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We go down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos to find that a recent controversy points to much bigger issues about American culture.

Opinion Some Believe Marina Abramovic Is the Satanic Ringleader of a Global Political Conspiracy. That’s Ludicrous. But Here’s What They Get Right We go down the rabbit hole of YouTube videos to find that a recent controversy points to much bigger issues about American culture. Promo image featuring Marina Abramovic wearing the HoloLens 2 headset Photo: Microsoft. Ben Davis April 20, 2020 Share This Article Last week, amid all the other chaos in the world, something startling happened: a Microsoft promo for the HoloLens 2 mixed-reality headset featuring performance artist Marina Abramović ignited a backlash so fierce that the Seattle software giant evidently took it offline (the company itself isn’t offering comment). I set out to trace the origin of the backlash. What I found is that, as they say, this rabbit hole goes deeper than I expected. The immediate cause of the Microsoft flame-up appears to be a blog post on Alex Jones’s Infowars site. On his broadcast, Jones referred to the HoloLens spot as “a two-and-a-half minute ad literally worshipping the head of the Church of Aleister Crowley,” referring to Abramović. The best of Artnet News in your inbox. Sign up for our daily newsletter. In any case, I find that the original Infowars post itself cites another source for authority: Out of Shadows, a one-hour-and-17-minute YouTube documentary featuring two former Hollywood stuntmen talking about their beliefs that a Satanic plot has infested the entertainment industry. That film reserves a special place in its climax for Marina Abramović as the puppet-mistress behind it all. Cover graphic for Out of Shadows (2020). Before I continue, I want to lay out a simple formula: I think you should not write about a fringe internet conspiracy theory if the number of people talking about it is smaller than the number of people who are likely to read what you write. But more than 9 million people have watched one YouTube version of Out of Shadows since it was posted online just one week ago, with a couple million more watching various mirrored versions. For comparison, Abramović’s own 2015 TED talk has accumulated 2.7 million views. The New York Times‘s “TimesTalks” interview with the artist has been seen about 400,000 times. Art21, the PBS show, has a 2012 clip about Abramović’s love of fashion that has 250,000 views. Conspiracy videos are, in effect, a major avenue by which the popular image of art is being shaped. Their ripple effects are likely to extend far beyond a Microsoft commercial. Hiding in the Shadows I won’t summarize all of Out of Shadows here, but I will offer a sense of what it has to say. Screenshot of Mike Smith in Out of Shadows. First, you are introduced to earnest, likable former Hollywood stuntman Mike Smith, who, after a tragic on-set accident in 2015, meets a physical therapist who opens his eyes to the “spirit world,” helps him find his faith, and makes him aware of the “Satanic people” controlling the film industry. Out of Shadows then follows his account of being converted by truth-seeking blogs, articles, and videos online and discovering the “very small group of people who influence all the content we watch.” You’d think that the point of centering the video on someone like Smith would be his firsthand testimony of evil doings behind the scenes in Hollywood. Not really. “I’ve seen things at parties,” is all he says. “I’ve seen artwork, I’ve seen statues, I’ve seen things in some people’s houses that seem to be mimicking occult stuff I’m reading about. So I’m just like, maybe there is something to this.” The “stuff he’s reading” is much more important than anything he’s actually seen, and most of Out of Shadows simply uses his narrative as a takeoff point for explicating a variety of theories about an alliance among government, media, and the occult. Screenshot of Brad Martin in Out of Shadows. In this, Smith is joined by another stuntman, former George Clooney double Brad Martin. At about the half-hour mark, Martin explains how he came to realize that Zoolander, a film he worked on, is actually covert CIA propaganda. “In a movie like Zoolander, when they are showing you that they are controlling Derek Zoolander’s mind through mind control, you realize that they are trying to desensitize you, and make you think that what you are watching is fiction, because it is in a comedy,” he explains. The rest of Out of Shadows is essentially a series of long digressions through the staging of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the CIA’s experimentation with LSD for interrogation purposes, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s flirtation with the Church of Satan (all of which are true enough, though tenuously connected). Screenshot showing Marina Abramović and Jared Leto in Out of Shadows. Marina Abramović first makes an appearance at the 46-minute mark, shown briefly in a picture with Jared Leto as the film points to the fact that the Suicide Squad actor lives in a Laurel Canyon mansion that was once used as a military propa...

Some Believe Marina Abramovic Is the Ringleader of a Global Conspiracy. That's Ludicrous. But Here's What They Get Right