Reality Hacking – Joey Skaggs

Multimedia artist Joey Skaggs has been called everything from the World’s Greatest Hoaxer to a royal pain in the ass. He’s been threatened, assaulted, summonsed, subpoenaed, arrested, deposed, dismissed, trivialized, maligned, even thanked and praised. In fact, Skaggs is America’s most notorious socio-political satirist, media activist, culture jammer, hoaxer, and dedicated proponent of independent thinking and media literacy.

What follows is a partial documentation of Joey Skaggs’ conceptual media performance work. It is not all inclusive and it is not his life story. However it is intended to illustrate Skaggs’ evolutionary process as an artist who uses the media as his medium. Hopefully it will serve as an educational tool for all media consumers.

Joey Skaggs has been a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief. He ran a bordello for dogs, directed a celebrity sperm bank, and was the capo de capo of the Fat Squad, a paramilitary organization dedicated to wiping out obesity. His cockroach extract vitamin was invented to cure the world’s ailments, and he was the only man ever to windsurf from Hawaii to California.

These and many other achievements have been diligently reported as fact by domestic and international news media for over forty years. Yet every one of these so-called news stories was the creation of conceptual artist Joey Skaggs. His elaborately staged media hoaxes, which brilliantly satirize sociopolitical and cultural issues, have two overriding goals: to expose hypocrisy and effect social change.

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