Here, catastrophe flickers on the television: skeletal cities, famine, a people crushed beneath history’s boot. And yet the living room glows with crystal glasses, velvet laughter, and the sparkle of champagne. The bourgeoisie sit not in ignorance, but in spectacle—the suffering of others reduced to background noise, a grim symphony accompanying their private celebration.
This work is not merely about distance—it is about complicity. The television becomes a mirror, reflecting both destruction and our capacity to normalize it. The laughter is not cruel by intention, but by indifference; a reminder that in the age of mediated horror, atrocity arrives softened, packaged, and consumable.
The extravagance is not in the gilded glass or the chandelier glow—it is in the casualness with which famine and ruin can share space with leisure. The painting forces us to ask: what does it mean to feast while the world starves? What does it mean to raise a glass in front of the ruins of another’s home?
It is not just a living room. It is the stage of civilization’s greatest contradiction: the coexistence of decadence and despair, played out endlessly on loop.
