way that he thinks will absolve him of any wrong-doing? It seems like he has, in his head, shifted responsibility from himself to the media, which he blames for not seeing through his ruse. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying, because his arguments are elaborately conspiratorial.

I fear that this will not be enough for Harris, because he’s smart enough to know this explanation isn’t very good, but currently unable to accept the consequences of his mistakes and find a way to move on. At worst, he will become the new Bobby Fischer, living a secluded life, occasionally sending ever-more paranoid statements to the media that paid attention to him back when he was on top. At best, he’ll find a good therapist, work through some of his issues, and rejoin society a humbler man.

One thing that did turn out to be fake,our
stock options!

wes hansen

At contemporary art museums, I marvel at the beauty of the Big Con, and how sophisticated it can become when honed over generations by large institutions! The great con men of yesteryear are today’s art stars, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If they can extract millions from the wealthy by making them feel special, more power to them. To do so successfully, you can’t help but hold up a valuable mirror to society. And the particulars of how this is accomplished are worthy of analysis, teach us about where we draw our lines, and can even help make a better world.

*I don’t think they will, though, because as far as I know, Josh Harris wasn’t enough of an art insider. But maybe he does have some longtime artist pals from early in his career who were in on the game, and have since advanced themselves. If so, he might be able to get Pseudo.com into the art history books after all.

“Alas, you can only extrapolate growth curves for so long, and though they’d formed an integral part of Pseudo’s ongoing coverage of the burgeoning southeast Asian underground music scene, Veena and Neena, the identical twin boa constrictor belly dancers, will have to seek employment elsewhere.”

Yes, he wanted pseudo.com to be a cool art scene where people trip a lot and have sex or whatever, and use the net to make weird points.

But he also, almost definitely, wanted to make money for himself and his friends. At the very least, I have to believe he saw his friends, parents, siblings, and girlfriends as being on the winning side of the art/money/scam equation. I don’t think he meant for the “artists” he was playing with – myself included – to lose all our savings by participating.

Perhaps he saw some endgame scenario where that would happen to Wall Street people, but even then, I think it was supposed to be about eventually getting other people’s money to build a really fun media studio. That we had to put in our own money at the beginning to make it work wasn’t about scamming others or being scammed ourselves, I don’t think.

If your art requires you telling me it is art, it isn’t good art.

What feels great is to be a part of a psychedelic ( in the classical sense of the word) history that is being forgotten. One of many great ironies is that after the Pseudos and the Kozmos and the Webvans imploded, those SunSparc servers found their way via liquidation sales into the homes of a thousand tiny simulacrae, some of which are enjoying their own Dadaist valuations. This is one performance art piece that is without end.

Whatever the truth is here, and whatever the evaluation of Josh (good/bad/sane/insane/artist/scam artist), I just wanted to add how much I, too, loved Infinity Factor, and many of the other Pseudo shows.

they were my first experience of internet TV. I totally fell in love with them, they were the future, and I remember wishing so hard that I could do something that cool, those shows shaped the rest of my life in a huge way, influenced some of the most important career decisions I made along the way.

Had I not seen Pseudo, I probably wouldn’t be doing BBtv today.

pseudo was “real” in the sense that they actually existed and spent their funds on real projects, so there is no fraud per se.

but they were “fake” in the sense that everything they did was essentially disposable and a part of josh’s momentous sense of aggrandizing self-promotion. there was no “there” there, but there was actually a lot going on there.

no more of a fraud than any television network, or a bank charging you $3 to use an atm, for that matter.

i thought his letter to the times could have been worded a little better to clarify his peculiar meaning of the word “fake”. like so many other capitalist ventures, pseudo wasn’t so much “fake” as it was just “shallow”. they remain significant in the history of the dotcom, and i suspect this was his essential intent and thus his claim to “art”, another term he recklessly misappropriates.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Bread/dp/B00005JGA4

Would that be track 5 “It Don’t Matter to Me”
or track 11 “Look What You’ve Done” or maybe 17 “He’s a Good Lad” or 2 “Everything I Own” ?

Dude goes public a decade later saying, “HAY GUYZ MY ARTY WEBSITE WAS ACTUALLY ART HA HA” and trying to link the entire thing to a years-old plagiarism scandal.

What in g-d’s name is the point of this??

(grump)

And now, in writing the above, I hope Josh is reading all these comments and laughing himself silly.

“To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”, E.M. Cioran