Please let me assassinate you, Mr. Baudrillard...pretty please? It would be such a wonderfully ironic little spectacle. The media would be all over it. Come on, just this once?

I have come to realize that I am (like everyone) an embodiment of the hopeless paradox of contemporary life. I am an artist in a world in which art is dead. Do you know what that means? Art is really dead, and has been for years. Creativity and beauty exist now as meaningless self-parodies; sponaneity and the individual struggle have ben reduced to mere cliches. Everywhere: only objects and the valueless relations between them. Talking is worthless: everything that I could think of saying has already been said a thousand times. There is nothing more to paint, write, or sing. Even Warhol looks pathetically noble now. What can be done? Revolution?! Ha!!! Your romantic sceneist revolt is no more revolutionary than a fashion magazine, and will always be so - you objectify yourselves, you place yourself into a comfortable place in the asshole of the simulation, while attempting to stand against the system of objects that give your life its purpose. There is no real hope for change, because hope implies a future - the future has already been rehearsed, and therefore will never be played out. Give it a few more years and we'll be in Ancient Rome again.

Distaste for everything fills me. Bland cynicism rules me. The postmodern condition has swallowed me up. I feel alien to everything, even the words "I love you" - why, they only signify a love for language, for objects! There is no point in even caring. To be even more apathetic than the simulation itself is the only way to really revolt.

But something deep down tells me that I do care. I really do.

(.......says the glowing, faceless computer screen.)

But in the mid 1950s, the struggle of the AEists concluded. The spectacle had (supposedly) triumphed. AE was dead, and Pop Art stood to take its place. No longer did artists seek to express themselves - there was no longer any "self" to express! The human had been overcome by the commodity, the self by the spectacle. And so the Pop Artists took up their canvasses in mimicry of the glory of the conquering spectacle. Their art was shallow, empty, only concieved to be hung in bourgeois galleries, for profit and fame - they knew this and accepted it; it was their intention. Smugly, cynically (though not completely so), and with a hidden air of complete defeat and depression, Warhol, Lichtenstein and their cronies launched a new art, an art free from all vestiges of humanity, an art as "transient, mass-produced, witty, sexy, gimicky, and glamorous as the new generation" (Richard Hamilton). It mirrored the spectacle in all ways: demanding nothing from its viewers but their money, pop art glorified colorful images repeated over and over without any concern to the expression of anything "within." Surface had overcome meaning. The spectacle had triumphed completely, and the pop artists were merely bowing down to its great and glamorous conquest.

MODERNISM            POSTMODERNISM                      MY BELIEFS

Heirarchy                     Anarchy                                    Anarchy

Technology                   Cyberspace/Cybernetics            Nature

Order                           Chaos                                      Interconnectedness

Progress                       Flux                                          Balance

Truth                            Subjectivity                              Subjectivity

Functionality                 Fragmentation                          Mutuality

Meaning                       Meaninglessness                      Value

Reality                          Hyperreality                              Reality

Objectivity                    Subjectivity                              Subjectivity

Honesty/integrity            Play/parody                             Openness

Serious                           Sardonic                                  Honest

Freedom                      -                                               Love

Advancement                 Cyclicality                             Immediacy                  

Struggle                        Meaningless disorder               Compassion

Science                        Quantum theory                       Awe

Narrative                      Hypertext/hybrid text               Narrative

Free will                       Cultural behaviorism                  Free will

High art                        Popular culture                       Individualist expression

Production                    Reproduction                           Alienation

Factory                        Advertisement                          Slaughterhouse

Marx                            Baudrillard                               -

Descartes                     Whitehead                               -

Joyce                           Pynchon                                  Hesse

Early Wittgenstein         Derrida                                    Zerzan

Freud                           (i don't know)                          Fromm

See if you can fill this out with your beliefs! Or if you can add some more topics to the list.

Every day the end of the age looms nearer. How will the change come? As the earth is plundered to the last for resources of every kind, as colossal amounts of waste poison every aspect of the ecosystem, as human relationships become ever more hideously distorted and alienated, as the misery of society imposes itself more intensely on every level, as billions starve and die under a sun that grows more toxic every day—- the downfall of the All-of-This draws, inevitably, closer and closer.

None of this will stand. It must past. The sun will not set many more times over the barren city streets of capital’s empire. The great towers of humankind’s arrogance and alienation cannot stand much longer in the fading light. But no matter what we do, no matter what course of action humanity takes, the sun will one day rise over a healed world. Morning will come again—- it must. In the rubble of the empires flowers will grow in the quiet peace of slow rejuvenation.

And so the question is posed—- will humanity be there on that morning, joyful in the calm sunlight, holding each other close and breathing deeply the fresh air of life’s rebirth? Or will we pass into the shadows of time, with only our bones and ruins left to bear tribute to who we were? Will we save our world and everything good about it—- or will we perish along with our machines?

This is the challenge that now rings from every facet of the moment. This is the challenge that echoes between every tree and flower, every factory and cubicle, every suburb and slum, every schoolyard and prison, every ocean and river, every slaughterhouse and battleground, every soul in this wonderful, terrible existence.

How will this all end? Will we destroy ourselves in the great fire wrought by our hands, or will we cast aside our fears, and in the depths of the crisis, reclaim the beauty, freedom, passion, and love inherent in who we really are? Will we be the light before the morning, moving and relating and freeing until the structures have collapsed—- or will we succumb to the isolation that has plagued us all these years?

There is only one answer to these questions: Those who watch to see what comes next never affect what comes next.