'Posthumous Promotions' Serves Artists Not Expecting Recognition While Alive

Pictured: Curtchie channeling Eddie Murphy.

Have a feeling that your art could be famous, but that you're just missing that crucial element of someone shooting you in the face? A revolutionary new talent agency could be the answer.

California-based "Posthumous Promotions, Inc." opened its doors last week, offering to help with the promotion of art, literature and other mediums of artists who consider themselves too advanced to become famous while alive. The company will specialize in sentimentalizing the public over hopefully-soon-to-be-dead geniuses, and expects to tap into the Jim Morrison school of "Dead is Cool" fad while it is still a hot market.

"We want the Kafkas, the Van Goughs, and Mozarts of the world to feel that 'making it' in life is not necessarily the most important thing, nor is leaving their after-death fame to chance their only option," said Dimitri Rubenswold, CEO of PPI. "We want our clients to know that while they may be dying in the abject poverty of an artist never having tasted the sweet wine of success in this life -- particularly after paying our fees -- we'll be in their corner, fighting to weave their name into the fabric of popular or even classical culture."

Though clients are encouraged to continue attempting to establish a respectable yet small-time name for themselves as living residents of earth, many are certain of their fate as unrecognized talents. One of PPI's first clients is Brock Battaglia, painter from New York's lower east side.

"At first I had established a presence in the community with my talent of making self-portraits out of the stool samples of my friends and relatives," said Battaglia, "but the stercoraceous style is so 1990's, and I had to come up with something else. My medium now is the discarded biohazardous material from hospitals, including aborted and stillborn fetuses, which I use in a number of ways and in various arrangements. I can only assume that art like this is decades away from being ready for mass-consumption, medically and artistically speaking."

Battaglia praised his new agents, saying, "Thank God PPI came around to make sure that my masterpiece 'The Hypodermic Fugue' will not only be remembered after I'm gone, but will be recognized by writers and critics everywhere as an unheeded harbinger of warning and caution."

"I shelled out for the package that guarantees me mention in freshman-level general art courses at no less than ten U.S. colleges," said Berkeley, CA native Poopicious, straining to expel his bowels over a large canvas positioned beneath his anus. "This shit is going to be hot stuff in 45 years."

While open to anyone who subsists below the poverty level and shows talent far too advanced for anyone to understand right now, the preferred customer of PPI are those who do not expect to live much past their 27th birthday. Said Rubenswold's partner Marcia Oster: "Ideally, we'd give fame and due recognition to something like John Kennedy Toole's 'Confederacy of Dunces' that could have easily been lost to the ages, but an occasional 'Notorious BIG – Duets: The Final Chapter' may be necessary to keep the company afloat until a truly great talent drops dead."

"This Century's 'Candide' may have been written already for all we know," Rubenswold added, "but until, say, 20 years go by and the public is finally ready for it, it is futile to publish an important document about these cruel times that can be grasped only in hindsight. That's where we come in."

Rubenswold, having abandoned a failed project to help bring fame and income to still-living artists, does not expect to see a return on his investment for some time. Despite the challenges, he remains optimistic and says, "the turnover rate is especially high in the creative community, given the things that some of these people do to inspire the muse." Unflinching in his faith in the talent of soon-to-be-dead geniuses, he holds out hope for a bright, profound talent with an extensive and un-sold catalogue to come his way and perish before "his time".

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