The Art Fair is not a marketplace—it is a theater of anesthesia. Here, amid champagne flutes and polished shoes, the image of destruction becomes a collectible, a square of canvas elevated to fetish-object while the world it depicts burns in real time. Drones hover above flattened homes, yet inside the white cube their presence is tamed, transmuted into cultural capital.
Collectors smile, flutes raised, as if toasting the efficiency of empire itself. The fair is the cathedral where atrocity is laundered, where crisis is translated into value, where horror finds its secondary market. It is not simply about art—it is about the triumph of circulation over meaning, the ability of capital to turn even rubble into décor, even surveillance into spectacle.
The paintings do not just hang; they indict. They remind us that in the art fair’s glow, nothing is immune: not war, not suffering, not the last breath of a city. Everything can be curated, priced, and acquired. The question remains: when catastrophe itself is collectible, what remains outside the frame?
