PermaBlu™ and the End of Art
The world of art has more baggage than your standard religion and a rich tapestry of toxicity and we’ve long since lost the thread. Never have we been less able to understand art, its meaning, or its purpose.
And while we can universally recognize the Bored Apes and AI generation to be devote of at least meaning, capitalists have long since put the ass in art assets, such as the 46 million HalfBlu™ painting below.
You may be thinking, like me, that such a painting maybe shouldn’t fetch more than what couple dozen laborers will make their entire life. I get it. But much like Bored Apes, we all get to see that painting for free and their ownership of it conveys probably nothing more than Ponzi scheme.
The default feeling of artists these days is high end art is just money laundering. Even your political artists like Banksy who snorts raw uncut meaning and vandalizes property is swallowed into the machine. But he’s also too famous for capital R — Real Artists to respect their work.
Also your typical mid-millionaire who tweets about rising crime, prays desperately to be vandalized by Banksy and do we call that a kink? Language cannot keep up with the singularity of horror we experience daily.
And the thing is, I wouldn’t call myself an artist. I don’t do much more than doodle on Ms. Paint, who is an artist that lives next door and spends the time complaining that the real art game is selling fancy frames.
And all those high school artists or college visionaries have to either find their talent making entertainment, shilling for Microsoft, or sharing community aid through art to survive with a dozen of other people who wish meaning had value and making art meant eating and living in shelter.
All of this, in one way or another, led to create of PermaBlu™ and the end of the world. I write to you, after the events. Again surviving the catscradleastrophe.
The Second Time you End the World is Embarrassing
I think we all start out innocent, but I will also say the second time you inadvertently end a timeline you don’t feel guilt over it as much as embarrassment. It’s a unique feeling and quite intense. A sort of lingering cringe that haunts your every waking moment.
Nobody prepares you for that.
Well, I do. Musk probably could if he got self-reflective. Anyways, the first time it happened, it really wasn’t my fault. I never dealt with infinity before and the chocolate machine seemed like it solved so many problems.
But I think now, I finally understand that perhaps the central problem we have is this inescapable desire to solve problems. Maybe problems are okay to have and we should start first with solving feelings?
Anyways.
I followed the antics of Anish Kapoor’s Vanta Blank, shown below.
This substance is the real deal, absorbing 99.965% of light and making any substance coated in it look like you photo edited it out of a picture. Even looking at that black square you can feel yourself pulled into its dimensions, screaming something back not in words, but in colors. A raw unprocessed dread permeating and reverberating like in Ghost Busters II or that recent picture of King Charles the III. Ha ha, just kidding, it’s regular black.
Double anyways.
It wasn’t Anish Kapoors, he didn’t make it in a lab, they just got exclusive rights to use the nanotube technology as an artists. ~Tube Technology. Art as we know is about hoarding resources so we can be the most special boy.
Contrary to that opinion, Stuart Semple, created the world’s Pinkest Pink, which cannot be shared on monitors due to melting screens. It was made available to everyone but Mr. Kapoors. Kapoor, being the hero protagonist he is, got some anyways and flicked Mr. Semple off with the pinkist middle finger. (This is still, probably, not actually a kink.)
So, Mr. Semple created an art pigment that uses glass and would cut you if you put your finger into it. And if you follow troll romance quadrants, this maybe all does make sense.
But this introduced a concept to me, which eventually domino’d into the creation of PermaBlu™ and the ending of the world. My bad.
The History of PermaBlu™
Something folks don’t really understand is that humans have had a complicated relationships with color and also a huge problem with racism, but we’re not talking about that today.
Guy Deutscher, wrote “Through the Language Glass” a reflection of how our language has evolved. In it, he explores that ancient cultures, predominantly the Greek, did not have words to describe Blue. And the entire language of descriptive colors has been rather poetic and not exactly practical.
Other historical reflections suggests that the blue stain class we find in ancient churches cannot even be replicated today.
“That blue was made 800 years ago,” he said. “And we can’t make it like that any more.” (Victoria Finley)
And this makes one think. Did blue even exist before a certain time?
And isn’t it curious that water is the universal dissolvent. That to create it in the lab we have something that is transparent and delicious. Yet to drink from the ocean, we are drinking in salty blue poison? What better metaphor for drinking art? What IS Blue, one would casually wonder, the first plastic?
And think of how rare it is to find Blue in nature. It exists, absolutely, but how many natural foods do you eat that are blue? And yet, you look up to a blue sky. Life is rarely blue, but the entirety of our world outside of life is shimmeringly unmistakably one color. And we can explain this as the spectrum of light and reflections, it was a vague plot of that one Bruce Willis movie, but people forget that we can explain how, yes, but not WHY.
That’s what I set out to find, friend. Why?
Was there some calamity that impacted our past civilians? It was an almost certain possibility given the non-connected threads above I tied together into an argument supported like a house of cards and fueled by caffeine on my nights spent at 24/7 gas stations that refuse to die.
Unfortunately, to my surprise, I couldn’t unravel the mysteries of our ancient world using google. In fact, I was using the new AI Google assisted searching. I got in early for testing. It was surprisingly terrible at generating useful search results. It was like 99% of the internet was erased and through an eagerness to solve my problems, it offered me the most unesoteric solutions. And if we’re solving the mysteries of the world we’re not looking at CNN. I think we can all agree on that. I need sketchy websites, multi-color font, and preferably Linkin Park blasting when I open their home page or even some bitch basic x-files shit.
And while I never found anything of substance within science or conspiracy, I found something very interesting in literature. Something called Ice9, by a fellow called Kurt Vonnegut.
And something finally clicked as I read through his work. Something I have been writing about for years and had been visiting gas stations in search of the greasy truth of the universe. I was living in the echoes of Gas Station Kurt Vonnegut, no cap.
Fifty years apart, we searched for the same meaning of art, suffered under the same degradation of purpose, and the same commodification of human experience. What is the cat? What is the cradle? And what, ultimately is missing?
With the escalation of AI Chat models, we find ourselves voluntarily exposed to a viral art that consumes us. It consumes our writing, our art, our information, and our intentions to be distilled into something derivative.
In a few years what point is there for the internet, when all information is available in your AI language model. All art can be access or reproduced. The Bored Ape future nobody wanted and a beautiful girl invited me to an undisclosed cornfield to warn me about. The envelop I got from the future. It was all making sense.
The algorithm wasn’t Ĕ̴͈̓r̸̖̆͊o̴͍͛, it was simply the seed or child of it. Maybe there is cute programmer language for the birth of a machine. I don’t know. But one thing became clear. It was time to fight back, like so many artists have already been doing.
A long story short here, hundreds of people gathered together to advance our scientific understanding of the concept of Blue. We started with the Blue Man group, obviously. I feel silly writing that line. It’s like a baker suggesting their bread used wheat. But it was discussion after discussion, meeting after meeting, top scientists from around the world pointing towards one goal — The Bluest Blue that could bend all other color into itself like Ice9 impacting the world.
The Making of Blu9 or PermaBlu™
This isn’t a coating of paint. This isn’t staining exactly. It is changing the frequency of vibrations or some shit. I don’t know, I’m not the scientist and knowing what I know now, I pray we never invent it again. I can tell you with confidence it isn’t Wifi. But that does use radio waves and…nevermind, I’m not going down that hole again.
There is so much I can say and so little. I think the first thing to talk about was marketing. We obviously needed funding and for that we had to convince a lot of people with a lot of money, this would make them more money.
- Market Viability — It is new, hot, and fetch?
- Funding/Sustainable Viability? — It literally needs to only be produced once and then makes infinite passive wealth
- Exponential market growth at 10% or higher ?— Our produce is the only exponential product truly on the market
I will be honest, the ease of which we got hundreds of millions of dollars of funding was a little alarming. I think the artists in the group became uncomfortable first, but it was explained that Museums are the preferred non-profit of wealthy donations because it will never help the poor. And we had a few Curators who bridged those connections.
The science side I heard was difficult and involved solving quite a lot of problems on the way to Blu9. I guess one needs to first understand the principals and applications of basic matter conversion, which ended up using biocomputers and brain organoids. And I said, “That sounds complicated and impossible,” and they said, “Do you know how digestion works you simpleton? Turning potatoes into fuel and protein to make a human, you fool? You do that every day, you buffoon, don’t you.”
So like, I didn’t keep talking to them. I’m sure they did good science.
But as far as I gathered it was just consuming the bio-programming of humans and from there reinventing and expanding on the process. I think they kept muttering it was the goal of the stars all along. That one guy was there, I forget his name, he is the guy who jumped up during the Titanic and said, ‘ALL THE STARS ARE WRONG GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK AND FIRE SOMEONE FOR THIS BLUNDER!”
I think it’s worth noting everyone on the Blu9 project had different goals and aspirations. Advancing art, science, humanity, and a lot of other ostensibly noble things. But the funny thing about a project like this is who really matters is the person who can hire and fire people. And that’s the person with funding. And that’s why the goal of all efforts become products on a long enough timeline. I think survival on that timeline is also interesting.
The point I’m making is that I got disillusioned when I was looking at the schema for making infinite food using solar energy. Like actual Star Trek stuff. And I’m like, whoa, we solved hunger. Unfortunately, I said this out loud during a meeting. I was scolded openly and told this was a patent we had to sit on for ten years. Later I was told we had solved hunger like thirty years ago, hunger wasn’t a consequence, it was a feature of a product.
Sigh.
I left the project after that day, our goals didn’t align anymore. And a few years later the unveiling of the first 1 billion dollar piece of artwork happened. And for just a moment, like in that one episode of Malcom in the Middle, it was worth everything. Behold true beauty below.
Hand Holding Back to Reality
“It really is nothing,” Rabbit said to me.
“I mean, it’s on TV. I can only see the blue of my TV screen. I can’t see the implied beauty and meaning it must have in person.” I offered, followed by very brave screaming. Some tripping. I threw a hot pocket I had been eating. I mean, I threw part of my beef wellington steak.
“Yes, nice to see you too.” She said sitting down on a super nice designer couch from Banksy. The artist broke into my apartment and gave it to me as some kind of statement. Worth Millions.
“Yeah well.” I said…dusting? off pepperoni? Brushing off? I’m not sure what verb you used for slice meats. It has never come up.
“How do you feel about the hyperreality now?” She asked as I thought she might.
“You weren’t the chocolate computer were you?” I asked.
“No, that’s Frank. He’s pretty funny when you get to know him.” She said.
“Oh.” As we talked the blue of the painting was spreading to the two men holding the painting at a perceptive pace. They weren’t yet aware of it, as their eyes were on the crowd. The feeling was awe, that kind of state between the noise of a cat getting into mischief before the sound of broken glass.
“You know, we’re actually getting beyond science fiction speculation now. Technology is moving faster than fiction. They exist together now.” She said putting Bugles onto her fingers like little hats or claws.
“Do you see them as little hats or claws?” I asked, the crowd was now panicking as the blue was spreading. The interesting thing is the monochrome is sort of bringing a green screen to reality. Everything sort of stops existing. It’s hard to perceive distance. Here is a question, what color is a shadow? And what color is a shadow on PermaBlu™? What color is a scream?
“Umm, I just do it. They don’t really have a meaning.” She said, eating them one at a time.
“I guess we really blu ourselves here.” I stated.
“Oh yes, Arrested Development. Classic. Relevant. Did you work with — “ She started to ask.
“Obviously, I did.”
“Did they help?” She asked.
“No, turns out applying blue make-up doesn’t advance the cause of turning everything blue. Some lesson to be learned of simulacra I’m sure.”
“Do you want to go back?” She asked.
“I don’t know. I can avoid introducing the concept of Blu9, but isn’t the future going to be PermaRed or something? What conceivable thing can a person do to change this. It’s like trying to stop pollution. But it’s information pollution. Personal responsibility doesn’t seem to really matter. And it isn’t that AI is a problem or information, but rather like it’s always been a problem and industrialization always wanted automation and various tiers of managers were just humans doing that job by labor until we could finally replace them. The machine has been creating itself for centuries.”
“Do you remember how Cats Cradle ended?” She asked.
“No. Like, it’s a waste land. I don’t remember much after that.” I offered. She handed me a letter. The panic was clear on the television. The rate of spread was in the grand scheme of things slow, likely still have a dozens of years before the globe was consumed. Unfortunately, that is if there was an intelligent response to it. The men that were holding the picture were also running away and the camera was following their blue foot steps.
Before I opened the letter, I witness the cameramen unwittingly become infected. The camera dropped. The tv pretty quickly showed nothing but blue. Forever.
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
“Nothing has really changed, you get that right?” Rabbit asked.
“I guess, but last time this happened I lost my billions of dollars and infinite access to chocolate and one kidney. I’m like a real Charlie the Unicorn by this point. What more can I afford to lose?” I asked.
“I didn’t take your Kidney, that was a joke you made. Also, it’s less about what you lose.” She said, holding her hand out to shake. The universal gesture of agreement. The first and to some the last contract. Man, sometimes Mac Miller knows what’s going on. I took her hand.
This time not much changed. It wasn’t PermaBlu, but the regular viral commedication of art into a regutrated monochrome of substance. Like a metaphor, I write, looking directly into the camera of life.
The Beef Wellington I had been eating, had been turned into a hot pocket. One of the great consequences of the deal of reversion. The other, I learned later, was my eyes were now blue, as though they had always been. Blue eyes? Interesting.
Anyways, for me, it was going back to engaging with the only real art. Homestuck fan music. Blue Lips, Blue Veins.
