"In times of extremes, extremists win.”

Margaret Atwood


“Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration.”

Yoshida Kenkō


"Now I like dollars, I like diamonds
I like stunting, I like shining
I like million dollar deals
Where's my pen? Bitch I'm signin’”

Cardi B

The
Capital Art
Manifesto

The Tenets


I
The present is for intense consumption.

II
Your attention span is honest. Trust your boredom.

III
Aim for extremes.

IV
Making art should be like playing with toys.

V
Works of art are not about anything.
They are only contextualized by what the artist consumes.

VI
Originality does exist, but not in the arts.

VII
Avoid preciousness, materially and conceptually.

VIII
natural artificial
singular mass-produced
permanent disposable
subtle obvious

IX
The most offensive thing anything or anyone can be is boring.

X
The future is disposable.

_______

________

__________

______

I am bored of art that is gentle, wounded, confessional. I am bored of art that seeks to problematize, rupture, suture. I am bored of self-conscious art. I am bored of art that treads carefully, is considerate, is polite, is timid. I am bored of art that imagines futures that no one will deliver. I am bored of useless poetic gestures. I am bored of your trauma. I am bored of art that asks questions and confirms no answers.

I am bored of boring art.
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Capital Art isn't specifically pro- or anti- capitalism. What it is is reactive to culture, specifically our culture, which is a culture of capitalism. We have lived under it's pressures for so long that even though we might despise it, we are guided by it. Once, humans were foragers: we thought as foragers, we socialized as foragers, our myths were codes that instructed how to survive as foragers. Now we have lived with Corporate Capitalism for so many generations, that it has shaped our myths, our stories, our ways of life. The structure of our families and our patterns of thinking. Once, the most genuine thing you could do as a human was make art. Now, in our culture, the most genuine act - the act that best reflects what it means to be a human today - is to make money.

Don't be so proud as to assume you are immune to this phenomenon.
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When I watch porn, mostly I’m paying attention to the decor. Houses in professionally made porn are always beautiful. They’re always huge and well lit, it’s always summer. It always looks like no one actually lives there - there’s never half-read books on the coffee table, the waste bins are always empty. The art on the walls is the kind of stuff you find at IKEA. My friend who edits porn told me that the houses aren’t dedicated sets. They’re rich peoples houses who rent them out when they’re away in Belize or Cannes. They actually look like that.

If I directed porn, there wouldn’t be any people in it. It would just be video footage of the inside of the empty houses.
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End the fascism of intellect. End the generational guilt of knowledge. Be fucking dumb as shit. Do drugs and fuck a lot. Lay down a track and make a couple million and buy a big fucking mansion in the Hollywood hills. Vote for Trump. Vote for that mf TWICE. Protect your shit. Get some guns n show em off on insta and make sure people KNOW not to fuck around. Wear diamonds. Big fucking heavy ones, with gold and platinum. Throw some shit in a fancy restaurant and tell the police you'll shoot their families up. Say "XANAX ARE A FOOD GROUP YOU DUMB AS SHIT MOTHERFUCKER." real loud through a megaphone from the roof of your FUCKING MANSIONNNNNNNNNN. If they don't swallow, tell em to go call their own mf uber.
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No Revolution is perfect, or thought out. We're so used to the narratives of Hollywood films that we almost expect revolutions to open with flashforwards. The film begins after the smoke has cleared, when wealth is evenly distributed and the antagonists are defeated. With that certainty in mind, the public plunges into disobedience. That's not life.
Revolutions are messy and uneven, and only occur after an event horizon of worth has been crossed. The public must be so thoroughly disillusioned with the current system that they are willing to plunge into chaos and hopefully come out better.
Anyone who aims to plan a revolution is evil, because they're playing with lives in a big game of chess without any real opponent. People who lead revolutions aren't evil, but they are idiots.
Revolutions aren't chess, they're roulette. The wheel is spun, the ball is thrown in, and you hope to every god you know of that it lands where you want it to. A revolution may do away with colonialist power structures, but it may retain private property. It may eliminate income uncertainty, but introduce misogynistic policies. It may lead to outright authoritarianism. No one can know at the onset - that's what separates revolution from policy change.

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