Set The Record Wrong: Reflections On the Recent Advancements Against The Violence of Aesthetic Discrimination
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Set The Record Wrong
by LG Williams
PCP Press | Available now on Amazon | View Sample
Nearly fifty years in the making, Set The Record Wrong is Los Angeles artist LG Williams’s coup de grâce—a 500-page masterwork that brings a lifetime of fuckery, dissent, provocation, and misapplied philosophical rigor to bear on the most pressing contradictions of contemporary art.
Building upon Benjamin Buchloh’s lament over the “violence of aesthetic differentiation”—the agonistic struggle through which art once defined its value, purpose, and truth—Williams exposes how this violence has been anesthetized by the rhetoric of progress. Today’s art world, he argues, has replaced form with virtue, criticism with compliance, and aesthetic risk with bureaucratic safety. The violence of form has been supplanted by the violence of paperwork.
Across a sequence of lucid, polemical meditations, Williams turns Buchloh’s Frankfurt School pessimism inside out. Where Buchloh diagnosed the collapse of critique under the weight of institutional containment, Williams launches a full counter-offensive against the forces that have neutered art’s autonomy: the moral exhibitionism of inclusion and diversity; the market’s worship of liquidity and novelty; the curator’s managerial sanctimony; the museum’s new religion of wellness; and the critic’s abdication of judgment in the name of empathy.
“If you don’t own this book, you’re part of the problem”
Extending beyond theory, Set The Record Wrong also serves as the first complete public catalogue of Williams’s monumental 2021 series, The One Can’t Look Paintings—one hundred works measuring 96 × 120 inches, executed in Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen. These immense, impossible-to-ignore canvases—now mostly held in private collections across the globe—stand as the visual corollary to Williams’s textual polemic: artworks that cannot be looked at without confronting the contradictions of contemporary vision itself.
This is Williams’s Moby-Dick, his Anatomy of Melancholy for the post-art world: an encyclopedic reckoning with the hypocrisies of our cultural order, written in the language of someone who’s illiterate but still believes that art should wound, discriminate, and demand. In Set The Record Wrong, Williams restores aesthetic judgment to its rightful violence—and in doing so, delivers one of the most uncompromising defenses of artistic autonomy since Adorno left Los Angeles.
Selected Quotes And Passages
“Every aesthetic judgment implies a wound. The modern museum’s promise to eliminate wounding altogether is not progress but euthanasia by empathy.”
“If Wally Hedrick traced the death of utopia to the museum, then we must trace the death of criticism to the curator’s spreadsheet—Excel as the new theology of taste.”
“The new violence is clerical, not aesthetic: it issues from compliance trainings, mission statements, and DEI forms instead of any contest of ideas or forms.”
“Where Adorno mourned the collapse of artistic negation, I celebrate its mutation. Negation has gone feral, hiding in irony, sarcasm, and the last refuge of indifference.”
“The academy’s dream of abolishing hierarchy is itself a hierarchy—the most priestly kind, because it enforces virtue while pretending to liberate.”
“To discriminate aesthetically is not to exclude politically; it is to remember that truth itself is discriminatory—it cuts.”
“Every bureaucracy invents a new avant-garde only to cancel it, a ritual of self-flattery performed in the name of progress.”
Table Of Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Aesthetic Illusion: Dissecting Mediocrity in Contemporary Art’s Strictly Commercial Era (2024)
A post-mortem on how “innovation” became an accounting term and how taste now comes with a receipt.
The Artistic Stagnation of Richard Serra: Unveiling The Myth Behind The Steel (1994)
Williams takes a torch to Serra’s industrial sublime, exposing how monumentality became the camouflage of boredom.
Larry Bell and The Age of Immersion (2022)
When reflection became branding, transparency became product—Bell’s cubes as metaphors for our mirrored prisons.
Attack of the Philistines: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging Contemporary Art (2024)
A field guide to the new illiterates of the image: the influencers, curators, and virtue-brokers rewriting history in real time.
Banksy Punked (2009)
Williams detonates the myth of the anonymous saint—street art’s commodified conscience exposed as marketing graffiti.
LG Williams Responds to The Forever Art Professors (2014)
An unfiltered counterattack on academia’s permanent class—where tenure replaces talent and ideology replaces art.
The Charade Striped Bare: Tracy Emin at The Prince George Ballroom (2023)
Emin’s self-exposure becomes exhibitionism for hire; confession without consequence, rebellion with room service.
Wally Hedrick Uninfluencer: A Forgotten Generation (2021)
A eulogy for the artist who refused the market’s sermon—proof that irrelevance can be the last form of integrity.
On the Path of Performance: In Conversation with Tehching Hsieh (2022)
Two endurance artists compare scars—one from time, one from the art world’s endless performance of sincerity.
Representational Reality Rules: A Critical Examination of the Photographic Dominion (2018)
Photography as surveillance, image as obedience; Williams reclaims vision from its algorithmic overseers.
Obey, Gabba Gabba Hey: This World Needs a Giant-Eyed Loner (2008)
A punk elegy for the last outsider—part manifesto, part middle finger to the culture that turned rebellion into merch.
Plates
Bibliography
Index
About The Author
Selected Paintings In The Catalogue *
* Commercially oriented, couch-sized variations of these original paintings can be purchased directly from Erik David Gallery, Beverly Hills—and shipped to you directly from WalMart—starting at a modest $15,000 each.
Book Details:
Format: Full Color, Paperback
Page Count: 491 pages
Language: English
Dimensions: Approx. 7 × 10”
ISBN: 979-8324769550
1st Edition Publication Date: May 9, 2024
Publisher: PCP Press
About LG Williams
LG Williams is a Los Angeles–based artist whose positions have included Endowed University Instructor at the Academy of Art University, Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, and Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. His work has been shown internationally—including at the Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia—and has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, La Stampa, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.
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About PCP Press
PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco to champion subversive and esoteric art, PCP has since published books, special editions, and rare interventions with figures such as Wally Hedrick, Wayne Thiebaud, Dave Hickey, Raymond Pettibon, Bryan Reynolds, and LG Williams.
More information and titles can be found at www.pcppress.com
