For medical research, sure. He submitted fake articles to publications, he didn't perform medical experiments on the reviewers.
Behavioral research too (which this certainly is). Anything involving humans, pretty much.
If not, the answer is no, though you can read the federal regulations yourself to prove me wrong:
https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=83cd09e1c0...
Boghossian is an employee of Portland State, an institution which almost certainly receives grant funding from the federal government for research. Some minute portion of his salary/office/supplies/etc. are paid for by said federal research grant money.
Regardless, the regulations apply to the entire institution and therefore any faculty members of said institution.
For a student project, I once did a user study with a purely informational app. I needed to get approval and have each participant sign a form that I had adequately informed them about the possible dangers of the experiment (none) and that their data would remain confidential and so on.
The effort seems ridiculous when it's obvious that there's no danger, but the whole point of having a review process is to make sure that someone checks.
If you want to, say, explode a simulated bomb in a TSA screening area to call attention to the waste of lives inherent in the checkpoints...yes, you'd need an IRB sign off, but probably that would be the least of your problems.
1) Qualifies as research, and
2) Is directly or indirectly funded by a federal research grant
then yes, it would.
I doubt much performance art qualifies, though.
As the author stated, the goal was to:
> "to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research"
"study" being the operative word, there.