Art Fraud by Jeffrey Schrader

Like Kafka’s Joseph K. waking up into the 21st century nightmare no one will ever see on Court TV, the unnamed “deponent” in Jeffrey Schrader’s Art Fraud is grilled by an also unnamed “counsel” who tries to find out whether he knew that “any of the works pictured in Art were fakes.”  So what is a “fake,” anyway?  And who “owns” the words we all use?  And is there any such thing as “originality,” or “plagiarism,” or “ownership”? One thing is for sure:  Art Fraud is the real deal.  Read it and you’ll see — or else!

— Stephen Ratcliffe

Precedent to Art Fraud: the personal, the proper-factual.  However, through meticulously clever anonymodifications, Schrader opens this precedent to a wider inquiry into intellectual property, into will & responsibility, while laying bare depo-fare language–its banal neuroses intact.  All this methodically executed to illustrate: where personal-proper distinctions (read, protections) fade, Commons flourish.  Because they want to.  Because they must.

—Chad Lietz

One could say of Art Fraud that it is typing, not writing. And one would miss the point. Jeffrey Schrader, typist extraordinaire, delves into the all too frequent absurdity that results when art meets commerce. The result is pure slapstick.

— Juliana Spahr

Using his keen ability to co-opt and subvert institutional language, Jeffrey Schrader succeeds in turning Art Fraud’s content on itself, poignantly and cleverly replicating a sham that plagues our times’ judicial, commercial and artistic institutions.  In the art world Schrader recreates, art and artist are relegated to roles of passivity, and this relegation may be society’s sham at its most naked.  Art Fraud may prove to be a great contribution to conceptual poetry not only because of Schrader’s “poethical” handling of “art fraud” but because his poetry still baits the appeal of traditional readers with the hope of a narrative trope.

— J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden

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Jeffrey Schrader’s recent work can be found in Work #3, Cricket Online Review, and various other photocopier-and-internet based journals and zines. A chapbook, gridpattern, will be one-third of the early 2010 launch of Erg Press. He currently lives in Oakland, California with Sherri, Milena, and a muttdog named Rilke. He regularly contributes a minimal bit of assistance to the folks at Cricket Online Review, and in return is credited as an associate editor.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 171 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402787

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