With a decade-long roster of exhibitions of the elusive work of trendy artists, copied, pinned and taped onto walls; replicas of the even more famous as wild installations; and even art made by totally fictitious artists – Jef Bourgeau and his Museum of New Art have been reinventing the alternative space when nonprofit galleries and their conventional counterparts are becoming more and more alike.

In the process, this renegade artist is unsettling our ideas about art and the apparatus keeping it afloat. The shows here question our fetishization of the art object and the myth of the artist as “autonomous, self-defining, and morally superior,” not to mention the concepts of originality, ownership, value, and influence.

Are Bourgeau’s recreations and reproductions sincere homage, or, as one gallery director put it, a slap in the face? His nonprofit space poses more questions than it answers. But, moving into its second decade, it has made one thing certain: By challenging our assumptions about art and its relationship to both its audience and the market, it has brought the alternative space back to the fringe.

- adapted from Deidre Stein Greben’s 25 Trendsetters - ARTnews, September 2007