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chapter eight “on the web we’re all equal” And Other Myths about Disability and Multimedia If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than drowning. Make all the money thou canst. —Iago, in Othello B etween editorial takes at the magazine, I would wander in Soho, generally stopping in at art galleries to recharge my visual and intellectual batteries for the next round of deadlines. One hot summer afternoon in 1999, when dot-com fever was at its height in New York, I turned up at the blue door of a gallery I had never visited and, after one look at the invitation card taped by the buzzer, which read Prosthetic, headed straight up the dirty, dark stairs to a big, brightly lit gallery space on the second floor. I was fleeing the wide-eyed hype of callow Web fanatics who saw nothing but Net in those days and who had taken over my magazine. Imagine my disdain, then, upon finding an “information installation” that combined my two worst art nightmares, conceptualism and the Web. Somewhere in its elaborate tangle of headphones, monitors, and turning wheels of photographs the slippery texts promised a glimpse of a person with disabilities who had been injured in a car accident and, one presumed from the title, used a prosthesis. The gallery show was the front for an elaborate Web site, one of the earliest of many exhibitions that relied heavily on the Internet. I was prying, but the crummy sixties-era photos of stunned children and insipidly grinning aunts and uncles set against hideous wallpaper returned a confusing mix of signals from happy times in what seemed a typical suburban family, all pulling faces and wearing polyester. After my second or third lap around the gallery, my patience fraying, I headed toward the desk where the boyishly handsome art dealer had just clicked shut his cell phone after lining up guests for a rooftop party with what I immediately assumed would be the coolest art types and beautiful people. Asked for the lowdown, he smiled and began the patter. The artist, William Scarbrough, was only thirty-one and had already been featured in such unartsy mainstream media as Penthouse, Details, New York, Harper’s, Artbyte, a Dave Barry column, the page 6 gossip column of the New York Post. The kid had even appeared on the Jerry Springer Show— how hot is that? Spare me. I just wanted to know about Stuart Tiros, the person with a disability whose life story was the narrative basis of the exhibition, and what he thought about the show. My editor’s instincts had already kicked in. Would he be available for an interview? The dealer’s grin broadened. “There is no Stuart. It’s all a fiction.” The floor spun, and a wave of embarrassed fury reddened my cheeks. I returned to the exhibition, which reeked of authenticity and the banality of those nickel-a-bushel personal Web sites that keep millions of egos puffed up on a daily basis, the blogs where “picture whores” vamp for their digital cameras and whimper about their boyfriends. The hoax had immediately gotten under my skin, and I wanted to meet the rascal who concocted it. Curiosity breeds perverse hungers, so I set up a lunch date with the artist at a trendy garden bistro in the same Soho neighborhood. A week later I was sipping a decent white burgundy under a leafy trellis contemplating the way I might still incorporate Prosthesis in the magazine . William Scarbrough, the artist, turned up in rumpled white T-shirt, jeans, and work boots, looking as if he had just come off the morning shift on a construction site—which he had, because that is one way for an artist who does not sell much of his work to support his expensive computer habits (he was also moonlighting as a designer for NBC’s Web site). With his Fu Manchu and wayward black hair he looked like a holdover from the Philadelphia Flyers of the 1970s, the sort of guy you don’t want to see in your rearview mirror behind the wheel of an old Buick creeping up on your bumper. It turned out Scarbrough was a true ironist. While his exhibition pushed many of the buttons of art du jour—installation based, Web intoxicated, pathetically confessional, all served with a dab of political correctness thanks to the disability angle—he maintained a firm satiric handle on...

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