Scam Likely: Post-Critical Essays on Art and Culture, 1988-2025
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback: June 2025.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
30 full-dress essays, 520 pages, 160 black and white illustrations, a black and white photograph of the artist by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on the frontispiece, a biographical note about the author.
9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy.
ISBN: 979-8-9913925-0-1.
Published by Index Books, New York, 2022.

RETAIL PRICE: $35.00 (includes postage and handling)

“Scam likely” is a disparaging term that often appears on our cell phone screens and various other devices alerting us of an unwanted caller, which term is used abstractly in this book, Scam Likely: Post-Critical Essays on Art and Culture, 1988-2023, as an ironic and critical trope alerting us that something is askew or has gone awry, more often than not dealing with the way culture is documented or the way the reality and history of contemporary art is being portrayed. In this case, the author contends that almost all history, and especially culture, have become today the consumer product of a corporate scam. An unwanted caller, indeed, which has far surpassed what Adorno and the Frankfurt School identified long ago as the toxic spectacle of the culture industry, given its global technological reach or what the author here calls Global Corporate Imperialism (GCI).

In a more specific manner, the author documents the way the artists of his generation, which he conceptualizes as Post-Appropriation in character and which Scam Likely unfolds in a grandular way, need to be differentiated from the reactionary academic ‘avant-garde’ Pictures artists – often backed by the journal October or the various Octoberists who have by now infiltrated the universities across the U.S. – who have hitched a ride on the backs of the Post-Appropriation artists’ success, even as the Octoberists have distorted the vital critical role the latter have played. While both generations, the Pictures and the Post-Appropriation artists, were devoted to a critique of the Social, the former surrendered to the spectacle of appropriation, Duchampian in essence, and the photographic function; whereas the latter bracketed the various critical instruments and methods they utilized in approaching appropriation asymptotically as a meta-Spectacle in the context of a distinctly anti-Duchampian ethos.

Where there is a barbaric true breakage of the Social, there are invariably academic artists and their armschair critics who play at Socialist concerns in a Left Wing / self-righteous / suppressive and self-repressive era of inverted McCarthyism. Rather than submit to the reification of dialectics, implicit in this or any critique, the author has chosen to pursue a dissonant critical method that reflects a more louche and outré approach, resulting in an anti-paradigmatic syncopation, thus availing himself of what can be described as the poignancy of dialectics.

In essays such as “Slouching Toward Avenue ‘D’ for Dialectics,” “The Problem with Craig Owens’ Puerilism,” and “‘Art History, After Sherrie Levine and Mike Bidlo,” he shows how the work of a whole Post-Appropriation generation of artists is compromised by pseudo-dialectical thinking and ideologically deformed dialecticians. Throughout these and other essays, he disputes the terms ‘Neo Geo’ and ‘Simulationism’ used in a reductive way to commercialize and stigmatize this same generation of artists and to rationalize the application of Picture theory in its latest permutations. He details the cultural industry’s cooption of the Post-Appropriation artists and theorizes in visceral and concrete form “History Disappearing,” “The Horror of Forgetting” and “The Barbarism of Art History.”

Scam Likely utilizes the ‘post-critical’ theory of the meta-Spectacle, including self-critique, to underscore critically the reification of critique on the Left end of the political spectrum, going so far as to even denounce the author’s own exhibitions, the ones he feels were compromised, in a meta-critical text on Joan Didion’s essay, “White Album,” and in “The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture.” He critiques revered critics like Tom McEvilley and a variety of sanctimonious critical venues in “Twisted Axiologies,” such as Artforum and October magazine, as well as various ideologically driven critics such as Gary Indiana and Susan Sontag, and members of his own generation of artists, like Jeff Koons, in “Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside.”

In the spirit of Wittgenstein’s ‘broom of the system’ philosophy, he argues we should “Question Everything, Especially the Questions.” And in the essay “An Eschatology of Tropes and Reifications for the Mekong Review: Why So Many Want Us to Believe the Danger of Imminent Nuclear Annihilation and the Death Camps Are Things of the Past, Are Too Negative to Think About, and Should Be Forgotten,” he brings together his concerns about how history in general is being distorted today and how it is subject to non-factual, alternative reality-principles which are barbaric in nature all in the name of POV (point of view).

Scam Likely asks the simple question: “where even in the sincerest of cultural and historical endeavors is a scam most likely to ravel? Not even, or especially, in the pages of this volume can we discount the possibility of such a perpetration. Perhaps, in the end, it may well turn out that the author himself is the unwanted caller.”