Belatedly...

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I have a book title I’ve been thinking about for many years for a book I will probably never write (an in joke for people who knew about me in the eighties or nineties): Belatedly Announcing that Death Waits has Changed his Name to Jacob Wren


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Excerpt from Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (to end the year)

This is a passage from my book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim that a few different people have posted online over the past year. From this I gather it might be something of a reader favourite. So, to end the year, I thought I’d post it as well. (Also, if you don't already know, this book got some really nice reviews.)


*

I remember how at this moment we both stopped. We had come to a plateau and the view was particularly stunning. From here you could look over the entire forest. Within the forest there had been a great deal of fighting. And you could even spot a few craters where stray bombs had felled the trees. But the forest was still thick, those trees would grow back, and listening to the silence on the tape crackle with background wildlife I remembered us standing side by side, taking in the landscape as fully as possible. It would be nice to be back there now.
—What do you think about on your walks?
—I try not to think too much. Mostly just take in my surroundings. To see every tree and pebble and insect. To feel how it all interrelates. How all these things need each other and none of them actually need us. How all of it would thrive so much more fully if we were gone.
—That sounds almost fatalist. Or nihilist.
—I don’t think so. There is a kind of humility I find so important. Knowing human beings aren’t actually the centre of anything. We’ve done considerable damage thinking we’re the centre of the world.
—Why is that damaging?
—Because when you’re the centre of the world, you can do whatever you want. The world revolves around you. And we’re not the centre of anything. We’re just full of ourselves.

As we stood there quietly inhaling the view, I tried to have some thoughts about the landscape that spread out in front of us. There was a forest and a river. At least, when you looked in this direction there was a forest and a river. I knew if we snaked our way around to the other side of the mountain the view would be rocks and hills and ridges. Dirt and sand. I didn’t know enough about geology to hazard a guess as to why one side was so lush and green and the other was not. I was about to ask a question along these lines when my thoughts were interrupted.
—I don’t know if I want this on the record. But since you’re recording me anyway, I guess I won’t object.
—If you like I can stop recording.
—No, it’s all right. Maybe it’s good that you have a record of what I’m about to say.
There is a long pause. So long that I wonder if the tape recorder had stopped working, but the background sounds of the mountain assure me the tape is still rolling.
—What is it you want to say?
—What I want to say is that I simply don’t like the fact that you’re here. It doesn’t sit well with me.
—I’m sorry to hear that.

I remember the tension in my body as I braced myself for whatever she was about to say. Whatever it was, I was sure there would be a great deal of truth to it, that I would largely agree with her arguments. I was there to learn, and unfortunately that also included learning more of the reasons why I should have never ended up there in the first place.
—You’re going to write about us, but you’re never going to get it right. I can feel that just from the way you are in the world. But that’s not it, that’s not quite what I mean. Whatever you write might not do us much good, but from what I can tell, you’re sincere enough, so it probably also won’t do much harm. It’s really something else, I’m not even sure I can fully articulate it.
—I’m listening. Don’t worry, I can take it.
—I’m definitely not worried about hurting your feelings.
—Why not?
—Any of us here, all of us, we might be killed any day now, any minute. Our lives are what matters. In this context your feelings definitely don’t matter.
—The criticism I’ve already received is that I’m only a tourist here, I have no real commitment to this place. I’m not invested enough.
—That’s certainly true.
—But that’s not what you’re trying to tell me. You want to say something else.
—You want to learn from us but you can’t because it’s always going to be about you. I don’t know why exactly. And I don’t even want to know why. But that’s the way that I see it. That’s what I see.
—You’re probably right. So what I should do is leave?
—Yes, you should leave.

But of course I didn’t leave right away. I think that mountainside conversation was maybe five or six weeks before I went out on my first patrol, which as we now know resulted in my capture and interrogation. And I remember how I spent those five or six weeks thinking she was right, that I should leave now. That now was really the time to go—what was I waiting for? I often say that when I don’t know what to do I become paralyzed, but here was a situation where even when I did know what to do I found myself paralyzed. I knew I couldn’t stay but neither could I get myself to start leaving. It went on like that for week after week after week. The tape continued.
—I understand what you’re saying.
—That’s the thing. You understand. You can leave. But do you also understand that I can’t?
—You can’t leave because this is your home. This is your home and you have to stay here and fight for it?
—You really have a romantic idea of us, don’t you?
—I’m sorry. Tell me. Why can’t you leave?
—I can’t leave because I have no money. No passport. No way to get anywhere. No other country that would take me in.
—But do you want to leave?
—I want the freedom you take for granted. All the freedoms. The freedom to walk up this mountain and know it’s my home, to know it will survive, and also the freedom to tomorrow be on a tropical beach and forget this war for as long as I choose, until I recover, until I’m ready to come back to it. It’s not that I would actually get on a plane and go anywhere. Perhaps quietly walking up this mountain once a week is enough for me. But why can’t I have that freedom? Just to know it’s possible, just to know that I can. And then it sounds like this is about me, or about you, but it has nothing to do with me or you. Some people can go wherever they want, and others can’t, and it’s the worst bullshit I’ve ever heard. Maybe that’s really what I’m getting at. Some people can go wherever they want, meaning you can also pick up and come here, no one will stop you, we even welcome you with open arms. Because we’re not stupid. We also know you have access that we don’t so easily have. More of a voice on the world stage. But what we have to say, what we’re actually living, is so clearly more important than anything you will ever write. And it fucking sucks that you have more of a voice than us. It’s bullshit and it fucking sucks, but that’s the way the world is, for now at least, and therefore the only thing me telling you all this actually does is give me a chance to vent and complain.

I remember the feeling of standing there on the mountainside, looking over the endless expanse of forest, her voice as she told me: “You’re going to write about us but you’re never going to get it right.” And once again it makes me realize how never in my life as a writer have I genuinely tried to get anything “right,” if getting it right means an accurate portrayal of reality, or even if it means providing access to something we might call truth or wisdom. In fact, it now seems to me, I have attempted to do almost the opposite, a search for how to “get it wrong” as evocatively as possible. Or to fully engage in the struggle between getting it right and getting it wrong. Of course, I’m always considering ethics, so I would never want to be ethically wrong, or to harm anyone with my words, but nonetheless there is the desire to be artistically off-kilter in ways that create the possibility of seeing things anew. To fully admit that I don’t know. But now I’m not so sure. Rethinking all such assumptions might be one of the many ways I find myself trying to change.



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Meet The Bug

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I just discovered the music of Meet The Bug and now want everyone else to discover it too: meetthebug.bandcamp.com


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still be structurally entangled

These Goodreads reviews of my book - that give me a sense some readers fully get what I'm working on - feel more and more helpful the longer I continue to be a writer. "What it means to care, to oppose, and still be structurally entangled in the systems you’re resisting."

Two long passages from David Velasco's How Gaza Broke the Art World

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Two long passages from How Gaza Broke the Art World by David Velasco:


*


On the day that I am fired, I am offered a choice. It’s a little before noon on 26 October when I meet with Jay Penske, the youthful CEO of Penske Media. We are at the company’s New York headquarters, an airless sepulchre of corporate banality in a prewar office building on Fifth Avenue. Jay is friendly as we speak, a practised inquisitor. “You have good friends,” he says with some amusement, referring to a letter, composed by the filmmaker Laura Poitras and signed by some big names, petitioning to keep me on board.

He asks me to walk him through my decision, which I do, carefully. I tell him that I felt, and still feel, that the magazine needed to respond to the moment. I had consulted the editorial staff and had reached out to contributors. No one felt they had the authority to write about 7 October and its aftermath. I had watched the agile responses of several magazines that I trusted, and the clumsy nonresponses of nearly every other publication. I contemplated various savvy “art world” takes, all of which seemed specious. In Paris, one of our contributors brought the letter to my attention, and I told them we would publish it, which, as editor-in-chief, is literally my prerogative. I did this swiftly, in consultation with the web team and our international reviews editor, who were entirely on board.

Jay asks me why I signed the letter, and I explain that we’re not a newspaper, but a leftist art publication. People should know where we stand on genocide, and why not? What kind of interest are we protecting? He tells me about the tricky situation the publishers are in. We’ve all been spammed with threatening calls and emails, many from people we’ve never heard of. (“The artists and other persons whose names appear as signatories and supporters of this shameless letter have no soul in their hearts,” preaches Gil Brandes from Tel Aviv.) The art dealer Marianne Boesky writes a letter: “This is appalling to me as a Jew and I need Artforum to remove all Boesky ads from Artforum’s platforms immediately.” I am told that the Chanel Culture Fund has demanded that we stop the presses in order to pull their ad from our November issue. (We didn’t comply.) The gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan has written a rebuttal, which I agree to publish online because it seems worth having a public record of the surreal moral universe it represents.

I am aware that much of the sentiment is divided by class: the letters’ signatories are mostly artists, the letters’ detractors are mostly their dealers and collectors. This is not a new rift in the art world, but Palestine seems to have deepened it beyond repair. Jay tells me that the magazine’s publishers are putting together a statement, and he asks me to write something describing my missteps, something I could post on Artforum’s website and to my personal Instagram. “And if I say no?” I ask. “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” he tells me.

I walk downtown to clear my head. What can I say? I don’t like the barely veiled threat, and I’m not sorry. Two weeks earlier, I cringed watching Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, post an apology for an Instagram story stating that Israel cutting off Gazans’ access to water and power “is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life”. To me it’s simple: my job is to position the magazine correctly in the current of history. We have done the right thing.

My phone rings. It’s Jay. He sounds panicked. “Someone has tipped off The New York Times,” he says. “We need to accelerate your statement.”

“I can’t produce something on this timeline,” I reply.

“I’m very disappointed to hear that,” he says. “I had really hoped this would work out.” He hangs up.

A colleague at the magazine calls next. “Are you really going to throw everything away?” he asks. “Over this?”

“I’m not the one doing the throwing,” I say.

“The letter wasn’t even a success,” he says. “Look, it’s divided the art world.”

“I think we have different ideas of success.”


*


The past two years have given the lie to any wisdom that the art world constitutes the progressive avant-garde. I can count acts of bravery from less-visible artists, but a fog of silence continues to dominate the field: few expressions of solidarity forthcoming from institutions, and too few artists willing to speak out via social media, much less their own work. What do we make of this depressing amalgam of fear and apathy? How many will it take to break the art world’s attitude of mute acquiescence?

I am struck by the fact that major celebrities seem more likely than major contemporary artists to publicly express support for the Palestinian cause. The musician Lorde lights the stage at Madison Square Garden in red, white and green. The actress Jennifer Lawrence tells reporters: “What’s happening is no less than a genocide and it’s unacceptable”. Joaquin Phoenix, Olivia Coleman and thousands more sign a boycott of Israeli film groups “implicated in genocide”. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem make regular statements, and Hannah Einbinder shouts “Free Palestine” as she accepts her Emmy. These are not simply symbolic gestures, but meaningful demonstrations of solidarity.

“The more of us there are, the more of us there are,” Nan said at the end of her speech. She understands that we pierce repression with a surplus of reparative and disruptive actions. More voices, more collective, louder, riskier. She understands that we make change not through holding ideologically correct or coherent beliefs, but through an uneven accretion of strategic and local decisions. Not everyone has to make the same choices. Certainly not everyone has to agree. But we all have to act.

I have spent the past two years on unofficial hiatus from the official art world. Its ceremonial sound and fury feel remote to me. Speculation has been hollowing art out for decades, and we might simply have passed a threshold where price is the only measure of worth. But I’m alert enough to know that the era of unbridled conspicuous consumption might be ending. The proverbial bubble has burst. Collectors are disposing of their minions and concierges. Galleries are closing, or having less lavish parties. Artists at every level are feeling the burn. It’s only appropriate, now that the uneasy truce between the market and its playthings has been scuttled. Brute reality tore the mast from the boat.

None of this is “complicated”, as the boilerplate from strategic wafflers would have you believe. As I write this, dim leaders celebrate the supposed end to this “war”. Those who couldn’t admit to a genocide now begin to speak of it in the past tense. We’re roughly 11 weeks into a supposed ceasefire, which Israel breaks daily with routine barbarism. As I write this, IDF soldiers continue their enduring project of annexation and extermination in the West Bank. A politics of wilful ignorance and escalating stupidity keeps the killing machines going. The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation. It’s increasingly hard to care about the fate of an art world narcotised by money and self-regard. We had a chance to at least try and make a difference. We had a chance to not sell ourselves out. We had a chance, and we blew it. This did not end well, and still we can choose to begin again, tilting – collectively, contingently – toward the pitch of liberation.



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Floppy Haircut

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"There was New Romantic, who spent most of each dream explaining various genres of music, and the soundtrack of each dream would shift to correspond, like an in-progress personalized mixed tape. Other names considered: Adam Anti, Fade to Grey, Bron Area and Floppy Haircut."

I’m currently serializing my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. The above lines are from the fourth instalment.

All posts are free so there's no reason not to follow (and receive a new installment in your inbox every two weeks.) You can do so here.



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end of year lists

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So nice to see my book on these end of year lists from Michael DeForge and Jesse Eckerlin.

Made even nicer by the fact that Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell was also at the top of my favourite books list from this past year.

addictive entertainment

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There’s been a lot of talk about whether AI can make art, and I think this is beside the point. The people dumping in money to create AI don’t care about art. The question is whether AI can make cheap, addictive entertainment. And, it seems to me, there’s evidence that AI is very good at making things addictive.


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Rum Music

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I've been listening to a lot of music end of the year lists and, so far, Rum Music: The Best of 2025 Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan is my hands down favourite.


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just finished / just starting

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The perfect holiday gifts: Rich and Poor & Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some favourite things from my 2025

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[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. (However, it seems I do rearrange the list a little to make it look nice.) This years list is also a little bit longer then some previous years, and I believe one of the reasons is that this year I did two mid-year lists, so I felt I had to add more things to make this end of the year list different.]


Music
Moses Sumney – Sophcore
Adrián de Alfonso – Viator
Qur’an Shaheed – Pulse
keiyaA – hooke’s law
Destroyer – Dan’s Boogie
Quinton Barnes – Code Noir
Quinton Barnes – Black Noise
Elle Barbara’s Black Space – Word on the Street
Nourished By Time – The Passionate Ones
Eddie Marcon – Carpet of Fallen Leaves
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky
Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes
Katy Pinke – Strange Behaviour
CV Vision – Release The Beast
DJ K – Radio Libertadora !
Pink Siifu – BLACK’!ANTIQUE
MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
Frog Eyes – The Open Up

As well, as previously mentioned, for much of the past year or two, I’ve been listening a lot to the same four exceptional records by Jeff Parker: The New Breed, Suite for Max Brown, Forfolks and The Way Out of Easy.


Books
Vivian Blaxell – Worthy of the Event: An Essay
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Touching the Art
Cody Caetano – Half-Bads in White Regalia
Saeed Teebi – You Will Not Kill Our Imagination
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Noopiming
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Water
Sarah Schulman – The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi – Everything for Everyone
Raja Shehadeh – We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
Fabio Morábito – The Shadow of the Mammoth (Translated by Curtis Bauer)
Lawrence Burney – No Sense in Wishing
Anna Swanson – The Garbage Poems
Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony
Emily Witt – Health and Safety
Nathanael Jones – Aqueous
Sasha Frere-Jones – Earlier
Caren Beilin – Sea, Poison


Performances
Martine Delvaux + Bureau de l’APA – Pompières et pyromanes
Dorothée Munyaneza – Toi, moi, Tituba…
Jo Fong, Sonia Hughes, Marilou Craft & Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé – Nettles: How to disagree?
Anne-Marie Ouellet, Thomas Sinou, Jeanne Sinou, Inès Sinou – Refaire la Marguerite
Sasha Kleinplatz – MAKING TIME
Public Recordings – The Chains
Su PinWen 蘇品文 – Leftover Market 剩女經濟


Plus:
Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert
Some passages from Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell
Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore


Also:
I haven’t done this previously, but a few other things from my year I want to mention:
– I wrote about the twentieth anniversary of A Radical Cut in the Texture of Reality
– I made an Inventory of novels I recently started writing but couldn't finish
– I was part of an exceptional lineup at the Montreal edition of Oral Method where, in response to the prompt EXCUSEZ-MOI, I wrote a short text I think turned out quite well called I Make and Watch Performances



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Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison

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Idea for a novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money.

Working title: Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison



*



The first few pages:


For years I couldn’t stop writing about the oncoming fascism and then the fascism was here and I couldn’t seem to write about it anymore. Most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis didn’t know that capitalism was already over. I knew. Which might be one of the reasons I chose to enact my foolish plan. There were many contradictory and confused reasons.

The memory is somewhat unclear, except the fact that we were both drinking, me noticeably more so. I remember her saying: “I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement.” And I remember thinking: Why just a game, why not actually make an art movement in real life. And then, as if reading my mind, she followed up: “I mean, art movements were a thing that happened last century. I don’t think they’re really a thing that can still happen now.” And I thought to myself: “But why not try? Attempt the impossible. Rise to the challenge.”

That was the night I first had the idea. But I’m not sure if I told her then, or some other night. And I know she never told me. I had to find out through other sources. But then, much later, when asked, she replied that I could stop by some time to watch her work. It was even more specific: she said she’d be interested in having me there, sensing my reactions. By then we were both in what one might refer to as deep trouble. I’m not sure if she knew it more than I did, or if I knew it more than her, or we both knew so on equal footing. There was also a sense in which neither of us knew, our activities too seductive, the anticipation that you could have your cake and eat it too. (The French version of this expression is to have both the butter and the money for the butter. The reference to money brings us closer to the point.)

The dilemma that most concerned me was as follows: I hated money and I wanted money. Money isn’t real. It’s a fiction, a story. But money can do things that nothing else can. So in that sense – at the level of power – it has some sort of greater reality.

Art movement became code. “How’s your Situationism going?” she might ask, then a few weeks later she’d instead ask about my Cubism, and I’d respond by asking her about the Stuckists. (If you don’t know about the Stuckists, we’ll find our way back to them a bit later on.) There have been many art movements in human history, so we tried to keep it all spread out. I didn’t know all that much about the topic when we began. I had to keep reading up. I was often looking for things to read that didn’t add any extra stress to my already stressful life.

My stress focused on the idea I’d be caught. I tried to calm my nerves with the counter-notion that there were worse things in this world then being sent to jail. I wasn’t certain exactly what it would be like, didn’t do any research into the eventual reality of the experience, but I imagined there’d be things I could learn. Conversations with individuals I would never otherwise meet, exercise I’d never otherwise do, reading and writing. It might be dangerous, I certainly intended to avoid it if at all possible, but anything that occurred would also be an experience.

At the same time, jails are getting worse, fascist jails obviously worse than previous ones, which were already unbearably cruel. If I had a choice, I would choose to live in a world without prisons. But we don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for. So many of my ideas about the world, what it’s like, were from what it was like before, and I often have to think long and hard in order to understand or describe what things are like now.

Many artists feel their work does not get all the attention it deserves. Jealousy of other artists is perhaps one of the most natural parts of being an artist. She responded to this common impasse in a unique way. She had a theory that the more she hid away, the more interest in her work would increase. That hiding a success were, for her at least, intertwined. It began on a whim with her not attending one of her own openings, then later announcing her absence in advance. Already there were relatively few photographs of her in circulation, and she then made a certain effort to scrub as many of the remaining ones, to avoid having her picture taken whenever possible.

Her work had a certain following, but she was far from famous, and there was certainly no one chasing after her for pictures. That she no longer made public appearances merited a certain degree of curiosity, and if someone decided to write about her they would often mention it in the opening paragraph. In fact, it seemed there was now slightly more pres than before, and sales slightly increased over time, leading her belief that her theory was correct. Many still knew what she looked like, she hadn’t magically transformed into Thomas Pynchon or Elena Ferrante overnight, but there was, nonetheless, some new sense of mystery. When I thought of this aspect I was always intrigued. How it was possible to be both public and secret at the same time. How your art was directly connected to your physical appearance and biographical details, and interest in it could be influenced by how many of these biographical details you chose to release. How when people looked at your art, they were also considering it in relation to your life.

I saw her only about a dozen times during the years we were both fully immersed in our art movements. Most of these encounters took place in my visits to her studio, across vast swathes of silence as I watched her paint. Watching someone paint is almost an artform unto itself. At least that’s how I considered my approach to the activity, giving it my full concentration. Sometimes we spoke while she painted, but most of the time it was silence, and then when she was done for the day we’d eat together, not have a drink together (since I was already clean by that point), and speak of the things we didn’t allow ourselves to speak about with anyone else, the secrecy lending intensity to every word.

I first acquired the printing press under the assumption I’d use it to publish literature. Maybe there was a part of me that believed this. In retrospect, that lie was also the first of many, all the small and big untruths I engaged in once my art movement was well under way. Before I didn’t have much experience with lying. And what was surprising was how many lies were told at the spur of the moment, without forethought, because the situation required quick explanation, and the real explanation involved information it would endanger me to divulge. I don’t know if I’m lying to myself when I still think of myself as an honest person.

I don’t think I would have bought the printing press if I hadn’t discovered the secret room. The secret room was the discovery that set off the first domino. I had just rented an apartment slightly too expensive for me, all my belongings in boxes in one corner of the main room. I was carefully exploring the apartment, wondering how I was going to set it up and also how I was going to afford it. There were bookshelves built into the entirety of one wall, perhaps the main reason I’d chosen to sign the lease, since over the years I had accumulated a rather large quantity of books. For some reason I was pressing my weight down on each of the shelves, I suppose to ensure they were sturdy enough before filling them. I also ran my palm across each shelf, difficult to know what I was hoping to find, but to my great surprise I did make a discovery. A kind of hidden switch in the back corner of the very top shelf closest to the window. I was standing on a chair when I made the discovery. The entirety of the shelf swung inward on well-concealed hinges, and behind this section of shelving was another room about half the size of the main one. The hidden room was entirely cleared out. It was impossible to guess what it had been used for, yet it had clearly served some secret purpose. I brought in a chair from my freshly moved belongings, placed it directly in the middle, sat down, and gave my mind over to a single question: what use might I have for a secret room?

Let’s return to the night at the bar. Now I’m unsure if I remember the timeline as clearly as I’d like. Was that night at the bar before or after my discovery of the secret room? It must have been after, because without the secret room I don’t see how I could have conceived, in practical terms, starting out. But I also think there might have been a different timeline: that night in the bar, ending with her deciding to start her art movement and me deciding to start mine, followed by a period I put it all out of my mind, until the moment I was sitting alone in that hidden room and the idea returned to me. Now it had a location, and every art movement needs a location. Either way, what I do know is the secret room sat empty for almost a full year before I met someone who knew someone who was selling a printing press. I did some research. It seemed this model might be just the thing. The money to buy it came from a relative who had recently died. Intergenerational wealth seems to be the case behind every art movement.

I remember going to buy my first pair of gloves. This was also a time in which most currency was digital. There was something old fashioned, even quaint, about committing my efforts toward paper currency. I tried on one pair of gloves, then another, feeling what I was looking for was not fashion, but rather something that might become an aspect of my personality. When I was wearing the gloves I could think of myself as a different person, the person committing the art movement. The pair I finally chose were white, in the hopes they would leave behind no threads or particles of color.

The reason art movements (real art historical movements, not art movements as a euphemism for something else) were prevalent during the previous century, and not this one, is because political movements were prevalent during the same period. Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Fascism (and in a different way Capitalism and Libertarianism) each had millions of passionate, organized followers who often reformatted their lives around collective practices for bringing their chosen ideology into greater prominence. A battle as to how society should best be organized. Many of the same people who were organizing politically were also organizing artistically. Or knew the people who were organizing artistically. Avantgarde artistic forms were made and fought for in relation to avantgarde political formations. To get out ahead of current artistic practices, and to get out ahead of current political limitations, took place parallel to one another and intertwined. The removal of the Berlin Wall is often seen as a kind of marker, both in time and in relation to tail end of an ideological shift. A moment when capitalism won the so-called Cold War and Communism was no longer generally seen as a viable option. And, it seems to me, art movements suffered a similar defeat.

At the same time, I have absolutely no belief in this way of framing these events. The former Soviet Union was never Communism, or at least wasn’t from the moment Stalin took control. And Capitalism won using only dirty tricks. The dirty trick of assassinating or overthrowing any leaders who didn’t tow the line and the dirty trick of giving certain people temporary “democratic freedoms” in order to dissuade them from amassing enough collective power toward Socialism and Communism, and then removing those freedoms when they were no longer required. Don’t go over to Socialism or Communism, they said, because we have these “democratic freedoms” that make our society so much better than any other, when such freedoms were only part of a temporary propaganda campaign for Capitalism that was never meant to last. Of course, it is Capitalism that is now in decline – perhaps a victim of its own success with no other world system to keep it in check. Unfortunately, Capitalism is now rapidly being replaced by Technofeudalism (or hopefully something better if we can summon the collective political will.) Art movements might return if radical politics also returns. If we can once again believe in its possibilities. Those possibilities were once based in the idea of progress, and since progress is a lie, we will need to find another basis. Things do not progress, they go in circles like the seasons.

Let’s return again to that night at the bar. Because it wasn’t just any bar. It was the place we went almost every night. As is so often the case, the times in which we did so were short-lived. There was a moment when everyone was there, then a moment later it was gone. Yet it was all so alive. We dreamed up ideas and schemes, most of which were completely forgotten by last call. Why is one idea forgotten while another becomes one’s life? It was a time of made-up names, so I’ll call her Sable. Sable and I saw each other many nights at that bar, with few in depth conversations. Mostly we just said hello. Or danced a bit. She’d tell me how much she liked a song moments before heading onto the dancefloor. (If I give you the song it might help with the year. And I’m not sure I want to give you the year yet. So, for now, the soundtrack will remain anonymous.) I like dancing but often shy away from it, I’m not quite sure why. The bar didn’t have a dance floor but when it got late they’d turn up the music and people would dance where they stood. We were young and thought it was our place. It’s only a few years ago, but now I couldn’t possibly feel any less young. Stress has aged me.

She said “I really like this song” and took a few steps into the middle of the room, merging with the other dancers. (Something else I might have not mentioned: the bar was tiny.) But a few songs later she was back beside me and we were commiserating about how hard it was to make money from our art. The idea that there was something noble or valuable in making art that might not sell seemed like an unused relic from a previous era. I remember I spoke about wanting to bring that idea back. What would it take to bring back the idea that things had a value which had nothing to do with money? She might have been interested in the idea but didn’t really see how it was possible. Even if you admired things that possessed an unclear monetary value, you still needed money to survive.

And then it was also a question of how much money. We were both able to make small amounts from our practices, but making enough to live from or show off was perpetually out of reach. She said “I know I’m smart and talented and good at scheming and good at networking. And I know there must be a way to make all that pay. But I can’t seem to figure out the formula.” Then she once again said “I really like this song” and shot back into the middle of the room amongst others who might have liked the song even more than her, if the intensity of their dancing was any indication. That night was a conversation that happened in stages, which might have been part of the reason it was a conversation that changed my life. Soundtracked by many songs that Sable really liked.

It seems to me that people today don’t have any particular interest in the experimental. The flavor of literature I had once most wanted to promote was literature that took risks with both content and form and strived to connect these risks directly to radical politics. But no one seemed interested. In producing small, beautifully printed editions, I learned a great deal about the printing process. And, at some point, I began to wonder if I could put this knowledge to better use.

I had heard that the art market was a good place to launder money. Sable was my only real connection to that world. My plan was simply to buy “wet” painting with forged money, then flip them for “real” money, selling them for not so much more than I bought them from young artists delighted to be selling anything at all. All of this rested on a rumor that my family was extremely wealthy, an exaggeration I did my best to encourage. My plan was, whenever possible, to buy directly from the artists themselves, leaving the galleries out of it. I was also planning to do so under a variety of fake names. As you will see, things did not go as planned. They rarely do.



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