In 2011 Brad Troemel self-published Peer Pressure, a collection of essays on art and social media. I read most of them. They were poorly argued, half-baked, unedited. He made a book for the sake of making a book. It was a way to inflate his CV, motivated by the same logic as his 2010 project Joyce Jordan, a platform for mutual promotion. Joyce was a fictional artist, and if you put her in a group show, “she” would add it to her online CV, incrementally improving the your Google results. In 2014 I wrote an essay for A.i.A. about Troemel and the Jogging, a Tumblr-based art collective he cofounded, and had this to say about his theoretical writing: “Meaning matters little to him; the production of texts is about building and reinforcing authority.”
But Troemel has renounced the pursuit of the art world’s standard signs of success, and his writing has become more direct and honest. He no longer puts it in long-winded essays but in memes and the captions beneath them on Instagram—more appropriate channels for his anarchic energy. On our website, Travis Diehl argues that Troemel’s Instagram account is an idiosyncratic and novel form of criticism, saying that “his shitposting is also part of a sincere attempt to forge a new sort of relationship to art-making and its infrastructure, beyond a stratifying gallery system, that makes a direct connection to an audience on social media.”
—Brian Droitcour
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