IMN #2 — Gary Cartlidge

It's Monday Night #2

Let’s share some thoughts about an NFT artist I discovered this week.

So, I want to talk about @TroyFitzpatric’s work: a desperately ironic exploration of late Society of the Spectacle’s haunted ruins.

Debord once said: «All that once was directly lived has become mere representation», but what happens if the representation itself collapses? What if the symbols symbolise nothing more than their own degradation and actual emptiness?

@TroyFitzpatric’s trash art demonstrates that fetishism continues to operate even when all fetishes have been exhausted. Every ready-made combines fragmented masterpieces, icons, brands and computer-generates images in a deceptively obvious way.

But one hasn’t figured it all out just because they’ve recognized some basic equation, such as: «consumption is the new God» or: «we are bored angels and facebook is trying to phish us». It is probably a trick.

@TroyFitzpatric's gifs turn most obvious ideological messages in pseudo-cryptic visions, as if they were keeping some valuable secret - perhaps only the fact that they hide «nothing».

Because @TroyFitzpatric’s art seems to be based on this intuition: the apocalypse will not happen and, in the end, this might be the reason why our world is so apocalyptic. If there is no punch-line to the joke, then it’s not a joke.