As if responding to the destroyed public landscape of neoliberal entrepreneurial culture, wide ranges of substitute institutes, centers, schools, bureaus, offices, laboratories, leagues, departments, clubs, societies, and sham corporations have inserted themselves into the deterritorialized space of the spectacular global marketplace. Each of these fake institutional entities has its own logo, mission and website, thereby engaging in a self-branding process that is not so much focused on market niches or loyalty to the product, but rather on conquering a hidden entrance to visibility itself. The most interesting phantom institutions do not only replicate the appearance of lost liberal, institutional structures: they also use their virtual offices to confront and intervene in the real world of real corporations, businesses, cities and states. Bold, young, and disarmingly tongue-in-cheek, this “whatever” collectivism mixes the visual arts, politics, fashion, music, and mimetic forms of casual organizing, in order to produce a mode of group work that is more in tune with the communal swarms generated by social networks than older notions of class or political solidarity of worker classes or the left.

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based, politically engaged artist and author, as well as a founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). Sholette’s recent publications include  Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, both Pluto Press UK, as well as Collectivism After Modernism with Blake Stimson University of Minnesota Press, and The Interventionists with Nato Thompson distributed by MIT. He is an Associate Professor in the Queens College Art Department, City University of New York and an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design Harvard. University,