The group show that transports viewers back to the months before the 2008 crash hesitates to leave the political and economic decline of the present behind—making it an art show for our times.

Like a modern One Direction for the art world, ICA bring together recent works and new commissions from Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory to create Genuine Fake Premium Economy, a show addressing the precarity that infects the art world, the economy, and all the tasteless agents in between. With no recourse to separate the artists, whose work is notably similar in approach if not necessarily in medium, the ICA build a collection of recognisable signifiers that address accessible concepts to poke fun at a culture that they are all too imbricated in. While this may create a hermetically sealed critique that allows for polemic despite itself, the show’s message is nonetheless astute, prescient, and certainly entertaining.

The burden of introductory work is borne by Jenna Bliss’ video work Eurodollars, from 2024. A suitable opening for the show, the work addresses art at the crossover with the Financial District in New York, compiling landmarks that became infamous through the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. The on-screen text may draw from pop culture, be it Obama speeches or quotes from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), but the feelings they conjure up of impending economic collapse are certainly of the present moment.

The squishing of time along rather negative, existential lines is bookended by a rather amusing interplay of the city symphony style, reminiscent of films like Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921), and the vertically-oriented, dual-channel set-up, an unavoidable similarity to the TikTok duet. One would be more inclined to focus on the top channel if, for example, the bottom were a Subway Surfers stream—a fact that propels the critique into the present.

In the main room, the system of representation seems to shift towards signifiers. Jasmine Gregory’s large Investment Piece oil paintings (both 2026) dominate the walls with Patek Phillipe’s famous catchphrase, looking over the other artworks as if to cast a similar, pompous approach to object value. One of these other artworks is another by Gregory, a sculptural work (also newly commissioned) entitled Conscious Uncoupling (Divorce), consisting of objects associated with love, piled precariously and stripped of their romantic significance by the word “DIVORCE” written on a board underneath (as well as on shot glasses designed by Gregory that can be bought from the ICA shop).

Around these works sit the pieces that create Buck Ellison’s imaginary bank Orlo & Co., manifested in three fake ads on chromogenic print and a collection of objects from the fictional Jack’s Office (all 2026). The latter work—a cabinet of frames, old coffee cups, books and an erroneous grip trainer—provides a moment of pause for viewers, as they enjoy the detail of these late capitalist artefacts and reflect on how these three artists have been able to get away with taking cheap shots at consumer goods, while doing so through the medium of objets trouvé. It isn’t like they are facilitating a resurgence in some Duchampian sensibility; you’d only need a half-day out in London to find a load of galleries doing the same thing. What gives these artists the right to take the moral high ground?

The answer is that they don’t, an answer that comes in the intentionally awkward short film True Entertainment (2023-4), Bliss’ other work in the show and the culminating piece. The film follows a gallery’s stall at an art fair in 2007, using historical hindsight as the ultimate dramatic irony while the curators and assistants talk with blind optimism about the future of the art market. Approached with the complexity of a GCSE drama piece, the characters quarrel grotesquely about status, posturing about “raw” (shit) art, all with a hint of classism. The film ties the perfect knot around a self-depricating show, but one that nonetheless provokes thought way beyond the confines of its humour.

We are both in a time where artists can stick objects together any which way and rake in thousands, and one where the economy is on the brink of collapse. The former is not causing the latter, but the art market’s apathy towards the real-world politics that catalyse economic downfall is a missed opportunity at best, and a failure at worst. On the surface, True Entertainment is exactly what it says on the tin: a pithy sitcom episode at a snooty art fair. But look a little deeper, and you see warning signs behind the irony.

This is perhaps why this playful, somewhat cynical show works so well in an art gallery—an environment that, like in True Entertainment, harbours overthinkers. Bliss, Ellison, and Gregory clearly know how to respond to their audience, with the ability to poke fun and serve up damning indictments on our time simultaneously. Even for those uppity types who believe they are more worldly than to inhabit the white walls of the art gallery, Genuine Fake Premium Economy has something important to say about the contemporary moment.

Genuine Premium Fake Economy is on display at ICA until 5th July 2026. For more information, visit their website.

Image: Jenna Bliss, True Entertainment, 2023 – 24, HD video, 31:59 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and FELIX GAUDLITZ.