The Financial Times gets cute with The Bruce High Quality Foundation:

Their growing presence has been met with a mix of excitement from those who feel that the New York art scene has become stale and overly commercial since the 1970s, and scepticism from those who, like curator and White Columns director Matthew Higgs, find it hard to know “what they are up to, or why”.

Their next step is to conquer Europe, with a solo exhibition in Berlin in September, based on L’eau de Vie, Un Film de Jean-Luc Godard – a film they made in 2005 about the idyllic age before art fairs were invented. Then they will recreate a piece in London called “Beyond Pastoral”, first shown in New York in 2007, in which the BP logo is made up of lemons and limes, wired to produce an alternative source of energy, like a potato clock. The work, they explained, “is going to feel much more timely and site-specific than it did originally, given the spill”.

This tendency to make art about the art world is seen by some critics as the worst kind of navel gazing. There’s a view that the BHQF are themselves the worst offenders in an art world obsessed with celebrity parties. Their 2009 group show in Miami, curated by Vito Schabel, teemed with New York’s rich and famous. But artist-curator and critic Mark Beasley, who organised the BHQF’s Governors Island project in 2009, sees their use of “social capital” as no worse than any other artist’s. In fact, he argued, it is “more transparent and honest than most”.

Making a Scene About Art (Financial Times)