Dead Peasant by Lisa Baldissera

Drawing on her decades of navigating the art world, Lisa Baldissera weaves writing conventions from the visual arts with the imaginative possibilities of magic realism and autofiction in this groundbreaking collection of short fiction.

The stories in Dead Peasant reveal the fraught circumstances and neglected emotions of an underclass who toil below the glossy economies of the international high-art world, including artists and art workers. Here, characters from across centuries are haunted by war, floods, and their parental histories. An auction-house worker vomits blueberries on an art-collecting oligarch. An aspiring curator converses with Lindsay Lohan about an exhibition of horse paintings before tragedy strikes. An archivist studies planet Earth from space, reflecting on tax havens and the embattled ecology.

Through these startling, affective, incisive, and fun stories, Baldissera chronicles the unique challenges of the art world and the damage it inflicts on those struggling to get by. Like the eviscerative work of Rachel Cusk and the dark humour of Miranda July, she satirizes the neoliberal double-speak of the ‘creative economy’ and its punyfiying forces, to ask, what is it, truly, that art can do now?