On November 5, election night in the US, I didn’t commune at Barbara Gladstone Gallery with Ariana Reines; nor at Earth with Dean Kissick; and not at Sovereign House with Milady and Polymarket. Nothing on the spectrum of New York culture, from grandly poetic to prettily reactionary, matched my mood of doomy resolve. Instead, I worked all day at a polling place in Bed Stuy. I went to bed without watching the returns – probably the least I’ve looked at my phone in months – and read a few pages of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1991). There, in 1985’s New York, in characters living through the height of the AIDS crisis and the depths of President Reagan’s smiling cruelty, I recognized my anger. And my depression: such a magnificent work of literature, and yet these same enemies keep getting in power.
Has a lack of compelling images damned the liberal order? Eight years of resistance culture didn’t stop Trump. Not Charli XCX calling Kamala Harris brat, not joyless children’s books like Woke Baby, not Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet titled America (2016). Over 100,000 people queued up on the Guggenheim’s inhospitable ramp to use the latter latrine in the first days of Trump’s first term. (Then it went to London and was promptly ganked – whereabouts unknown.) None of these metaphors have stymied the inexorable enshittification of life in Western democracies, or stopped our bombs from falling elsewhere. What can culture do? Clearly not affect politics directly or change people’s minds. Maybe it can describe the world’s hollowness. Maybe it can channel belief.
Meanwhile, rapaciousness is winning. The other night at the bar, I was doomscrolling a feed of AI-generated videos of Gordon Ramsay spewing lettuce and toilets being crushed by a giant piston, mixed with actual product demos of robotics from Elon Musk and defense contractors. The look on my face was enough for the stranger two stools down to buy me a shot. “It’s gonna be ok,” he said. I showed him my screen: a picture of Kanye West as some kind of Global South diamond miner. “I don’t think it is,” I said.
Each dollop of uncanny slopdiminishes the planet’s livability. We’ll have lethal autonomous robots soon enough, but meanwhile we’ll have burned through all our fresh water and much dirty energy to feed the server farms behind crypto and AI, fueling digital inequality alongside videos of cinnamon rolls turning into wriggling puppies.
Beeple, you are what you eat, Instagram daily, 18 Nov, 2024
Established culture can’t match the zeal of crypto evangelists and accelerationists and shitposters. To borrow a phrase from former artist Daniel Keller, they have the “sloptimism.”
On November 20th, a crypto magnate paid $6.2 million at Sotheby’s for Maurizio Cattelan’s conceptual duct-taped banana, Comedian (2019). He bragged about it on X (née Twitter), tagging SpaceX. The banana is an artwork by an artist who no longer believes in art. It was purchased for an unethical sum by someone who doesn’t really believe in money. What does this prove? That established culture can’t match the zeal of crypto evangelists and accelerationists and shitposters. To borrow a phrase from former artist Daniel Keller, they have the “sloptimism.”
If I’m honest, it felt like Trump was going to win. There Is No Alternative! said Margaret Thatcher, coining neoliberalism’s crie de coeur. Well, maybe the alternative is a more intense style of self-interest. I kept thinking about the Beeple image of a nude, child-scale Donald Trump held aloft by the podcaster Joe Rogan riding the shoulders of a hulking, striding, naked Elon Musk clutching an American flag. Credit where it’s due, Beeple’s cringy apocalypse describes the spirit of the times. Following the Sotheby’s banana sale, Beeple made an image of a dolphin-size banana taped to the table of a private jet with Trump’s motley entourage gathered ‘round, a redux of the actual photo of Don Jr., RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and the President-Elect sharing a meal from McDonalds, on high. Yeah, the moment feels redolent of the performatively crass taste and public consumption and unhealthy hazing rituals of the broligarchy.
Another recent Beeple image has the white hands of God reaching through the clouds to bestow a kawaii icon on the masses: Luce, a bug-eyed pilgrim with cloak, rosary, and staff, is the Vatican’s official mascot for the 2025 jubilee, and was unveiled in late October. This is the Pope trying to connect to today’s youth. This feels redundant, since a crude Catholic mysticism proceeds independent of the actual Church, the Vatican’s mascot being several years behind the tradcath kawaii of the brand Remilia and their Milady NFTs.
Beeple, and on the 69th day, God created shitcoins… ✨, Instagram daily, 29 Oct, 2024
Back in March, Daniel Keller “tokenized” a painting by the beleaguered market casualty Oscar Murillo after it failed to sell at Sotheby’s – and lately, with support from Milady fans, the shitcoin has surged. Remilia’s controversial, pseudonymous cofounder Charlotte Fang wrote at the time that a lack of real belief in art doomed Murillo’s generation to soulless wandering, beholden to collectors’ fickle attention. Remilia’s answer is Milady, or tokenized digital art in general. In this way, they say, art can find its way back to truth, bypassing the old guard’s creaking gates.
Their election watch party, incidentally, was sponsored by an online betting company that got press for offering odds on Trump’s reelection and now lets you gamble on an “Israel x Hezbollah ceasefire” or Bitcoin hitting $100k. That’s a win-win for someone, I guess. I can’t shake the evidence, though, that the liberatory promises of blockchain, of tech in general, willfully overlook the downsides of climate catastrophe and autocracy.
What NFTs, Crypto, Tesla, Trump, and Art all share is this: the transfiguration of belief into clout. And clout, perchance, into power. There’s wild potential for hyperstition as well as fuckery. In the world of Angels in America, God and the angels are as fickle and dysfunctional as we are. God got bored and wandered off and the angels, getting desperate, came to America. Today, in the absence of compassionate leaders, let alone God, people are trying to make their own deities, angels, demons, the whole pageant. So far all we’ve made are idols. My cringy hope is that our grasp of reality’s pliancy can be grounded – not in heaven, but on earth. There is no art. I love you.
Miladys photoshopped into a still of Kanye West’s infamous appearance on InfoWars