UPDATED: Boca Raton art museum’s ‘Creature Features’ extended, but time’s running out to catch ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ conspiracies & magic exhibit

UPDATED April 22, 2024: Don’t call this fake news, but Tony Oursler’s “Creature Features” gallery, a centerpiece of the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s “Smoke & Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art” exhibition, has just been extended through Oct. 13. “Smoke & Mirrors,” meanwhile, will close as originally planned on May 12.

Call them conspiracy theories, alternative facts or disinformation, but the theme of the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s new blockbuster exhibition is the almighty lie.

“Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art,” running Nov. 18 through May 12, takes on historical myths that manage by magic or illusion to dupe the public. Featuring the works of 30 contemporary artists, the years-in-the-making show is aptly timed for the present, museum curator Kathy Goncharov says.

Just consider the rolling carnival of recent tech breakthroughs like ChatGPT, facial-recognition software and AI deepfakes, which seem at first like wild and mysterious magic, producing shock and awe for users who don’t quite grasp the inner workings, she says.

“It’s easy to believe in magic,” Goncharov says. “It’s comforting sometimes. Since COVID, there’s been a spike in spiritualism TV shows, a spike in people who believe in mysticism, and it brings to mind all the 1920s artists who practiced psychic mysticism after the 1920 Spanish flu killed a lot of people.

“How can you believe that stuff? Well, I think this show will make you realize you can convince people of anything, and that maybe the message is, ‘Don’t be so gullible.’ ”

There’s arguably no greater fib than the one lying in the museum’s biggest gallery.

At 10 feet, 4 inches tall and dubbed “The Cardiff Giant,” artist Tony Oursler’s resin sculpture is a replica of one of history’s most elaborate hoaxes: a grotesque behemoth straight from the Bible. It riffs on a “giant” invented in 1868 by George Hull, a cigar maker and avowed atheist who, during a business trip, debated a revivalist preacher’s literal reading of a Bible passage about giants who once walked the Earth. As a ruse — and to prove a point — Hull invented his own.

First, he had a 5-ton slab or gypsum carved into a petrified, naked man lying on his back with a mysterious smile. Then, he sealed the fake archeological wonder inside an iron coffin and buried it in the Cardiff, N.Y., backyard of his relative, a farmer named William “Stub” Newell. A year later, on Hull’s orders, Newell ordered crews to dig a well on the property — and they accidentally-on-purpose unearthed the giant.

Yes, this thing actually hoodwinked Americans. “A New Wonder,” declared the front page of the Syracuse Daily Standard newspaper. One Syracuse science lecturer thought the fake giant was a statue carved by French Jesuits centuries earlier. In the first week alone, about 2,500 people reportedly stopped by to see it; Newell set up a tent and charged 50-cent admission. Even circus showman P.T. Barnum infamously tried to buy it and was, of course, rebuffed.

Oursler, with his colossal tribute, doubles down on the 155-year-old hoax: Projected on his statue’s translucent front, which is lying on its back, are a cavalcade of YouTube clips showing UFOs and other conspiracy theories. This artwork is one of dozens of “Smoke & Mirrors” sculptures, video installations, paintings, prints and posters that fill the entire ground floor of the museum, each sharing one thing in common: They tackle the confusion between illusion, belief and reality with tongue-in-cheek spirit.

Oursler, a New York video artist who’s made music videos for David Bowie and Foo Fighters, has devoted his entire career to hoaxes, conspiracy theories and alternative facts that have duped human beings for centuries. Along with The Cardiff Giant, his “Creature Features” gallery — a room the museum commissioned for this show — carries deadpan video tributes to the Cottingley Fairies, the Flatwoods Monster, mermaids, Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle and Mina “Margery” Crandon, a 1920s psychic who claimed she could channel her dead brother.

“It’s not that I’m fascinated by hoaxes,” Oursler says. “I’m fascinated by people struggling to transcend the banality of daily life, and the belief systems that drive it. On the other side are magicians and charlatans and madmen who exploit it with UFOs and moon hoaxes.”

Speaking of moon hoaxes, Goncharov’s new installation “In Event of Moon Disaster” is devoted to NASA and its Apollo 11 moon landing. The piece, a traveling project first created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to warn the public about the dangers of deepfake technology, is named after a real-life, notoriously chilling speech that President Richard Nixon would have read if astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins failed to land Apollo 11 on the moon.

The video, which depicts a deepfaked Nixon reading the contingency speech, plays on an old-fashioned TV inside a circa-1969 South Florida living room, complete with tacky palm-tree wallpaper and rotary telephones. Goncharov decorated the room using antique furniture she bought from OddBalls Nifty Thrift in Oakland Park, she says with a laugh.

“I wanted to create an old TV room in Florida, as if you were watching Nixon’s speech live,” she says. “I’m even putting in fake newspapers about how Apollo failed.”

Goncharov says her original inspiration for “Smoke & Mirrors” was her friend, professional magician and late Plantation resident James “The Amazing” Randi, a skeptical crusader who for 40 years went on the warpath against spoon-bending mentalists and mystics who claimed they could channel 1,000-year-old deities. (Randi died in October 2020 at age 92.)

The first gallery that museumgoers encounter chronicles Randi’s legacy, with historical photos showing the 32 times he appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” his public feud with Uri Geller — and the time he “decapitated” Alice Cooper’s head at a rock concert with a prop guillotine.

In another alcove of the museum is a black-box theater shrouded in stage curtains, the mysterious backdrop for another commissioned piece called “Jeanette Andrews: magi.CIA.n.” Here Andrews, a performance artist, riffs on the declassified CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception — a Cold War-era spycraft manual written by magicians — by performing tricks from the book.

“It’s very humorous,” Goncharov says. “There’s a video of her doing magic, but then there’s another video of her performing the same tricks but as a CIA spy.”

Other works include pieces by Gavin Turk and Stephen Berkman, both about the same subject: The Mechanical Turk, a fantastical device that traveled the globe in the late 1700s as the world’s first robotic chess-playing machine. Of course, it was a hoax.

“The thing traveled the world and even beat Benjamin Franklin in a match,” Goncharov says. “In reality, it was just a professional chess player hiding in a wooden box.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Smoke and Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art”

WHEN: Through Sunday, May 12, 2024

WHERE: Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real

COST: $12-$16, free for children under 15

INFORMATION: 561-392-2500; BocaMuseum.org