The Art Collectors
Postpainting
Circa 2025
In Art Collectors, the opulence of the frame suffocates the scream of the content. Here, in this exquisite sarcophagus of velvet couches and crystal flutes, the dead toast to the decay of meaning. A magnificent gold frame entombs a vision of desolation — a graffiti-scarred wall, a wasteland littered with the residue of human failure, watched silently by skeletons in tailored suits. These are not mere remnants of life, but the final arbiters of taste in a world that has long since forgotten how to feel.
The painting within the painting mocks the sanctity of the gallery. What is displayed is not art as celebration, but art as autopsy. And the collectors, eternal and skeletal, are not innocent spectators. They are complicit gods, inheritors of a culture they annihilated through acquisition. Their refined setting — chandeliers, gold leaf, wine — is not a contrast but a camouflage, a final aesthetic ritual performed over the corpse of civilization. They are Nietzsche’s last men, not blinking but grinning, sipping their ruin in crystal glasses.
We are reminded that art history is not written in pigment, but in power. The gallery is the new necropolis. The work asks: who gets to frame catastrophe? Who profits from rubble? When the apocalypse becomes collectible, the collector becomes the final tyrant of meaning.
This is not post-apocalyptic. It is post-truth, post-human — postpainting. And in this luxurious tomb, all that remains is to laugh, drink, and hang the horror on the wall.
