Weiszklee

The Fence has published an exposé on Stuart Semple (of Anish Kapoor 'feud' notoriety) which they have been working on for six months.

investigation reveals Semple / his studio / his partner Emily Mann (who's described as acting as his 'enforcer' in his business) :

mishandled £400k grant of public money intended for a public gallery, allowing the money to flow freely between the public project, his own personal studio and personal projects such as Culture Hustle (his online business selling paint etc)

underpaid or failed to pay many of his assistants to the tune of several thousand pounds each.

former assistants have taken him to court and he simply hasn't bothered to show up and he's threatened to sue former assistants who asked for their back pay

repeatedly funds ambitious projects that never see release eg Abode, an 'Adobe-rivalling' suite of creative software (he claims he still intends to release this)

encouraged a cult-like atmosphere at his studio in Bournemouth

was frequently in debt and having to negotiate with bailiffs etc for his debts while at the same time crowdfunding various projects

ran fake social media accounts boosting Semple and his work

The portrait that emerges is one of decades-long scam artistry tbh and someone who's juvenile, manipulative, narcissistic.

The Fence btw is a decent fairly small-circulation quarterly magazine from the UK which specialises in satire, investigative journalism, culture, and fiction. You can read the piece in its entirety if you register (which is free).

a few links:

The Fence's newsletter from April discusses this article & how Semple has tried to muddy the SEO waters

Semple threatened to sue The Fence for publishing this story - many of you are American so here's the relevant UK law on defamation.

The first thig that put up a solid red flag was the shipping material. It's cool that he has custom boxes for his studio, it looked really neat. Then I opened it and sae things like "Not for bean boy" printed all over the inside of the box.

Between Mirror, hyper pigments, and black 2.0, none of them were as extremely out there as the videos on his site made them seem. The colors are vibrant, the black is dark, and the mirror is shiny. But the level the videos showed them at are not levels I can recreate.

So like, he exaggerated as an advertising scheme. Alright, shame on him.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954) is the life story of a poor Spanish woman who rises up to become one of the most famous actresses in the world. The movie does not bother to give her character traits beyond that she loves to have sex and also that she loves to run around barefoot (the fetishistic connotations are inescapable). She falls in love with a count and ultimately marries him. The big twist at the end of the movie is that her new husband had his dick blown off in the war and so they can't have sex (because, tragically, he never learned how to do hand stuff). Then he murders her for having an affair.

In 1978, Ina Garten bought a specialty food store that, for some unfathomable reason, someone had already named The Barefoot Contessa after this movie, which in 1999 became the title of her bestselling cookbook, which was then followed by a popular Food Network show. Now all of us need to deal with there being a TV cooking show called The Barefoot Contessa as part of the background radiation of our lives.

@witchofanguish

That doesn't mean I don't know exactly the kind of tumblr/online portrayal of which you speak, I do for sure! Just noting that Pratchett was not that deep of a thinker (complimentary) I guess.

yet unfortunately their very existence is entangled in geopolitical nonsense about which horrific state has the biggest cock or which company has tithed the most to a bunch of corrupt sociopaths.