Slipping through the storied streets of London with friends, on one of those glorious afternoons when your own authenticity gets you fired again (a book all its own) –this time for sharing oil paintings deemed offensive by a particularly sensitive client, I found myself illuminated by a strange calm. Self-actualisation in the slipstream of rejection.
Martin Eder’s pornographic AI stylisation feels like the devil at the crossroads for such days. Straight out of Berlin, he sits inside London’s Mandrake Hotel in Noho, a perfect portal to luxury decadence where discomfort reveals your true obscene and divine self.
In the gig economy, where censorship creeps in through the soft compliance of client expectation, what do we do? Cease to share, for fear of offence? Or keep doing what artists have always done –shoot from the hip like there’s no tomorrow, sharing work that resists aesthetic aspiration and dares to be imperfect?
This is the cryptic madness of right-wing tech-liberalism: visibility sold for dopamine hits, creators using meme-speak to maintain reach, authenticity reduced to a social slider oscillating between consensus and collapse under a guise of collaboration and community. The need for singular, uncompromised visions is ever vital.
I’m no frequency snob. I want to communicate. My Difficult Second Novel should reach people –what else is literature for? But I’m deep in the swamp of the process: combing through years of work, trying to make something “bigger than Jesus”, knowing it must be clear and the quality may lie in my own discomfort. Because discomfort is proof of life.
Art comforts me in a way digital never does. Art is a super-dope, like Marx said of all culture. Which is perhaps why I find myself in the most remote village in Spain writing now, halfway up a mountain, living in the contradiction of using the very platforms I critique to publish this voice, to find resonance, lost in the essence of the surreal [I revisited Dali’s Theatre in Figueres, Spain a month ago, I suspect I should write about it for you, and that entire road trip…which pushed my resilience like the 40 days and 40 nights I had in the cave here, before a month back in England.] Relishing the connection to all communities, yet vitally aware my strength gets pacified in the resonance of shared experience, the collaborations of my past culture are partly what prevents me from pedestalling my own struggle.
Meanwhile, our digital selves fracture into endless micro-communities, splinters of our data are traded without consent, our individuality flattened by the AI-averaging of ‘taste.’ Social media is productivity’s evil twin: promising empowerment while policing expression.
But Art still carves out a space where we can resist the algorithm. Not everyone has access to that space. Fewer can afford to live in it. But we must try. Because Art, unlike brand, is not here to sell us ourselves –it’s here to mirror, to disrupt, to remind us we are still breathing.
Back in retreat now, it’s not always about taking up public space. Sometimes it's about holding one’s own: for beauty, for contradiction, for sanity and the uncomfortable challenge of being alive because that is what creates art. It takes time. And effort.
Hold my dopamine – I'm going nowhere fast.
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