A Look at the Probable Genesis of QAnon

When media literacy and critical thinking are absent, the world becomes a much more dangerous place. Check out this very illuminating Buzzfeed link as well (in the 2nd paragraph below).


QAnon: the Italian artists who may have inspired America’s most dangerous conspiracy theory, by Eddy Frankel, The Art Newspaper, January 19, 2021

An anonymous left-wing art group known in the 1990s as Luther Blissett are wondering what they have unwittingly helped create

Q, the 1999 novel by the anonymous Italian art collective Luther Blissett, has notable similarities with the workings of QAnon

As the US Capitol was overwhelmed by Donald Trump supporters in early January, one figure stood out: with his painted face, bare chest, fur hat and American flag-draped spear, Jake Angeli became one of the most photographed rioters of the day. He is also known as the “QAnon Shaman” and has been seen waving a “Q sent me” placard in other protests.

QAnon is America’s most dangerous conspiracy theory, and if you pull hard enough on its threads, the whole tangled mess lands, somehow, at the feet of a group of Italian artists. It might sound like a conspiracy within a conspiracy, but, as Buzzfeed first reported in 2018, chances are that QAnon, at the start at least, took inspiration from an amorphous organisation of leftist artists who, for most of the mid-1990s, called themselves Luther Blissett after the 1980s English footballer.

They used the Watford and England striker’s name as a nom de plume, perpetrating countless media hoaxes, pranks and art interventions. They started raves on trams that turned into riots, they released albums, wrote books and manifestos, they mocked, questioned and undermined the mainstream, and they grew and grew until hundreds of people around the world were calling themselves Luther Blissett.

In the process, with their media-jamming hoaxes, they helped lay the groundwork for QAnon, a conspiracy theory about a secret satanic cabal of child abusers which controls the world. During the 2016 presidential elections, it famously gave rise to the rumour that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring in a pizza parlour, Comet Ping Pong. More recently, QAnon has become a mainstay of far-right protests and riots, including the US Capitol insurrection. Continue reading “A Look at the Probable Genesis of QAnon”

LiteratEye #32: Pranks With a Novel Twist — An Interview with Elusive Wu Ming

Here’s the thirty second installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.


LiteratEye #32: Pranks With a Novel Twist — An Interview with Elusive Wu Ming
By W.J. Elvin III
September 25, 2009

band0-200The counter-cultural creative arts collective Wu Ming, based in Italy, evolved out of the madcap Luther Blissett phenomenon (see LiteratEye #15).

Blissett scattered into a million little pieces, becoming an incredible world-wide prank epidemic. For a time it seemed everyone was doing bizarre creative “actions” and attributing them to Blissett.

Then some members of the group that launched the Blissett project morphed into Wu Ming.

Apparently they are now four culturally revolutionary Italian novelists cranking out very popular books.

Being anonymous – the name means “no name” in Mandarin – they are only identified by number, Wu Ming1 through Wu Ming5.

Right. And we just said there are four of them. Well, one of them must have dropped out. Or something. Continue reading “LiteratEye #32: Pranks With a Novel Twist — An Interview with Elusive Wu Ming”

LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History

Here’s the fifteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.


LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History
By W.J. Elvin III
May 22, 2009

f24c7fa0c7119f749fa38e2cb0e57e5e-200So you’ve got this American Revolution-era historical novel weighted toward the Iroquois point of view, written by four anonymous Italian guys who call themselves Wu Ming. Formula for a best-seller or what?

Let’s start with “or what?”

The English language version of Manituana isn’t out yet, though you can get in line for it at Amazon. So, not reading Italian, I can’t say if it really has the best-seller qualities mentioned by those who have read it. It may well be a page-turner of the Dan Brown sort, with the welcome added element of intellectual stimulation, as has been suggested.

Wu Ming has had previous successes under that name and other hits writing as Luther Blissett.

ArtofthePrank readers may recall Blissett as a collective counter-cultural commotion of the 1990s wherein artists, pranksters, protestors, writers and others identified themselves as Blissett.

Luther Blissett, a soccer player from Jamaica, was victim of racial slurs while playing for an Italian team. At first he wasn’t pleased with the craze surrounding his name, but eventually he got into the spirit of it. Some excerpts from his appearance on a BBC program can be found on a rather poor quality but definitely bizarre YouTube clip: Continue reading “LiteratEye #15: Wu Ming Re-Visions American History”