Don't Forget to Die

We live in a dark age. In two hundred years, all our pigment photographs will be faded away, all our harddrives will be corrupted; and who even knows if our eighth-great-grandchildren will have the hardware to read the M-discs, burnt into stone, that will survive? Maybe between now and then, a way to preserve our pigments will be discovered. Maybe copies of copies will survive. But for the most part, this era will be lost to time. Our culture is decadent. It's all consumption and no production. Supposed producers are merely consumers of social media platforms. Seemingly nobody realises that the audience is the medium of these digital Gesamtkunst artists like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. And as the fifth estate plays demagogue and king-maker, the people just consume like they'll live forever. So my work is decadent. Composed in darkness. Sensuous materials. Tenuous postures. Things that rot. Things that break. Things that must be conserved if we value our inheritance and patrimony. Nobody gets it. And that's fine. Let them consume the pretty pictures and click and tap away their days in sloth. If I'm lucky, one of these works will survive beyond our era and tell an history whose siblings the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys have smothered in the crib. And I know that luck favours the prepared; if art has been degraded into propaganda, as it seems to have been, then I shall propagate virtue, as an antidote to the demoralisation of postmodernism. Don't forget to die.