“Swedish-Canadian Lars Cuzner is a trickster who you’re never sure is on the level. Using assumed identities and provocative language, his work has often sparked controversy, addressing uncomfortable topics such as racism, Nordic nationalism and the rise of right-wing populism all over Europe. As part of the festival’s ongoing Situation Reports, he roamed the streets as a self proclaimed “con-artist” interviewing politicians and the general public attempting to raise funds for his self help book that he describes as a ´really bad book.´” Forbes.com

Lars Cuzner’s “Good From Far” is about artistic research and literary production. This three-year endeavor aimed to explore the boundaries of publishing, authorship, and the commodification of ideas in the contemporary literary landscape.

The primary objective was to secure a book deal with a publisher without presenting any written content.

This is an excerpt from a terrible book, Good From Far, by me, Lars Cuzner.

It was never meant to be a good book and I lied to get it published. Actually, that’s not entirely true, I told people that I was lying, but I wasn’t. If you can’t get people to believe you, tell them you’re lying. So I told everyone that I’m a con artist. They didn’t believe me because I’m a conceptual artist. It’s a simple enough trick, which is a good thing, because in the confidence game, simplicity is your best friend.

The art scene, or the so called international contemporary art scene, to be exact, has internalised and accepted a set of social behaviours that in other areas of life would be considered scams. What this means is that in the arts, you can apply manipulation techniques that are used in straight up illegal cons without it being considered criminal. To understand this we need to look at the complex relationship the art profession has to insecurity.

Exactly no one is surprised to hear that cons are prevalent in the art world and I will explain why that is, but this book is not an exposé of art world high finance. It’s not about forgeries or money laundering. That’s a real thing though, art money is a massive con and one of our societies most accepted unregulated economies. But that is for another story. This is a self help book that explains the psychology of the confidence and insecurity game. The art scene just happens to be the perfect place to illustrate this particular kind of game. 

 I’m going to teach you in this book is how to use your insecurity to your advantage. First you need to understand that most people with influence in the art field confuse cultural power with power. The professional art world focuses on describing struggles and conflicts that will never effect the art world, and those who represent it will most likely believe that they are agents of real change in society. To con someone you need to make them first con themselves, and that is much easier with people who are already self-delusional about something that is so obviously not true. 

Back to the opening statement of this introduction. This is actually a poorly written book and I don’t want anyone to correct it. I’m not just saying that to be coy, I’m trying to prove that I pulled off my con. Call it professional pride. I got the publishing deal before I had written anything. I am not an author and I have never published anything. I got this book deal because I’m an artist and I said that I was a con artist. The only promise I made was that the book would be bad. Since I’m an artist people just assumed that I wasn’t telling the truth. I’m using the art world to get a self help book published. To make money, obviously. That should sounds counter-intuitive. Art is necessarily selective and self help isn’t considered much of an art form. To pull this off I had to do a con.

First of all, know this. The easiest people to con are people who are highly educated and consider themselves intelligent. The reason for this is simple, they believe themselves to be above being duped. The perfect mark. The art profession attracts this type of person in droves since it yields irrational levels of social status. And because it’s a very small and competitive field, both in number of jobs and audience, it is overrepresented with easy victims of easy scams. 

Disclaimer: Throughout this book you might find yourself thinking -“That’s not only true for the art world. That’s true in any profession” – and you would be correct in thinking so, but there are some specific differences that set the art profession apart, so let’s start there.

In theory, the art game is a pretty easy scam, the problem is that everyone who is playing it is insecure. The confidence game thrives on insecurity, but when everyone in the game is disguising their own insecurity, they are more sensitive to micro expressions of over-playing your confidence. The art game is about fluid confidence while struggling. I know, it’s confusing, and it has to be played over several years. In the art world you have to fake being a little bit fucked up, or fake being poor. It’s about being interesting. Easy living makes for boring people and everyone knows it.

The scam is to pretend that you are insecure but successful. This is confusing for people who are actually insecure. Competition is fierce and it doesn’t take much to get a bad reputation. You are constantly being read. Intelligence agents do this, they call it butt sniffing, like dogs do. They are professional bullshitters so they sniff out bullshit on the first meeting with anyone. You know that old joke? “Deja moo – The feeling that you’ve heard this bullshit before”. My kids always loved this joke and used to say it to me whenever I started telling them how this new project was the one to get us out of this crappy apartment. 

When you’re getting started, you don’t really know why your efforts aren’t paying off. You don’t know what you’re doing wrong, and when it does work you don’t know why it worked. You’re just winging it. Because that’s what you do in the beginning. Nobody is showing you what to do, and they don’t teach you this in school, (because, frankly, the truth isn’t very flattering). In this confidence game you have to learn to use your insecurity as a weapon. I tell this to young aspiring artists and I tell them what works – not what they think works – but what actually works. If they listen to me they enjoy it more and get better results, they survive the game longer. Naturally, most young people are not receptive to this kind of advice and bless them for that.

“With Lars Cuzner’s project “The Intelligence Party”, 2018, they finally arrived at the topicality, because Lars Cuzner has set up a fictional party here with which he moves in Graz as if he were on an election campaign tour. Tirelessly, the committed artist introduces the program of his “Intelligence Party”, a party that on the one hand demands the humanist demand for a right to vote for foreigners, and on the other hand supports this demand with right-wing arguments, such as true love of the homeland. The paradox seems hardly to go – and yet: in talks around post-colonialism, for example, “nationalism as a legitimate anti-colonial resistance movement” (Varela / Dhawan) is repeatedly discussed. The fact that steirischer herbst artistically discusses contradictions like these in various forms, is exactly what makes it so necessary this year.”

artmagazine

All across Europe, the right fears what they call “the Great Replacement,” where eroding European values supposedly cannot hold up to Islamic fundamentalism… and worse. The Intelligence Party, initiated by artist and activist Lars Cuzner, has a proposal to assuage these fears. Founded in Norway, the Intelligence Party is named after one of that country’s oldest political parties, which was led by romantic poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven in the 1830s. Today this party is reborn and appeals to cultural protectionists across Europe to enshrine the most important right of all: the right to vote. The universality of this right and its constant expansion is the most quintessentially European value of all, the Intelligence Party argues, and it should therefore be extended to non-citizen residents, regardless of where they come from. The party’s thinking goes that universal participation in elections would reveal more commonalities than expected between European and non-European residents, who might, it would turn out, share with conservative electorates a concern for family values, religious freedom, and the protection of cultural identity. That, at least, would stop any fundamentalist insurgency in its tracks, so the Intelligence Party proclaims. After spreading the party’s message in Norway and several other European countries, online, and in rousing public discussions, Cuzner now turns to Austria and Graz. Paradoxically injecting a left-wing demand into a right-wing agenda and presenting it to an undecided electorate, Cuzner and his party question today’s hackneyed notions of politics as well as the truth-procedures used to reach them.

You can read Lars Cuzner’s text “The Great Replacement” in this book.

“More absurdly, this technique is used by the artist Lars Cuzner in the project Intelligence Party – the conservative traditionalist party, in which the artist nominates his candidacy for the European Parliament. Here is the image of the artist: Lars, with a lush red beard, in a woolen three-piece suit, with a cane, comes out of a shiny white old fashion car to talk with voters and hand out caps with official symbols, slogans in the spirit of “I understand white people” or “All women are stupid” and the election campaign demanding universal suffrage.”
Aroundart.org

Press release
For their first exhibition in France, Lars Cuzner and Cassius Fadlabi have formulated a specific artistic proposal that resonates with current social events and questions the ethical engagement of artists within civil society. Together, they create improbable projects that take the form of installations associated with media events. For LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons, they present an installation titled European Attraction Ltd Tours, which features a film of a refugee camp shot from a helicopter. The installation as a whole is a continuation of a project initiated in 2014 in Oslo, focusing on the notion of the “human zoo.”

Borrowing their mode of communication from mass media, they create a provocative work that questions the role of the image, as well as the civic and ethical responsibilities of the artist in society and the impact of their actions in the context of real-world issues.

European Attraction Limited began in 2014 in Oslo. On the occasion of the bicentennial of the Norwegian Constitution, Lars Cuzner and Cassius Fadlabi recreated a human zoo, Kongolandsbyen, originally built in 1914 by a leisure company named European Attraction Limited to celebrate the centennial of the Constitution. Beyond critiquing a culture of colonialism, the project also implicates the audience: its appetite for voyeurism and its taste for scandal.

European Attraction Ltd Tours in 2017 addresses another facet of the human park, now resonating with contemporary European geopolitical issues: refugee camps. The film produced for the exhibition at LE CAP – Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons critiques the obscene gaze that the media invites us to cast upon the other. Confronted with others and their pain (Susan Sontag), we Europeans are often so ill-equipped that we prefer to add filters, barriers, images, rather than face the reality. Worse still, the camp becomes a tourist zone that one can fly over without confronting any danger.

Cassius Fadlabi & Lars Cuzner, European Attraction Limited tours, 2017. Couresty: Artists and LE Cap-Centre d’arts plastiques de Saint-Fons

Press text

Original score. Leif Cuzner.

Camera. David Spriggs.