Whatever happened to Oliver Braid?
Artist, educator ... vigilante?
It is degree show season and, according to the showcase site, 116 fine art students graduated in Glasgow alone. Of these, it is estimated that around 9% will be working as artists in fifteen months’ time, with 3% earning over £23,000. The art world is a brutal, competitive place, but the potential reward is cultural immortality and a life of total creative freedom, so it is hardly surprising that people are willing to put the work in.
A few years ago Oliver Braid (b.1984, Birmingham, UK) was one of those fresh artists who looked like he was jostling his way to the top. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art MFA programme in 2010 and had shows at galleries like Collective (2011), The Royal Standard (2012), Intermedia/CCA (2013), Transmission (2013), Vane (2016), and appeared at the Edinburgh Art Festival with Ellie Harrison (2013). He was awarded a Creative Scotland Bursary (2014) and was an artist-in-residence at Cooper Gallery (2015). He illustrated an album cover for Loki the Scottish Rapper (AKA social commentator, Darren McGarvey) and was featured twice on the BBC.
When I first met Oliver a decade ago we skipped pleasantries and started talking about Jean Genet and the artist as criminal. This was typical. Oliver was always fizzing with ideas, consuming them like other people consume music1. He was, for instance, the first person I knew who got into object-oriented ontology. He would talk about resistentialism, chaos magick, awkwardness, antagonism, Kantian ethics, agape in Plato's dialogues, and much more. These philosophical ideas were all the more interesting because the work he was producing was so engaging. Here, for example, is his Sincerity Shoe exhibition, which was accompanied by presentations on Hakim Bey, Quentin Crisp, and Lauryn Hill — all provoked by an embroidered, sculpted trainer.
Visually, Oliver’s art was colourful, maximalist, and beautifully crafted. Conceptually, the work centred on friendship, the search for love, sociopathy, and obsession—universal themes presented in a way that resisted easy commodification.
In 2017, he made an installation piece called Trustafarian Vanity Project, which included a “Diogenesian teleidoscope, a Tuatarina hatching pod, and an old mechanics.” And then … nothing. Oliver put his blog on hiatus and apparently stopped making art. As someone who had always enjoyed his work—even participating in a game of Philosophical Football he organized—the world felt a less interesting place without his input.
The Certainty of Insignificance
In 2012, inspired by Quentin Crisp and the idea of existential exuberance, Oliver delivered a presentation called The Certainty of Insignificance. His point is that if we subsume our egos into craft for craft’s sake then the work we produce will be pure and enjoyable, rather than distorted by status anxiety. It is an intriguing thought, one that he discussed many times, perhaps in most detail at Bad Vibes Club in London, but is it true?
When I first heard about the Certainty of Insignificance it resonated with my own nihilistic tendencies. Life, art, everything—none of it is meaningful in a universe that will eventually collapse into entropic nothingness. Oliver talked about the futility of being attached to outcomes and how, according to Crisp, living in the future destroyed happiness. Only through living in the moment can we be truly free.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if it was like the film in Infinite Jest2, whose viewers lose all interest in life. Some ideas motivate people to do amazing things, others kill their desire entirely. For Oliver, the line of thought seems to have been a mind killer or at least an art killer. He talked about it being like Pascal's Wager, but Pascal's Wager has a positive pay-off which is getting into heaven whereas the Certainty of Insignificance seemed to lead to sitting around smoking weed. Also, it’s not true that meaning only occurs “in the grand scheme of things” (e.g. artistic immortality), there are many ways of acting meaningfully: from a kind gesture to campaigning for justice to nudge the world in the ‘right’ direction.
Well, it turned out that Oliver hadn’t stopped doing things. He had simply withdrawn from the toxic status competition of the art world. He was working as an educator in Glasgow Museums and had become a member of an activist collective, just not the kind of collective that wins the Turner Prize.
Wolf Pack Hunters UK
Claire Bishop’s book Artificial Hells (2012) identified the cultural trend of public bodies using arts funding as a way of fixing the problems caused by neoliberalism. Indeed, these days, no art piece is complete without a participatory workshop with the community.
Back in 2013, Oliver resisted these moves and lost a commission to make a mural for Book Week Scotland because of his ironic suggestion for a workshop where the locals would kill the dolphins he believed were haunting the town.
His next, satirical attempt at public engagement was to get a paedophile hunter to come up to Scotland to do a ‘sting’ (ie catch a sex offender). If you haven’t seen one of these videos before, the basic premise is always the same:
the vigilantes set up ‘decoys’, fictional profiles of children online;
paedophiles start talking to these ‘children’ and become sexually suggestive;
the paedophile suggests meeting up only to find live-streaming ‘hunters’ who, once they are happy that it is the right person, call the police;
finally, vigilantes are generally very careful to ensure that the law is followed and hand over evidence to the police to get a conviction.
Oliver would have these stings live-streaming in the background whilst sewing or drawing. Watching them, you can see how they might become addictive. The confrontation between a vigilante and a person whose life is falling apart due to acting on their darkest desires is undeniably powerful.
Some of these videos get hundreds of thousands of views, which is rather more than most art world productions, though they are barely mentioned in the mainstream.3 The groups are popular on Facebook, it is however not the kind of popularity that can ever be legitimised in the mainstream without undermining the justice system.
Oliver helped start Wolf Pack Hunters UK and became one of the leaders after the rest of the team were banned from stings for taking part in a violent altercation with an online troll. The interview with James English shows some of the ethical issues the team encounters. It is a bizarre underworld for people used to the bourgeois niceties of the art world and even now I find it hard to reconcile these activities with Oliver’s previous career.
What next?
At a time when all the new graduates are fighting it out for attention, my mind turned to Oliver and how much I miss his artwork. I wanted to know why he had stopped making art. Was it a Gustav Metzger-style art strike or was he just burnt out?
Anyone who wants to attract public attention is likely damaged in some way. Maybe they were, like Oliver, bullied at school and the desire for external validation stuck with them. Maybe it is better to stay out of the art world and be at peace. But, selfishly, I hope Oliver can emerge from his artistic exile—perhaps with the book he is working on—and help make the world a more fun place.
Listen to him tell his story in the podcast we recorded:
Oliver also consumed a lot of music, turning me on to Die Antwoord.
I recall Oliver carrying around that enormous book around ten years ago.
There was, however, a rare appearance of Wolf Pack Hunters UK in the Guardian.
Such a great piece Neil! Thanks for taking time to tell Oliver's story. I wish he would get on and finish his book!