Taro J. Qureshi

Recently published my writing here: tinyurl.com/tarojq. Please check it out!

Heading to the Orion AI Governance Research Sprint tomorrow. Anyone else?

Bro is 2000 years late to the problem of evil

Is there anything more humiliating than wearing a lanyard?

Art made me happy to live. AI made me unafraid of death.

The machinesmiths are always on about autonomy. If it’s possible, what does this say about the nature of the universe? Is it deterministic? Are LLMs philosophic zombies?

AI generates slop. Can you think of any human artists who do the same? Think about how many Basquiat clones we have - that’s slop too.

Rauschenberg’s Rebus is a network of found imagery—a microcosm of digital excess. Its JPEG reproduction here continues its circulation. The Internet does this endlessly. What if painting, rather than resisting this, embraced it? What if a painting was an unruly, curated Internet?

A transitive painting visualizes its network. It does not resolve, echoing capitalism’s instability. It cannot be reduced to labour value. Joselit: “Network paintings are multilateral: a diagrammatic profusion of relations.” If a painting is a network, it mirrors the market yet defies it.

Baudrillard’s hyperreality in painting? Joselit’s ‘transitive painting’—an object never still, circulating, changing meaning through context. A Poussin in Jutta Koether’s hands, a Manet in Prina’s. The painting resists finality, echoing the fluidity of information in the digital age.

Painting is a speech act. It has a locution (what it literally depicts), an illocution (its subtext), and a perlocution (its effect on reality). A kitsch painting begs validation as labour. A transgressive painting disrupts, refusing to complete itself, making commodification absurd.

Sign and signifier are a-hierarchical—neither precedes the other. Their relationship is arbitrary, a psychic agreement. This makes painting an act of deconstruction: breaking signs apart, exposing the illusion. To paint is to print the source code of the simulation itself.

The Demiurge obscures reality. If the material world is a simulation, then the Platonic realm of forms is the Lacanian Real—the inaccessible truth. Derrida: “The truth in painting is merely its double.” The painting is not reality, but a model of its falsehood. An abyss looking back.

Painting is inherently conceptual. A camera outperforms it in representation. Its value lies in process: presence, surface, illusion. It mirrors the simulation itself—an arrangement of signs. Painting does not stop at its edges. It is, as Joselit says, “beside itself.”

If practice expands to encompass life, then all interactions with the simulation become artistic events. Okon asks: “How do I withhold from some while being generous to others?” Is toppling a statue a refusal of form? A justice-driven artwork? Not palliative, but muscular, political.

Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ blurred art and life, rejecting commodification. Their first title? The Demiurge. A simulation with its own logic. Art as a rupture, a nonsensical event. Like Dada, nonsense is a weapon. If art cannot be commodified, it cannot be controlled. It remains outside.

Beyond theft, refusal is power. Ima-Abasi Okon: “Let’s use laziness and stillness as resistance.” To reject neoliberal productivity is to embody Camus’ absurd rebellion: following one’s authentic interests, even if meaningless to the market. Like Sisyphus, smiling as he rolls his boulder.

If poverty limits creation, we can steal. Theft subverts the sacred transaction of money for labour. If property is theft, then theft—disrupting property’s sanctity—is moral. Artistic canon accepts this: the readymade was theft. Today, digital technology makes stealing easier than ever.

Imagine a painting unlinked from the labour that made it, severed from the reality it simulates yet exposing that simulation. The art world does not sustain critique; it is an extension of the state. Resistance demands transgression. To reject prosperity, we must embrace unsustainability.

Art dealers extract surplus value by commodifying artists’ labour. This is why glorifying ‘hard work’ in art is futile—it mirrors capitalism’s obsession with productivity. But art need not be a commodity. It can be something else entirely: a rupture in the dominant order of signs.

Art confronts labour as a separate power, producing ‘strangeness.’ Camus calls this ‘absurdity’: the moment when contradictions reveal themselves. The absurd is realizing one is trapped in a system yet refusing to submit. Camus’ response: revolt. Live without escape, with lucid defiance.

Yet alienation can be reappropriated. The Xenofeminist Manifesto declares: “The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation.” If art is to resist capitalism, its value cannot be financial. Instead, its currency might be strangeness—an unsettling presence in the world.

Marx saw independent artisans as outside capitalism: they sell commodities, not labour. But the commodity itself alienates. The handicraftsman, claiming their work is ‘hard’ and ‘valuable,’ reinforces capitalism’s equation of labour with worth, suggesting the poor simply lack ambition.

Surplus value is capital—but it is not real. It does not correlate to material facts but to the factory’s ‘need’ to generate excess. Baudrillard links this to capitalism’s derealization of life: goods obscure the suffering behind them, replacing human toil with the illusion of a fair exchange.

Artists have a malleable relationship to labour. A work of art need not be made, nor do anything, to be art. Danielle Child argues that “unproductive labour” does not produce surplus value—key to capitalist accumulation. Art resists quantification, challenging the factory model.

To reject the market, we must reject its tenets. A worker sells their labour, not its products. This creates a power dynamic: the worker must obey to survive. The employment contract enforces this, making the worker’s existence contingent on a system that extracts more than it gives.

Artists must reject compromised institutions to escape capitalism’s grip. Reform efforts have yielded awareness, not change. True avant-garde practice requires rejecting the market entirely. The privileged paint pictures—real action demands breaking from the Demiurge’s systems.

UK art schools mirror the market—privatized, exclusionary, and expensive. Most artists come from privilege; in 2019, only 3% of Black staff at the Royal College of Art were professors. If art is shaped by wealth, how can it challenge the systems that sustain it?

Baudrillard argues we can no longer distinguish real from artificial. The art world reflects this—Venice Biennale is a playground for elites, not truth. Whitney Museum’s tear-gas scandal showed artists refusing to withdraw labor, exposing their complicity in capitalism’s violence.

Avant-garde art should challenge power, not comfort the bourgeoisie. Artist Ima-Abasi Okon critiques the system, questioning if art can exist without perpetuating violence. Meanwhile, mainstream art institutions—driven by wealth—uphold the very systems artists claim to resist.