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In this article author talks about full-body portraits appropriated from Google Street View began appearing on sidewalks and buildings around the world. Topics include examines the Street-View-images-turned-street-art, as well as the conspicuously manufactured viral news story which were part of Street Ghosts, a project initiated by Paolo Cirio.

Coercive disobedience is a targeted mode of protest; it goads retribution, dialogically exposing laws and policies in a manner that is potentially damaging to the interests of dominant elites. While previous discussions of coercive disobedience are limited to political science, law, and philosophy, I propose a consideration of such modes of dissent within an art context. Under consideration are experiments in simulated transgression realized by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, as well as James Baumgartner and UBERMORGEN. In their transgressing of conventional forms of lawbreaking, their artworks became crimes, not because a crime was committed but because they were pursued as crimes. The artists' mode of coercive disobedience encourages a questioning of how and why simulated transgressions were able to generate powerful legal consequences and retaliatory actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not surprising when blue‐chip artworks are inadvertently caught up in dubious financial activities. But what role might art itself play in investigating and narrating the intricacies of financial crime? To consider a segment of creative practice deconstructing global financial matters (Internet scams, tax avoidance, money laundering) I propose using the framework of true crime. True crime is a genre comprising stories of real events, the telling of which is shaped by the narrator. Here, I extend discussions of true crime from literature, film, and radio/podcasts into the field of art, situating it as a lens for understanding projects by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Mark Lombardi, Paolo Cirio, and Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronman. Rather than simply responding to fraud, these artists investigate it, manifesting crime scenes for abstract and illicit activities and sharing information in a creative, didactic, and intertextual manner.

Scholars and artists have long been interested in socially engaged artworks, particularly those involving civil disobedience. But what of the opposite approach? What of radical adherence? In the 1970s, California-based artist Lowell Darling realized a series of creative endeavors exploiting uncivil obedience, characterized by a conspicuous and hyperbolic compliance with established laws, rules, and mandates. Following the disallowance of proposed deductions to his 1969 federal income tax return, Darling—by way of projects such as the fictional Fat City School of Finds Arts—deconstructed the so-called hobby loss rule of the U.S. Tax Code by rigorously and ironically fulfilling those factors said to indicate a profit-seeking intent. In 1978, Darling mined the intricacies of electioneering norms and campaign finance by staging an insincere run for governor of California. In these projects, Darling mobilized a kind of legal medium for creative expression, manifesting a mode of art-making that departed from expectations about how art and law might interact and intersect within art practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a Cold War climate of paranoia regarding secret identities and communist plots, California-based artist George Herms realized artworks attributed to fictional artist-authors: Eric Hammerscoffer, Paul Mistrie, Iris Firewater, Sigmund Fletcher, Astropoet Moonstone, and Tarzan Feathers. The lives of these imaginary artists were narrated in outlandish biographies, and their artworks were displayed in museum and gallery exhibitions. Rather than simply presenting work under a different name (a pseudonym), Herms deployed the literary technique of heteronymy—which is both a tool (a heteronym) and a conceptual strategy. Herms’s heteronymous practice comprised presenting work by distinct personae, each of whom differed from the others in terms of aesthetic style, philosophy, personality, and life story. By advertising the fictional status of the attributed artists, and doing so alongside documentation of their existence, Herms galvanized the problematic space connecting a named artist-author to his/her/their artwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]