A friend at U. Mass, Amherst tells this story: A couple of painters in the master's program for Fine Arts were doing well until they got sucked into Second Life. Rather than return to painting, they came up with a brilliant idea: Submit their Second Life gaming as their art! You know: blah blah Baudrillard's simulacrum mwah mwah. It might've worked, except one of the profs went SL-diving himself and came up with example after example of far more impressive simulacra whipped up by 14-year-olds in Nebraska. The hapless students' efforts, which largely consisted of pretending to be gay and annoying other characters, wasn't recognized as the scholarly performance art for which they'd hoped to win a sheepskin.

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