The year is 1994. You are New York artist Tom Sachs. You design a shirt that says KILL ALL ARTISTS and write a manifesto for your artist collective, NYC Militia. Two years later, Thom Yorke wears the shirt onstage with Radiohead. In 1999, a bootleg version of the shirt appears on a bully in the teen romantic comedy movie She's All That. In the meantime, your career is picking up, and you eventually become a very well-known contemporary artist commenting on violence and consumerism. You become known as the bad-boy handyman of high art.
You show work around the world. You popularize the concept of knolling in a very twee Wes Anderson-core short film titled 10 Bullets. You design shoes for Nike. You get into NFTs. Your art generally gets boring and repetitive, forgoing its original transgressive edge in favor of overly baroque bricolage space-junk and designer iPad cases. You run a famous Chinatown studio, with strict rules and a 10 Bullets-enforced culture, which you call your "greatest work of art." You approvingly compare it to a Manson-style cult. Unforunately and unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a real shitty place to work. You develop systems; you pay minimum wage; you become what you once wanted to kill.
Everyone knows the art world is moribund. The institutions have no edge; the Artists have no grounding; at the top there is nothing but money and the thirst for it. Where once there was counterculture, there is now high culture, from the Chanel guillotine to hypebeast heroism - and so the cycle repeats. In your words, "in the admiration of a good chuckle," it is again time to KILL ALL ARTISTS. This time, we start with you.
