The art of failure: in recent years, Michael Smith and Joshua White have created a series of highly detailed installations that satirize society in general and the art world in particular. At the heart of their work is the Everyman-as-loser persona of "Mike."

Once upon a time, hidden somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, was an artists' colony named QuinQuag. It started out as the evening salon of Isabelle Nash, an old-money socialite who liked to entertain artist friends in her country mansion. As she continued to invite back the ones who, in her words, "impressed or amused," the idea of starting a colony developed. A parcel of land on the Nash estate was rented to the colony--named in honor of the founder's 50th birthday ("quinquagesimal" refers to a period of 50 days)--for $1 a year. Nash thought that QuinQuag should be self-supporting, however, or at least appear that way, so the artists began making hand-painted tries. Not many sold. The residents then turned to manufacturing rocking chairs, which caught on in the early 1960s, largely thanks to a rumor that Jackie Kennedy had bought one for JFK. Profits poured in, until the assassination. The "JFK" rocker was followed by a bright yellow "Pop Art" model. Later came a rocker designed by Halston. Both were flops.

Time passed. The QuinQuagians grew older. Isabelle Nash died and the estate changed hands. The new owner, an entrepreneur named Mike Smith, planned to use the property as a conference center catering to dot-com millionaires. One day, his fiancee, a performance and "movement" artist, was walking around the estate when she came across QuinQuag. The colony's lease was expiring, but she persuaded her boyfriend to incorporate the artists and their tile inventory, which was becoming valuable, into what Smith was calling a "Wellness Retreat." The entrepreneur also wanted to build on the QuinQuag site, but he needed capital for his expanded vision--a jumble of New Age therapy, arts and crafts movement and networking concepts. To this end, he assembled a traveling promotional display he called The QuinQuag Arts and Wellness Centre Touring Exhibition: Artistic and Personal Growth in the Catskills Region.

As the reader may have guessed, this story is a fiction, but certain truths are revealed in its telling: artists are dreamers and dupes, and so are venture capitalists; real estate rules. The inventors of QuinQuag are artists Michael Smith and Joshua White, who told their story in an installation that has been seen over the past year in New York, San Francisco and London.

At Christine Burgin Gallery in New York, where I saw the installation last fall, a large banner hung outside the door of the gallery, announcing the show with some rather feeble graphics. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors discovered a video and what appeared to be a combination sales-promotion display and small-town museum. The video offered an episode from what purported to be a French documentary television series titled Millennium Visions. It opens with a tinny, big-beat musical theme. A bearded narrator introduces (in English translation voice-over) a series of still images from the colony's history: community get-togethers and faded photos of Isabelle Nash when young, then in old age, peeking out from the ivy. Next come clips of interviews with reminiscing QuinQuagians. The gentle, older artists seem as willing to be infantilized by this looming speculative enterprise as they once were by Nash's largesse.

As the documentary continues, we meet Mike Smith (played by Michael Smith), a smug salesman, who is well dressed but wears a cheap, flashy wristwatch. "I look out to the horizon and I see the future," he proclaims. His "design team" is at work on what he calls the "outernet campus" of the retreat, and his fiancee, now VP in charge of artistic development, demonstrates some dance movements and defines QuinQuag's goal: "empower people to find solutions for their creative and personal lifestyles." The narrator sums up the project with the dubious claim that "dreams of the future are frequently built on failed dreams of the past."

Near the video monitor was a low-budget architectural model of the revamped QuinQuag. Its centerpiece was a wire globe--part Unisphere and part geodesic dome--that suggested a collaboration between Donald Trump and Buckminster Fuller. Wooden toy blocks labeled "conference hall," "tramway stop," etc., stood in for other structures. Nearby, the "donor tree," a polished wooden plaque shingled with mostly empty brass nameplates, beckoned toward future corporate sponsorship. Rotating slowly on a dais at the rear of the gallery was a full-size JFK rocker, with a large photo of Kennedy hanging on the wall behind. Next to the photo was a smaller model of the Halston rocker, a kind of splayed chair with a narrow back that looked terribly uncomfortable.

A group of QuinQuag tiles, painted amateurishly in styles ranging from Picassoid to New Image, were mounted in grid formation on the west wall. Across from the tiles were bulletin boards displaying the history of the colony with placards, old pictures and, in a withering satire of artist-colony customs, an enshrined set of car keys signifying the QuinQuag ritual of driving Isabelle home at the end of the evening. The perfect pitch of the satire is even more impressive when one learns that neither Smith nor White has ever been to an artists' colony.