The First Statement of Z Collective::Art Crimes for the 21st Century
October 8th, 2011
New York City

In the course of the past decade we have been witnessing the decadence of American art, culture and society. Its turn to unrestrained greed, its corruption, its attempted enslavement of our minds with an ever vanishing goal of more useless
products, ideas that serve only to uphold the status quo like a rotting corpse.

The official art and cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, esthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring - a regurgitated fare of outdated ideas and modes of existence which we are constantly force fed to the point of believing we like it.

Even the seemingly worthwhile works, those that lay claim to high moral and esthetic standards and have been accepted as such by critics and the public alike, reveal their decay. The very slickness of their execution and presentation have become a perversion covering the falsity of their themes, their lack of sensibility, style and substance.

Our rebellion against the old, the official, the corrupt and the pretentious is primarily an ethical one. We are concerned with humanity and what is happening to us. We are not an esthetic school that constricts the artist within a set of dead
principles. We feel we cannot trust any classical principles either in art or life.

If our ideas until now been a virtual, unconscious and sporadic manifestation, we feel the time has come to join together. There are many of us—the movement is reaching significant proportions—and we know what needs to be destroyed and what we stand for.

So we call on everyone to join us in this struggle to build the future out of the ashes of this now dying world.