What's Real Anymore?

From virtual currency to the "paintings" of Robert Nava, it's sure feeling Matrix-y up in here ....

Robert Nava, Splash Cloud, (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery.

It started with Hollywood.

As Hollywood got better and better at blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, life started imitating art.

We have no idea what’s real anymore. We can’t even agree on the truth. 1/3 of Americans think the attempted overthrow of our government on January 6, 2021, was a “false flag” operation instigated by Black Lives Matter, the FBI, and Antifa. 2/3rds of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to commit treason, one involving top officials of the previous Administration, including ex-President Trump.

I’d say in about 2015 or thereabouts, we officially entered a period future historians (provided any are left) will likely call “The Era of Alternative Facts,” where any bozo with a Wi-Fi connection and a social media account could brazen forth the most repulsive nonsense, much of which was accepted as fact. In this alternate universe, Hillary Clinton is a Satan-worshipping pedophile who sifts children for their chemicals, John F. Kennedy, Jr. is returning from the dead, vaccines have microchips causing infertility, and Trump is still president. Well, at least until he starting touting vaccines, in which case he’d been cloned and some nefarious Deep Stater was pulling his strings.

But seriously, what’s real anymore?

Nowhere is this alarming “alternative facts” narrative more apparent than in cryptocurrency and the art world. Case in point: new auction house darling/flavor-of-the-month artist Robert Nava.

Here’s his work:

It’s selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction right now, and it looks like something you might tack onto your refrigerator with a fruit magnet.

The wildly unregulated, high-finance art world has become Holland’s tulip bulb mania of the 1630s. You remember what happened there, right? It was the first speculative bubble in recorded history. Tulips, particularly tulips infected with the mosaic virus, which variegated their colors, were a hot commodity, trading for the equivalent of thousands of dollars. For reasons having to do more with the bubonic plague than sudden mental clarity, the tulip bulb market abruptly collapsed in February of 1637, and hundreds of Dutch merchants took a punch to the throat.

We should be so lucky to see something like that happen in the art world.

But with investors buying amateurish, low-level art for ever-increasing prices—art, like Nava’s, for instance, so cynical and insulting it takes your breath away—and with the sole intention of re-selling said “art” at auction houses for tsunami profits, the problem will continue ad nauseum until buyers finally refuse to pay such outrageous sums for refrigerator art. And when will that ever happen in an industry that’s wholly unregulated?

It has nothing to do with the inherent value of the art, no more than infected tulips possess inherent value. It’s all about the hype. Like Tom Sawyer selling Huck Finn on the idea that white-washing a fence is fun, and Huck should do it for him, speculators are now able to bend reality itself.

Most, but not all, rich people wouldn’t know good art if it sat on their faces, making them easy dupes for art-world predators. Not that they care. It is far more interesting to them to see what their investments will fetch at Sotheby’s, rendering “reality” itself nothing more than an abstract, tedious, and irrelevant concept.

Equally abstract is the rise of cryptocurrency. Visa uses it now to settle payments in USDC stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain. Make no mistake: cryptocurrency has no inherent value. Like the fictional Matrix, it is nothing more than a string of numbers and letters, signifying nothing.

Unlike banks, crypto is decentralized, spread out over thousands of computers across the globe. Like paper money (which also has no inherent value, other than what we collectively agree to), crypto is a social contract. Pax G or Paxos is a digital token backed by physical gold parked in a London vault, but does gold have any inherent value? Gold is a shiny rock, no different than the 24 dollars’ worth of shells and trinkets the indigenous inhabitants of Manhattan once accepted in exchange for their land.

Things have value when we decide they have value. It’s why teachers are digging into their own pockets to pay for school supplies and athletes playing children’s games with balls are paid millions. We value the athlete. The teacher? Not so much.

Wild to think about, isn’t it? We have no choice in life—zero—except to obtain money, which we need in order to feed and clothe ourselves, and yet money has no intrinsic value. Is this a life well lived—or a life at all?

I could make a similar argument about religion, but I’ll let you parse through that yourself. The material question, of course: does God exist? If so, he must be quite the prankster.

It’s safe to say we are post-reality. We are, in fact, creating our own realities curating images of ourselves on social media that are themselves a digitally manipulated distortion of the truth. In a world where numbers and letters are money and Robert Nava is an auction-worthy artist, you know you’re already down the rabbit hole.

We live in a torrent of data, of CCTV cameras and smartphones, and yet now more than ever, we can’t agree on the truth. What happens to a society that doesn’t share a consensual reality? Do we become more deeply cynical and nihilistic? Yes, it’s likely. And a nihilistic society does what you would expect it to, which is annihilate.

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen until then. Perhaps the one thing we can agree on is that the Internet has undermined the shared sense of reality that underpins our society. What the outcomes will be, nobody knows.

I usually cap off my Cappuccinos with a call to action or some bromide meant to make us all feel better. In this instance, I have none. Because if we can’t agree on simple truths like climate change, vaccinations, or what happened on January 6, 2021, it might just be time to build that bunker, stock it, and solder the door.

All I know for sure is that things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Pain is the only way we humans ever change.

More than ever, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Leave the in the comments section below.