They send out a crew and squander taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. The victim of the prank is a famous missing persons prime time show on the Italian state television. HARRY KIPPER, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Yugoslavian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent.

Luther Blissett's media hoaxes were crowded with imaginary artists, because the art world is crowded with gullible people and makes for a perfect target. The end of the LBP did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web. All the 'veterans' committed a symbolic seppuku (samurai ritual suicide). This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story.īlissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany.ĭecember 1999 marked the end of the LBP's Five Year Plan. In Italy, between 19, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the 'Luther Blissett' identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. 'Luther Blissett' is a multi-use name, an 'open reputation' informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994.įor reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player of Afro-Caribbean origins. The latter project, albeit more focused on literature and storytelling in the narrowest sense of the word, is no less radical than the old one. In January 2000, some of them regrouped as Wu Ming. They worked together to tell the world a great story, create a legend, give birth to a new kind of folk hero.

They all called themselves Luther Blissett and set to raising hell in the cultural industry. In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.

Q by Luther Blissett