Chapotraphouse

I googled Scott Bruce. I found an 27 year-old article where he said he's an artist on the bleeding edge and he sculpts public consciousness on the World Wide Web. Why? Because he collected cereal boxes and lunch boxes and he wrote about them. I did not make any of that up.

CREATING CULTURE OF CEREAL BOXES IS HALF THE FUN FOR SCOTT BRUCE

October 13, 1998

It is all a great, unfolding show.

Bruce, 43, a fast-thinking, fast-talking, creative dervish who lives in Cambridge, Mass., knows the value of media but doesn’t really seem to enjoy pandering to its many weird appetites. He says it makes him sweat, hyperventilate and obsess about how well he is doing.

But he has to do it because it’s all part of the greater game.

“I see myself as an artist, an artist whose medium is not conventional formats. I am not a painter or a sculptor. But I am genuinely creative and few people understand that. My tools are network television and print and the World Wide Web. I sculpt public consciousness.

“I see myself as an artist with a particular nervous system that, for better or worse, lends itself to this kind of public display. . . . Obviously I am driven by some need to be out front, and I certainly am on the bleeding edge. On the other hand, you can be too far out in front of your flock.”

It is not always a happy place to be, he says. “You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows in their back.”

Sounds a tad overwrought, doesn’t it?

Yes. But Bruce is serious.

The longer he talks, the more frustrated he becomes about the fact that no one seems to recognize him as an artist. They think he is a smart collector and great self-promoter who happens to like cereal boxes rather a lot. He doesn’t like being defined as a collector.

For him, that’s like looking at a portrait and telling the artist that he has put a nice frame around it...

I couldn't find anything more recent.