It was an important time last December, when the frogs made their splash in the art world. Well, at least it was big for a fascinating cadre of social subversives loosely known as FrogTwitter; and later, with great fury, their many menacing “anti-fascist” antagonists. With the debut of its so-called “alt-right art exhibit,” a heretofore little-known East London gallery called LD50 thus quite accidentally thrust itself into the center of a cryptic memetic war simmering between the self-deputized street fighters for the prevailing global order and the loathsome little content creators that dare to provoke it. Snapshots of the exhibit quickly filtered into the only feeds that could make sense of it, which amounted to maybe a few dozen anonymous social media accounts. A wild conspiracy diagram slashed across the room’s bright white walls, linking obscure images with text and tweets. There, a smug Southern Pepe sat fanning his seersuckered self on a grand porch, moonshine in glass, as his harvesters toiled on the sunbaked plantation in the background. “CONTENT FARMING,” read the caption. Random comments etched in glass were scattered about—“the normies are not ?woke?,” indeed—among other signals and references only intelligible to the unfortunately initiated. This was staged around an ad hoc altar to “Kek,” the awakened Egyptian trickster god said to animate that rascally Pepe and his “meme magic,” candles still smoldering, ashy Neoreactionary trading cards strewn here and there, all tokens offered in petition for the all-mighty dubs of the Internet. The whole thing was spot-on. It was called 71822666—a reference to a post on the anonymous message board 4chan that had correctly predicted the Trump presidency. The creator clearly had a keen read on the weird and wild world of post-conservative online organizing, warts and despair and all. Here was an interpretation of the deep alt-right that eschewed the same old adjective-laced wow-just-wowing in favor of an aesthetic exegesis in the budding culture’s own semiotic terms. The critical post-capitalistic and techno-dystopian elements that distinguish the avant garde of the alt-right from the free market fundamentalism of traditional conservatism were palpable, as was the general sense of spiteful gloom saturating a generation of young white men who mourn both a glowing past that might as well have never existed and a creeping future too horrible to accept. Lucia Diego was intrigued indeed. The bold curator of the LD50 Gallery is a young woman of Spanish descent whose raw curiosity and perhaps fatalistic faith in the rational capacity of our modern marketplace of ideas drew her to venture into the oddest underbellies of contemporary online discourse. I’ve been there myself, and our cast of characters is much the same. Her gallery had hosted a series of talks last July featuring such noteworthy un-people such as “neo-reactionary” philosopher Nick Land and former National Review editor Peter Brimelow. The talks went off without a hitch, receiving little mention or notice at the time, and were preceded by several uncontroversial showings of mainstream artists in the previous year—most recently by John Russell and Joey Holder’s occultist TETRAGRAMMATON in May. Then the art scene got wind of the Pepes and all hell broke loose. It’s difficult to piece together the early timeline of events as an observer, since the drama largely percolated through a series of passive aggressive social media messages, but apparently the most ambitious among the undoubtedly unbearable London art striver scene sensed one of their own straying outrageously far from the bounds of acceptable content and resolved to nip this one in the bud sometime in February. The brouhaha followed the standard anti-fascist script: an anonymous blog called Shut Down LD50 meticulously catalogued all of the target’s supposed sins—from an insufficient denunciation of the devil Trump, to Land’s random (and very liberally interpreted) writings, and most notably the unrelated comments that exhibit participant and blogger Brett Stevens had previously made about the political assassin Anders Breivik. This litany of infractions was copied and pasted from article to article, status to status, picking up steam and mindless outrage until finally the cultural gatekeepers at the New York Times took notice, officially cementing the debacle in history. Outlet after outlet piled on, offering free advertising to the supposed (and perhaps funded) “enemies of international power” that surrounded the small gallery in the streets, with nary but a half-hearted (yet still roundly condemned) defense of “[art’s] right to disgust” from the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. Their cheerleading paid off: A swarm of hundreds mobbed the LD50 Gallery for days in February, defacing the building and smashing up windows. Diego fled for her safety and temporarily shut down the gallery. And so the good little anti-fascist girls and boys and non-binary genderqueers slept soundly at night, proud of destroying another iconoclast sticking out in our sickly totaling world. A sad rain cloud appeared on the gallery’s website, seeming to admit defeat. “As a result of this [incident], we are able to witness in real time how reality empties itself out, reconstellating in a structure of fears and lies that grows bigger and stronger to the point there is no return,” its parting message read, “and we are now inhabiting those new truths/ or so called ‘post truths.’” How could Diego have proven to the violent mass outside her door that she was not a racist or a Nazi or a xenophobe—just an open-minded artist? She couldn’t. But she could channel their censorious rage into a meta-commentary on the hierarchical motivations of contemporary expressive suppression, which is precisely what she did next. Unfazed, LD50 Gallery re-opened on May Day with a new participatory show, CORPOREALITY, put together by several of the subjects of the first controversial exhibit. Twitter users @Kantbot10K and @Logo_Daedalus—both of “Donald Trump will Complete the System of German Idealism” (Google it) fame—pitched in, along with satirist @Menaquinone4 and YouTube surrealist TV KWA. CORPOREALITY casts the viewer as the latest hire of an “exciting new business venture” known as KWALY. This revolutionary new social media start-up promises to professionalize (and monetize) … Continue reading Life and Death on the Content Farm