Amalia Ulman is probably best known for Excellences and Perfections, a year-long Instagram performance that led many to believe she was an L.A. sugar baby, her grid replete with fussy cocktails, half-baked inspirational quotes, an addled downward spiral, and some cosmetic surgery. When it was uncovered as such, the routine incensed her new followers and landed her on Forbes’ 2016 Top 30 Under 30 list, alongside people like Petra Cortright, Lauren Conrad, and Eckhaus Latta. What most may not know is that her placement on this list—by judges Sarah Jessica Parker, Sophia Amoruso (coiner of the term #GIRLBOSS), and home décor e-commerce figure Alison Pincus—along with a profusion of accolades from art and culture mags about her so-called “hoax,” later became the fodder her tattoo-artist father used to frame her out of a home.
As Ulman explains in (2020), a PowerPoint presentation commissioned by the Tate Modern, when she was a child she was responsible for delivering her family’s cash rent payments to their landlords. For whatever reason, these childless owners of multiple properties in Gijón—the coastal town in Spain that the artist called home after emigrating from Argentina—bequeathed the apartment that her family was living in to , specifically, making her a property owner at age ten. In a dark turn, years later, her father took her to court, wielding all his daughter’s then-recent press as proof that she was, on one hand, a famous, financially secure artist, and on the other, an untrustworthy person, demonstrably comfortable with leading people on. He won,
