Around 2000 AD, I went to a conference at Casa de Serralves, in Porto, Portugal, by then already harboring the Museum of Contemporary Art on its grounds. I can't remember the name of the speaker, I attended various events there, but the experience was forever to stick with me.
The conference subject was art currents and what we perceive them to be through the years, and at the end, the speaker told us a story to illustrate the points he had been making. To be honest, until then the damn thing was pretty boring and borderline casuistic. Here's the story.
At some point during the art wars of mid XX Century, in some place like Venice or Paris or something, a singular experiment was conducted. A group of classical art apologists was asked to step into an empty room. Inside the room, nothing but a plaster copy of a renaissance sculpture, David, I think it was, and a bunch of hammers. The door was locked behind them and a tape started to play in a loop, saying "the Greek-Roman Art is dead", over and over. After a while, the guinea pigs started to get restless and looking to opening the damn door to no avail. A few hours later, as expected by their jailers, they lost their shit and grabbed the hammers. They did not motion towards the door. They needed to destroy something. Anything. And there stood David, whom they so adored. One after another, they proceeded to destroy the statue with savage hammer blows, until it was shattered in a million pieces. As were their beliefs. The door was unlocked, and they were allowed to go free, aware of their misgivings.
The audience laughed at the story. It was a good story. To this day I have no clue if he made it up, but it was to the point. But then, out of nowhere, came the coup de grace. The speaker walked towards a table where, all the while, a turntable sat with a record on. He said, "Let me illustrate." and he placed the needle on the groove and stood back, quietly. We all listened. And for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds, there was silence, during which roughly half the audience left the hall. At the end of the four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the speaker removed the needle from the vinyl, stopped the turntable, and shook his head, saying, "Well, I am very glad the doors are unlocked and there are no hammers around." The remaining audience laughed. "That was John Cage's 4'33'' piece", he finished, "Thank you for coming and have a good night." Yes, I knew what that was and I was very amused. Until I was not. We were still in the same place those fuckers locked in a room 60 years earlier were... And guess what, we are still there now.
Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony, but so is reality. These days, we can't tell reality from fantasy anymore, fact from fiction, real from unreal... It all blurs together in a mush of dung we tend to call news. But it is not. News. Breaking News. Unprecedented News. Shocking News. Morning News. Evening News. News at Eleven. All shit. A pile of crap we are forced to get into to claw the last shreds of reality from. And it's exhausting. It's just fucking exhausting. But we have to do it. We need to grasp reality, somehow, pass it along to others. Make them see, open their eyes! Open their eyes… Why can't they see it? Did we fail to completely remove the muck from the reality we so desperately tried to wash as we got it out of the slush of shit it was embedded in? Is it... real?
I find myself looking at that reality, rescued from the deafening noise it was buried within and doubting myself. Did this happen? Am I just adding to the noise, recycling shit and selling it for more than it's worth? What the fuck am I doing, anymore. Doubt and suspicion are my everyday companions. At every turn they tap on my shoulder and go, "Look again", and as I give them a side eye they smile and just go, "Trust us. Take another look." And what do you know, half the time they are fucking right. It's not reality, it's just shit. News shit at any time of day.
How the fuck did we get here? How did we let this happen? And, please, spare me the "I didn't do it!" bulshit. Of course you did and of course WE did. The same way we allowed Trump to get elected in 2016, all of us did. Especially the "good people" who did not vote for Hillary were the ones responsible for his election the most. Just as if they voted for him. We allowed all this shit to become normal. We did not push back enough - myself included. I am not preaching here, except to the choir. I am part of the problem. We all are, especially the ones who pretend they had nothing to do with this fuckery. No. It's on them too.
We did not force change, when change was forced upon us by the relentless bombardment of "unprecedented" events that were not, of "shocking" news that were not, of fucking "alternative facts" that were not. Once and for all, there are NO alternative facts, they are either facts or fiction or outright lies. So please STOP using that fucking expression; all you are doing is perpetuating the perception that there really is such a fucking obscenity. Just stop.
I admit I was blindsided. I trust most of you were too. I mean... Who could have honestly see where all this was going, back in 2016? Oh sure, a lot of us saw who that orange buffoon was. Hillary warned us. But not this. Not the complete and utter assassination of reality. That no one saw coming, at the time. But it soon was painfully obvious to all, except the most entrenched idealists who refuse to accept... well, reality. Such is our life, these days. An endless spiral of shit, we so desperately try to make sense of, most times unsuccessfully.
Today even as we, on Threads, were laughing our asses off to the fact that Trump dares to call his flying piece of junk "Trump Force One", here comes the news and lo and behold, Andrea Mitchell, on MSNBC, in the most balanced newscast tone she could muster announces Trump just boarded Trump Force One. No voice inflection, no sarcasm, straight up serious news casting. And yes, some still refer to this orange traitor as Mr. President, even when not in his presence. And whenever he says or does something stupid, ignorant, outrageous, provocative, or insane, they report it as BREAKING NEWS, and he gets all the oxygen in the world for hours, days, weeks.
Whenever they speak of him there is an unending slideshow of his horrendous face filling the screens, screens that are EVERYWHERE around the country and the world, millions of them set in public spaces with NO SOUND, so even if the news person speaking under the horrific slide show of Trump's face is calling him a motherfucker, which is not happening, NOBODY can hear it. All they see is TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP, everyday, everywhere, relentlessly banging against our eyes like a never ending free campaign ad that someone forgot to stop. Just fucking STOP!
Reputable explicit sarcastic sources like The Onion, or Andy Borowitz, publish outlandish material and everyone's first reaction is "You can't make this shit up!" as if it were real! "YCMTSU" is probably the most used initialism on Earth. And half the time incorrectly! It's reaching insanity levels. The inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, true from false, fact from fiction, truth from lies, is spreading like a wild fire pumped up by hurricane force winds in mid Summer. And we are trying our best to survive it, the fire, but it's hard as hell.
