Untitled (Nicole)

This New York Times obituary is pitch-perfect in every way except for one: Nicole Kidman is still very much alive. McEwen made his name forging death announcements for celebrities, politicians, and art-world peers, none of whom had actually died. Anticipating today’s rhetoric of "fake news" by more than a decade, McEwen follows tabloid tales to their logical extreme, mining the discrepancy between true and invented stories. A skilled mimic, he recreates not only the graphic appearance of the obituary page—digitally formatted, then photocopied, enlarged, and scanned, before finally being printed as a photograph—but also the dry, expository language of the form, which he learned firsthand; before becoming an artist, McEwen wrote real obituaries for London’s Daily Telegraph.