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Who is Todd Atticus? His name came to my attention only yesterday, when I thought I’d spotted a bizarre typo on the cover of our current City Gallery Wellington season brochure. Instead of ‘Colin McCahon, Petra Cortright, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’, it read ‘Colin McCahon, Todd Atticus, Martino Gamper, Shannon Te Ao’. WTF! My jaw dropped. Was this a monumental screw-up or was I just having one of my typo nightmares? Someone pinch me. But, when I looked closer, I saw it was a fake. Mr Atticus had also replaced the Cortright image-and-blurb with his own, which explained his sleight. Where we had spruiked the LA post-internet-art it-girl as ‘the Monet of the twenty-first century’, he proposed himself as ‘the Duchamp of the twenty-first century’. Atticus had sneakily inserted himself into our brand, and he’d gone to great trouble to do so. (He has, apparently, done another version of the brochure, trading places with Gamper.) I hear there are now a thousand rogue brochures out and about, in the city’s bloodstream. We could be offended, could call the lawyers, but it’s too clever, too funny, too well done, and ultimately too flattering—sometimes it’s reassuring to be part of someone’s fantasy. I was reminded of Julian Dashper, who once took out an advertising page in Artforum to print a fake look-alike Artforum review of his work. Positive, of course.