 Hi everybody, thank you all for coming this evening. I'm Sarah softness. I'm the former I'm former assistant curator of special projects here at the Brooklyn Museum and The fortunate collaborator for the last six months or so with David Levine on his fascinating new exhibition Some of the people all of the time which opens as you know tomorrow to the public and to you all this evening downstairs Just after the lecture in a moment So I want to take a moment first to thank our amazing partners at the Amnesty Cultural Center in New York With whom we are Co-presenting this exhibition as part of their birds a festival inspired by Aristophanes Which has over the last weeks presented a wide-ranging roster of dynamic programs and performances all over the city and sort of really Wonderful and fruitful collaboration, and we are tremendously grateful To them and a special debt of gratitude to violin we small festival curator and boo fruible our festival producer for their vision Seamless execution generosity of spirit all throughout truly truly special next I must shout out the tireless Brooklyn Museum team who's made this project possible Adrienne Coteen Sharon Matt Atkins Emily Annis Jochim Huckle Elaine Kamarowski Madeline O'Hare just to name a few Of course all happens under the visionary leadership of Anne Pasternak Thank you, Anne and finally to the brilliant David whose commitment and acuity and creativity have been continually inspiring and Which I'm so excited for all of you to share in tonight And so I'm gonna quickly say a Few words about the project itself, and then I'd love to invite Violanne up on stage And so some of the people all of the time takes up a deeply relevant and an anxiety provoking set of questions regarding democratic participation and political good faith Which asked us to consider who is being fooled in the public or political sphere and by whom in a new cycle dominated by accusations of crisis acting revelations by Cambridge Analytica and crowd casting agencies we must ask who really takes part in assembled groups both in real life and Online and are they there for the right reasons what even are the right reasons in David's show this suspicion and ethical fragility come together with a thread of celebrated practices of infiltration within contemporary performance art The exhibition centerpiece is the live performance of a monologue enacted by a rotating cast of professional actors To distinct Installations composed of artwork both from the Brooklyn Museum's collection some on view for the first time in decades and Striking new prints by David form the stage set where it all happens So with that I'm gonna pass it now to Violanne who will speak about two additional public programs We have among other things so thank you so much for coming and enjoy This is the last installment in our festival And it's a really great privilege to be able to introduce David living who's an artist I've admired for many years And so it was a great thrill to be able to co-present this work with with Brooklyn Museum Our festival started about a month ago at the American Museum of Natural History To give you an idea of the range of institutions that we've partnered with over the last month And the centerpiece of our festival was a production of the birds a new adaptation by Nico's Carathonos Which was we presented at st. Tan's warehouse to for two weeks It ended last week to a sold-out run We were really thrilled to see this great new work of greek theater presented there The play originally was written by Aristophanes and premiered 2,500 years ago And we based our festival on the play and on the themes that surround the play So not only birds and in all of their interpretations both metaphorical and natural But also in the sense of democracy And the Utopia and some of the some of the political themes that are addressed in the play And when we presented the project of our festival to Anne Pasternak, she immediately thought of David Levine Because it seemed to her clear that David's project spoke directly About this question that we've been wrestling with for the past 2,500 years the question of how our citizens Work together to create a fair and just political system And not only that but The question of how Cultural institutions address that question in bringing together an audience And letting people experience work together Feels very relevant I think it's very unusual for an institution of this scale to present a project of this size and ambition In so little time. This is a world premiere. This is a new commission And it all happened within the last six months so Really, I want to thank and acknowledge the extraordinary vision of Anne Pasternak for Bringing this project and David Levine for his incredible talent and putting it together As this is the last installment in our festival I'd like to acknowledge some of my colleagues at the Onassis Cultural Center also Karen Brooks Hopkins My former boss at BEM. Thank you, Karen Amalia Kosmetatu the executive director of the Onassis Cultural Center, New York Sofia Eftimiatu, Mandy Boaku, Eleanor Goldhard Zoe Dolan, Tamar McKay, who is also A member of the curatorial team here And many others. Thank you so much for all your great work and your support There are going to be a few more public programs as part of this installation on June 16th There's a family event all day And then on June 23rd There's going to be an Ecole de la Clac for those of you that want to learn how to be a fake crowd and how to boo and clap and Encourage the performers And on June 30th David is going to moderate a panel discussion about the issues in the work that he's going to present And now please join me in welcoming David Levine Thank you all for coming I want to thank Sarah for everything she did for this exhibition and you have to you have to sit through a few more Thank yous, but they're really since they're really really really sincere Um, I want to thank Sarah for everything she did for the show via land for that great introduction From the brooklyn museum. I want to thank This is a non-exclusive thank you list, but uh, ampastronack and jennifer chi and sharon madakins and the entire staff who Did a huge amount of work in a very short amount of time And from onassis, especially uh, the alan and bufrabel and the mario cosmetattu For everything they've done to bring this all to fruition I also really really really need to thank the indispensable ashley k tata Who is the associate director of this piece without whom literally none of this could have happened And lastly, I want to thank the rational dress society for this amazing jumpsuit Uh, the significance of which will become clear if you check out the performances after the talk So, okay, I'm going to talk to you a bit about some of the ideas behind this project But first I need to give you a little bit of history Uh, june 16th 2015 Donald trump announced his campaign for president in the atrium of trump tower Surrounded by ardent fans from new york from connecticut Young old black white brown men women They all have one thing in common other than their love of donald trump That's a divinico del giaco An actor known for the streets right to live and brooklyn betrayal and this here on the left Is cordony klotz A actress and model with the made worldwide agency and those two along with every other person in the t-shirt Were brought to uh trump tower for the campaign by a company called extra mile casting that mainly does casting for background extras in movies Cut ahead to january 20th 2017 2017 one of the weirdest weekends for fake crowds and crowd accusations ever um A dispute breaks out over the size of donald trump's inauguration crowd Which seems smaller than barack obamas the next day The women's march draws over 450 000 people but Right wing media suggests that many of these supporters were fake paid up to $2,500 each by the soros foundation Meanwhile in langley donald trump addresses the cia There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the cia And then donald trump rapturous applause In the meantime, right wing media found proof that protesters at the inauguration were paid By a crowd casting company a left wing crowd casting company called demand protest we assemble movements Now the left feared that this was a right wing hoax designed to discredit protesters But it turned out to be a left wing hoax designed to discredit right wing journalists You should actually you should actually google this one dom to lipsos performances Okay, so clearly there's fake crowds and there's accusations of fake crowds and The accusation of fake crowd of a fake crowd has been around as long as the concept of a real crowd As soon as acclimation became a measure of power or influence or commitment Opposing forces found it necessary to delegitimize that commitment usually by reference to incentive as in They're only there because they're getting paid Or coercion as in they're only clapping because they have to Witness for instance the emperor nero's augustiani an elite core of 5000 Soldiers dragooned into cheering on his musical performances Nero is said to be the first person to fake a crowd But we know this mainly through swatonia's To virulently anti-nero historians who had their own incentives to question the sincerity of his support Sometimes a fake crowd is verifiably fake The clack in 19th century paris was a well documented mafia of professional clappers Professional laughers professional criers who could make or break a theatrical production They would extort payoffs from producers writers and actors separately Sometimes all four as in this domie etching of a man who's been hired by the heroine to cry By the comic actor to laugh and by the writer to stomp his feet and by the theater's patron mess to clap This guy's gonna have a long night The clack lived on in the 20th century as laughter His laughter is infectious or so the theory goes And in the 21st century it involved it evolved into the actual crowd rental agencies There's rent a crowd in the uk There's crowds for rent in the southwest There's circus An app that tries to disintermediate party promotion by luring millennials with the prospect of free drinks And there's the aforementioned crowds on demand your home for protests rally rallies advocacy audiences pr stunts and political events These agencies as they promise provide crowds for everything There's party activities with a campy edge self promotion experience because life doesn't get any better than having a large crowd of people chanting your name Exclaiming the world what a great person you are There's more persuasive promotional activities Creating buzz all these strategies bolstered the designer's image leading to substantial coverage in TMZ a doubling this twitter following Most importantly a lucrative deal with the department store chain And there's actual political organizing campaigning and picketing crowds on demand was in the news just a couple weeks ago And of course There's just creating value for instance for art You could request a crowd for an artist's exhibition to admire certain works Yeah, you laugh but crowds matter to Instaurant institutions to nonprofits attendance numbers translate into visibility funding and patronage from the blockbuster exhibition To the blockbuster protest crowds matter for press coverage from photo ops to followers and reposts And as we know these two can be faked Followers can be bought from companies like Davumi Or they can be bought by artists like constant dillard whose 100,000 followers for everyone project distributed 2.5 million instagram followers among a personal selection of art world instagram accounts And the art version i think really crystallizes the paradoxes behind all this Whether it's protesters rallyers or spectators the destabilizing thing about fake crowds is uh, they're not there for the right reasons We know this But what does being there for the right reasons even mean? And why does it matter so much? And what would the right reasons be? Is disinterested participation even possible? If so, what would it look like if so? Is it even desirable? I think fake crowds are actually A real problem Entergy's use of crowds on demand for the new orleans city council meeting actually kept concerned citizens From being seated because they fill the auditorium from being heard and from offering objections thereby Making it look to the city council as though Entergy's plan enjoyed overwhelming support fake crowds actually helped that plant get approved I also think that the accusation of fake crowds is a real problem Accusing school shooting survivors of being crisis actors or dismissing catastrophes as false flag operations is not only pernicious but socially corrosive But it's also hard to say how prevalent a problem the fake crowd is Just as it's hard to say how effective foreign influence campaigns on social media were on the last election So I think for tonight The problem of the fake crowd is best considered from the point of view of why we find the idea so viscerally offensive in the first place And the answers can actually be kind of odd And before I speculate irresponsibly on that, I want to offer two caveats one In its current instantiation, the fake crowd is a uniquely American problem Not because we're the only country that has fake crowds far from it But because as friends of mine from russia, egypt and latin america never tire of pointing out Americans are the only ones who freak out about it People from eastern europe, for example, look at american anxiety over this as yet another example of our Astonishing innocence whatever happens to us. We're always the first one it happened to While other countries kind of take this stuff in strad Here's julia yafia russia correspond for the atlantic And I remember at the first really big protest right near the kremlin walking around and I see this young man wearing a scarf with Gold yellow black and white which are the kind of nationalist colors of russia Which seemed out of place there. I started talking to him and I asked him, you know, what are you doing here? And he's like, oh well my he was probably like 18 19 And he said well i'm here because my my friends are here. They all wanted to come and participate and at the time the russian state tv was already saying that hillary clinton because Putin said that hillary clinton had given kind of the signal for these protesters to come out and state tv had taken this message and run with it and said all these protesters were paid for by the state department which if you have ever encountered the state department and it's Budget and budgetary woes You would realize this comical but the same way we think russia is omnipotent russians think the state department is Omnipotent and well funded So I said well, you know your friends. Do you think they were paid by the state department to be here? And he said well, they deny it But i'm sure they are and I said why do you think that and he's like well I'm paid to be here by nasi, which is the pro kremlin youth organization So they must be paid too. They're not just going to come out and spend their free time for free Another way of saying this is that we Well, is that americans freak out about this because we place such faith in the meaning of the crowd to begin with And this leads me to caveat number two It's really weird that we place any faith in the crowd at all because for most of the 19th and 20th century The crowd was something to be feared First is something unruly volatile and mob-like and then as john plots has argued as something Deadening and conformists. So think of all those sociological studies from the 50s and 60s of like one dimensional man and the organization man and the man in the gray flannel suit But in either the chaotic or the conformist formulations the threat of the crowd was always that your individuality would get swallowed up obliterated in the leveling wave of the mass But today Our anxiety seems to be that there are people in the crowd who won't lose their individuality People who haven't surrendered their autonomy or to be more precise people who've already surrendered their autonomy But to a force outside the crowd A force whose purposes unlike the crowd Are not clear In this view the fake crowd is akin to a 501c4 or other organization a seemingly grassroots spontaneous movement that has in fact been organized and paid for Astro turf as as Lloyd Benson christened it in 1985 And often what we call a fake crowd is simply a group of true believers who've been organized by nonprofits that we don't like So is it a fake crowd if the people are really cheering that someone else paid their bus fare? I don't know. Is it fake if you all write amazon reviews for your best friend's debut novel? So what i'm trying to say is just that in discussing the fake crowd We're traveling along an entire spectrum of belief organization and incentive We equate authenticity with spontaneity But as Lenin and countless organizers since have pointed out spontaneity alone isn't going to get you very far And just because a campaign was organized doesn't mean it's not sincere However, there's always the question of accountability Those amazon reviews are only effective to the extent that they seem disinterested And 501c4s don't need to disclose their funding sources. This is the dark money problem And fake crowd agencies are frequently subcontractors to middleman public affairs consultants who have themselves been hired by the real client Who prefers to remain Unknown enter G for instance hired a company called Hawthorne They were the ones who contracted crowds on demand Trump Contracted a public affairs company who themselves retained extra miles. So there's plenty of deniability Now crowds on demand. All right, I just said that because I'm robotically reading from my own teleprompter energy was shocked and appalled to find out That paid actors have been hired to occupy the city council meeting because they would never do that because it goes against their core values now The founder of crowds on demand adam sward He actually doesn't see what the big fuss is about at all One truly bizarre afternoon in west hollywood over the biggest smoothie i'd ever seen He explained his philosophy to me Say you've got 10 people Who want to protest something? 10 people who are willing to protest for free In adam sward's view these 10 people are equivalent To one person willing to pay for a protest. Why is that? Well This is because Each of these protesters is giving up say ten dollars an hour. They could be making it work in order to protest In total they're giving up a hundred dollars But this guy over here He's willing to spend a hundred dollars In order to buy the services Of ten actors for ten dollars a piece In both cases a hundred dollars are being expended. So It's a hundred dollars worth of commitment either way Who cares if it comes from one person or from ten? So if you accept money as the universal equivalent all other considerations go out the window proportionality for one The broader principle of one person one vote for another As amway eras and dark money impresario betsy devos wrote My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the rnc. We expect a return on our investment But even looked at from sward's point of view It's actually inaccurate to say that our protesters are losing money because they're investing time in future outcomes That could yield disproportionate economic returns What is ten dollars compared to tens of thousands of dollars saved under universal health care? If you get it As steven squibb said quickly I think I heard him right a protester could be said to enter into a credit relationship with the future You're investing your labor time now in exchange for a future return on investment One reading of marx suggests that debt and credit holds society together through mutual obligation So along this reading what's offensive about a fake crowd is that they're getting paid off immediately Rather than investing in the future They're just taking the money and running And money as means of payment is inherently antisocial But even then the suggestion that you could see any incentive at all to aesthetic or political participation even a future incentive still seems grotesque scandalous in poor taste And that suggests that more than anything the fake crowd is an offense against meaning From this point of view, what's offensive about the fake crowd isn't that it's too fake It's that it's too real Here we all are Trying to build a symbolic expression of blame Or appreciation Trying to participate in and uphold the symbolic role of the fake crowd And there you are earning a buck For all that we equate low-wage labor with authenticity We're actually still pretty sniffy about actually earning anything There's probably a lot more to say about clacks about crowds about art and about work But I think that's probably enough for the moment I and the Brooklyn Museum and the Anastas Cultural Center would like to see you downstairs to watch the preview performances in the Blum Gallery and attend the reception in the lobby Thank you all for coming and have a great evening