{"id":478369,"date":"2026-06-15T12:40:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478369\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T12:40:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T12:40:12","slug":"recession-indicator-art-artreview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478369\/","title":{"rendered":"Recession Indicator Art – ArtReview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genuine Fake Premium Economy at London\u2019s ICA warns: beware marketing, beware art, beware of being broke when you choose the latter<\/p>\n

Genuine Fake Premium Economy centres on a generational condition: coming of age as both millennial and as artist in the wake of the 2008
financial crisis; a warning to a younger generation of already pessimistic Gen Zs, delivered in a retroactive, superstitious, very American vocabulary. Akin to Adam McKay\u2019s film The Big Short (2016), the show invokes nostalgic symbols of the pre- and postcrash world \u2013 hedge fund managers, false confidence, preppiness, 9\/11 \u2013 that together seemingly preach a tenet: beware marketing, beware art, beware of being broke when you choose the latter. <\/p>\n

The two-room show\u2019s humour strikes hardest when part of a self-implicating, heavily fictionalised biography. Buck Ellison<\/a>\u2019s Jack\u2019s Office (2026) is a sonnet on marketing and self-determination, less a narrative about identity than a hyperspecific 2020s \u2018starter pack\u2019 meme; a vitrine contains fragments of \u2018Jack\u2019s\u2019 fictional life \u2013 armpit hair, ransom notes, image of a golden Labrador, all arranged casually, without chronology. Jack\u2019s Office undeniably draws on the class-coded photography of Ellison\u2019s day job, depicting WASP with other privileged communities across America, but its biographical aspect shifts his satire up a notch, into a self-satisfied autofiction. <\/p>\n

\"\"Buck Ellison, Science, 2026, c-print on Duratrans film,
\nlightbox, artist\u2019s frame. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

Speaking of WASPs, the fiscal repercussions of economic dynasty are played off one another in Jasmine Gregory\u2019s painted recreations of
Swiss watch brand Patek Philippe\u2019s advertisements (Investment Piece No. 10 and 11, both 2026) and Ellison\u2019s small lightbox advertisements
(Science, Virtue and Hands, all 2026) which combine Copley, Bronzino and Manet paintings overlaid with the obtuse, falsely erudite slogans
(\u2018Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm\u2019) of his fictional bank, Orlo & Co. Subverting advertising messages isn\u2019t new.
For a show that examines the superficiality of marketing, it contains a fair amount of the superficial. Investment Piece No. 10 and 11 are paintings of advertisements \u2013 two works are fairly cosmetic renderings of ads, save for one angry, greyscale abstracted \u2018erasure\u2019 of text
below the main tagline, \u2018for the next generation\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"Jasmine Gregory, Investment Piece no. 4, 2024, oil on linen, 120 x 110cm. Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an exhibition with easter eggs; Jack, of Jack\u2019s Office, mimicking a Lehman Brothers exec, may well have traversed the halls of the fictionalised 2007 art fair depicted in Jenna Bliss\u2019s showstopping videowork True Entertainment (2023\u201324), viewed from a large, hipster-style vintage sofa. Set in an Art Basel-like art fair, Bliss\u2019s film evokes the art bubble preburst, as it follows a fictional gallery \u2013 its manager, its art handlers and its artist (retired it-girl Lola Van Haas) \u2013 through tight shots, triangulated gazes and implied \u2018eye-fucking\u2019 between an intern and potential buyer. Gregory\u2019s pop-psychological collages Conscious Uncoupling (Divorce) (2026) might resemble the work of True Entertainment\u2019s Van Haas, who in one work employs glitter cutouts of Britney Spears mid-breakdown and newspaper lettering doctored to read: \u2018Bin Laden Will Never Be Captured\u2019. It is, unlike most video
art at the ICA, truly entertaining \u2013 but less affecting than similar, nonsatirical videoworks documenting the consumable aesthetics of
the era, such as K8 Hardy\u2019s diaristic fashion self-portrait Outfitumentary (2001\u201312).<\/p>\n

If this exhibition aims to alleviate the artworld\u2019s hypocrisy by focusing on a single world event with a mixture of satire and sincerity, it half succeeds. The show\u2019s strength is its open acceptance of naivety and acknowledgement of Bliss, Ellison and Gregory\u2019s once-held belief
in a meritocratic artworld. The three sell merchandise in the store: a babygrow featuring the Lehman Brothers logo, shot glasses marked \u2018Divorce\u2019 and a lighter emblazoned with the show\u2019s title. They leave one wondering about the show\u2019s use of irony, and its commenting upon an unfair artworld from within it. Does the message translate for a famously \u2018sincere\u2019 Gen-Z? Genuine Fake Premium Economy\u2019s greatest asset is its immersive, rather than didactic, tactics.<\/p>\n

Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison & Jasmine Gregory, Genuine Fake Premium Economy is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London through 5 July<\/a><\/p>\n

From the Summer 2026 issue of\u00a0ArtReview\u00a0\u2013\u00a0get your copy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lydia Eliza Trail<\/a>Reviews<\/a>June 15, 2026ArtReview<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Genuine Fake Premium Economy at London\u2019s ICA warns: beware marketing, beware art, beware of being broke when you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478370,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-478369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}