Christian Alborz Oldham’s Having no talent is not enough relies on supportive text. This isn’t a criticism. I didn’t come away from the print-heavy exhibition feeling as if a pick-pocket had visited me; I felt tricked in another, more mystifying sense. Like a child who’s seen a magic show, I left SOCIETY, the gallery above Mother Foucault’s on Grand Avenue, restlessly giddy.
The extensive exhibition text describes each work in Having no talent is not enough—a show composed of sculpture, watercolor, and print publications—as “a double, […] a bootleg, replication, edition, [or] pair.” Bootlegs are tricky to define as they instantiate novel meanings under the conditions they’re made in and by the people who make them. Undergirding every bootleg, though, is a charged indifference to stabilizing concepts, ones like authenticity, commercial value, and the law.1 The bootleg is no doubt a mischievous class of object and the bootlegger a trickster, to be sure. I would consider Oldham a trickster in their own right. They wield the aesthetics of error, cheap production, and mimicry that we’ve been socially trained to sniff out. Moving across three works, we can see the bootlegger in unexpected social roles: as a pericapitalist entrepreneur, an extra-legal archivist, and an anonymous artist. From these positions, we can see the multidirectional—even vital—functions of the bootleg.
The faded green cover and purple text on the spine of Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 by Michael Asher and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (2016) are presumably the same as every print before it and editions yet to come. Oldham’s unsanctioned reprint channels our attention to a proprietary timeline: who has had the rights to print, distribute, and profit from this text, which documents the archive of an artist who actively pushed against such formalities. With Writings 1973-1983, Oldham places themself in a lineage of postmodern contemporary artists who baffle the institutional systems they simultaneously operate within. This canon’s artistic process typically references a catalog of theoretical texts more than technical craft. It’s think-y art that smirks at dominant modes of circulation while remaining inside them. In the works list, Oldham chronicles earlier editions (first, The Nova Scotia College of Design in 1983, later The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1985), noting that at one point copies were either unavailable for purchase or inaccessibly priced. Necessity spurred their very own edition, which they produced without authorization from Asher’s estate. Oldham sold copies, but only ever at a price that would sustain its circulation. This move undercut the inflated second-hand market price while acting as a steward of Asher’s trickster spirit.
Comme des Garçons F/W 1983: Gloves, Skirts, Quilted Big Coats (2018) is full of discrepancies. As a designer knock-off, it veers far from the original. The cream merino wool sweater that Oldham and their collaborator Davora Linder fabricated is a mere approximation. Neither artist could access the “real” CDG crewneck, from which they could form an exact pattern. Instead, they bought and then returned a similar sweater from an entirely different collection, more than ten years apart. The pair settled for likeness over replication, leaning into the unforgiving nature of sight-memory, the process of having to produce an archival artifact extra-legally from limited information.
But you wouldn’t know that just from being in the gallery. At SOCIETY, it’s displayed on a wall inside a shriveled, clear vacuum-sealed bag. Rather than attempt to produce an unclockable counterfeit for a lower-than-luxury market price, the artists produced a few rare sweaters to be used in accordance with specific instructions. In this way, Comme des Garçons F/W 1983 might be considered a “knock up” as opposed to a knock off.2 The term “knock up” originated with Daniel Day, also known as Dapper Dan of Dapper Dan’s Boutique. Day crafted custom versions of designer-label items that were tailored to the exquisite aesthetic tastes of his clientele in Harlem, New York, offering elegant, inventive, and high-quality garments without the luxury price tag. His designs, though they recalled the branding and silhouettes of luxury labels, displayed a singular style that grew to exceed their social value—evidenced by the numerous lawsuits they waged against him, eventually leading him to shutter the business in the early 1990s.
Where a counterfeit “aspires to pass as legitimate,” a knock-up is distinguished by how it “displays its illegitimacy as a refusal to participate in the oppressive structures it was created to challenge.” A “knock up,” then, functions as a vital cultural archive that simultaneously resists oppressive notions of social and economic value through differentiation. By positioning (or packaging) the “knock up” CDG sweater as a piece of ephemeral performance art, Oldham and Linder practically remove it from economic circulation—ironically making it more prized than the “real” sweater that began it all.
The two preceding bootlegs fall somewhat neatly into the thinky-art category, but Untitled (Figure with Backpack) (2020) requires little to understand its value. It’s beautiful. In watercolor, the roiling mist of washed-out grey appears to suspend a fair-skinned young person of seemingly East Asian descent in baggy dress clothes with a fashionable pop of teal from their branded backpack. The figure seems to stand outside of time, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I felt sheepish in its presence. I wanted it the moment I saw it—original or not. This instant attraction is more or less how Oldham came to produce it.
Much like the masterpieces and artifacts housed in policed museums, Untitled (Figure with Backpack) has lore. Oldham first encountered the watercolor through a photograph from their friend’s travels in South Korea. With no way to trace the location of the original or the artist, Oldham contracted a reproduction factory in a small suburb in China, where it was completed by an employed fabricator named Lizi. Rare is it today that a stunning, coveted art object would claim no author, but a string of agents who would resurrect a nearly lost treasure for no other reason than wanting it to exist.
In a cultural moment when absolute authenticity is aspirational amidst conditions that dwarf questions concerning what’s real and what’s not, what does it mean to devote an artistic practice to making fakes? These three works from Having no talent is not enough engage the definitional shiftiness of the bootleg. Others might flinch at the word “shifty,” wanting to distance themselves from criminality in favor of something agreeable. Oldham’s duplicates, however, inhabit the many positions and tonalities that the bootleg can take up without completely divorcing from seedy connotations. Object to object, these shifts reposition the bootlegger’s orientation to the social. The bootleg, then, is revealed to be more than just a counterfeit artifact of shallow consumerism and status. It’s an object of immense trickery, beauty, and historical power—a social irritant and salve—making the case for why these tricksters might be the artists we need now.
- Ben Schwartz, Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice (Valiz and Source Type, 2024), 16. ↩︎
- Schwartz, 34-36. ↩︎
Christian Alborz Oldham: Having no talent is not enough
August 23–November 15, 2025
SOCIETY, Portland, OR