There is a grainy photograph of the meeting that made this Society what it is. It was taken by someone who was not in the room. Could not get into the room.

The Nikolopoulos International Society is an invented institution with an annual forum, imagined through art. A Fellowship. Regional committees that have quietly resented each other since the 1990s. A...

His work in the Venice Biennale and at Paula Cooper Gallery turns history’s absences into artworks.

Until 1991, an artist could not vote here. The studio that showed their work could. So could the special school, the hospital arts programme and the welfare association.

O Grupo de Leitura RESONANCE é um encontro mensal da comunidade académica RESONANCE, dedicado à reflexão sobre um texto ou livro importantes.

Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra ...

Serrated Edge · Episode

The Mastermind is a parafiction about an armed robbery at the Worcester Art Museum. The Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana, designed by I. M. Pei serves as the Framingham Museum of Art, a fictional stand-in for the real-life Worcester Museum of Art.

1let me just clarify i’m not kidnapping the dallas cowboys cheerleaders. i saw photos of the unabomber cabin in storage and artistically, i can’t say i didn’t like it, it was sort of appealing, but…

This thesis draws on the concept of parafictional persona to examine the increasingly pervasive phenomenon of comedians playing themselves in fictional media. With reference to case studies selected from American comedy from the dawn of broadcast media to the present day, I identify and describe five distinct but closely interrelated “modes” of parafictional persona: parafictional stardom (George Burns and Gracie Allen in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show); performative parafiction (Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm); proximate parafiction (Tig Notaro in One Mississippi); parodic parafiction (Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington in On Cinema at the Cinema); and parareality (Nathan Fielder in Nathan for You). I adopt a persona studies approach to investigate each of these comedians, aligning theories of self, celebrity, and performance to analyse the construction and enactment of their polysemic public selves across fictional, nonfictional, parafictional, and social media. Within this approach I consider parafictional persona as a construct, noting common attributes and effects across the case studies, but also observing how they differ from each other and how they separately fit into wider structures of media and culture. My research reveals these performers and texts to be emblematic of growing tensions in how we categorise and make sense of contemporary media, challenging traditional understandings of stardom, comic persona, and the self. By identifying and articulating these five modes of parafictional persona in comedy, this thesis illuminates the historical and contemporary meanings and significance of a highly self-reflexive mode of comic performance, representing a significant advance in the theorisation of persona and a novel contribution to persona studies, comedy studies, and media studies more broadly.

Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty defines parafiction as an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction. In other words what do we understand and experience from art...