Art Club 2000, an artists' collective active during the 1990s, was made up of eight enterprising art school undergraduates: Craig Wadlin, Soibian Spring, Sarah Rossiter, Will Rollins, Shannon Pultz, Daniel McDonald, Gillian Haratani and Patterson Beckwith, who made art and produced exhibitions - two activities they understood as having separate implications. When the group began they were studying at Cooper Union - a tuition-free institution in New York's East Village - with teachers such as Hans Haacke and Mark Dion, meaning that although the members were exposed to the extreme capitalism of the city, they were also allowed enough distance to appreciate its effects.¹ Art Club 2000, with its precocity, became a unique clash of commodity fetishism and institutional critique.

The collective was formed through the instigation of Colin de Land, the late New York gallerist who became known for his anti-conventional commercial gallery, American Fine Arts, Co. De Land's interest in developing the Art Club 2000 experiment stemmed from his disappointment with the machinations of the New York art scene, and with an art economy predicated on money and stardom. In many ways AC2K - a group of young people with nothing to lose in terms of art-world standing - could be seen as de Land's 'fuck you' to the art world and its careerist denizens.

De Land's involvement from the beginning is essential to the group's history. Its association with his gallery provided AC2K with a platform from which to develop works and exhibitions, as well as a modus operandi of insistent questioning. The gallery itself was a peculiar and revealing institution within the New York art world, as de Land strove