Ａ．Ｄｅｇｅｎ　Ａｒｔ

sex nerds sex nerding

process shot of some sex nerds sex nerding, posting it at night to mybe dodge the explicit tag

*4 pages not chapters

Here are the first 4 chapters of Iskandar's attempted conquering of Sindh and his conversation with the Gymnosophists

fake movie poster for like a 1970s gritty Western

Talking to my brother about little guys I used to draw when I was a little kid

There was but it's out of print, maybe again some time!!

Anyway that was the last of the Value Palace images thank you for looking at them

The last image in the series, a woman and a child walk through water where lotuses are growing from the mud, the ruins and dead cops. Had to end it on a hopeful note, I don't care if it's sentimental

The proverbial lotus from the mud, 蓮在泥中潔

Value Palace 22

Lotus

Love in the ruins, what it's felt like to be in love any time of my adult life

From Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach". Perhaps a very basic reference but I like it- "Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Value Palace 21

Ruins

This ended up being the most popular image in the group. Initially I was going to try to make this seem more like it was happening in space or underwater, but idk. Roving romance billboard among ruins

From Charles Baudelaire's "Lesbos"

Value Palace 20

Ditch

Nazi vampires do karaoke through a machine powered by a dog corpse(?) in a room full of statues and paintings of Venus. It's been 30 years of my life of hearing about the "new punk rock" and it's always reactionary right wing bullshit; the lame young Gen X anomie of Vice to current day Thiel and other vampire funded nazism.

Value Palace 19

Old Boy's Club

Who knows what the fuck this one is about? Maybe I do, I don't know, I'm not talking. The men covered in pollution, as seen in the second imagine in this series, are seen moving stuff in a stairwell, as their job, above some kind of parade is going on

Value Palace 18

Stairwell

Superhero movie on screen while cops round up people in the audience The superhero movie is supposed to look like 70s sentai, a sailor moon type character versus inhuman villains based on Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school, boogeymen of the fascist conspiracy theory of "cultural marxism" taking over academia and culture

Quote misattributed online to Plato, actually from the SherabDongbu (Tree of Wisdom), Tibetan translation from sanskrit of a 2nd century Buddhist work This is from the 132nd stanza which reads "A hero is born among a hundred, A clever man is found among a thousand, But the wise hero in a hundred thousand May be born in a thousand (or not at all)"

Value Palace 17

Viewing Room

A friendly stranger hands out fascist pamphlets. On the fascist pamphlet is an angel with a DNA sequence halo overseeing a brutal war of all against each inside a crater. I made the stranger a strange computer blue to make her otherworldly but mostly thinking about how in the last 9 plus years all of the nakedly fascist information I am subjected to comes from phones and computer screens

Wrote "friendly" here in katakana 「フレンドリー」bc I've always found that word has a creepy ring to it in Japanese

Value Palace 16

Concourse

This statue is based on an 18th century goddess or 'personification' of the Americas, Columbia.

Value Palace 15

Columbia

Sad image, I'm both the figures in it, reading everyday about how man made ecological destruction will kill all birds and then us, on the wall is the 18th century print "Flock of Cranes" by Ishida Yutei

Value Palace 14

Aviary

Cops in a flooded and probably poisoned room protect an ornate golden chair

Probably the most hamfisted work in this series but I stand by it

Value Palace 13

Flood

Oh wait holy shit it must be?! I must've been looking at that and forgot, you're right!

What "the anarchist"? No but I like the comparison!

Probably my favorite piece in this whole series. An actress is visited by admirers bringing her gifts in her dressing room. She, evidently, performs fully costumed as the mascot character seen throughout this series. She also seems to have some kind of rig inside her costume, like a vtuber or something, and she's charging the rig. Her admirers seem to run the gamut from needy to terrifying. There are posters of the mascot character on the back walls

"Eyes" is capitalized

Value Palace 12

Dressing Room

Thank you!

Was thinking of the insane fake scientism of health influencers and tech people who claim strength and immortality in general and that one venture capitalism whose name is so generic I can't remember it, the one who measures his and his son's erections and swaps blood with his son in particular. Drew it as a lonely nude man in socks lifting weights and hooked up to a machine in front of a holographic diorama of mammoths fucking

Existing in a world with endless, breathless, profiles of baby brained fascists whose definition of life and strength is demoralizing, humiliating. In a better world these tech psychopaths who dream of immortality would have their wealth taken and redistributed, and they'd be allowed to something actually productive

Value Palace 11

Diorama

Women bobbing for apples, looks like a posed photo shoot with the now school fake formal/informal staging and a porny end product

"Bobbing for apples" is such a strange thing, I was thinking about it and it felt like something I saw in a dream, but is apparently real. Feels like one of those weird victorian things people did to pretend to not think about sex, like some game in a fragonard painting with powdered people laughing,

Value Palace 10
Rec Room

Two people in love watch an airplane breaking up and exploding and falling out of the sky, at either dusk or dawn. Wanted to capture the feeling of hope and hopelessness of the moment.

Line from the 1912 Apollinaire poem "le pont Mirabeau"

Value Palace 09

Observation deck

Thank you!

An old man with a respirator and his orderly play a 3D holographic ball game. The game is based on Henri Rousseau's "The Football Players" (1908) In the upper left cheesecake picture (painting?) is a drawing of a Baku (貘) the supernatural eater of dreams from Japanese mythology

The man with the respirator is wearing some kind of champion medal in the first picture

Value Palace 08

Game Room

A woman in a room with an autumn scene wallpaper Someone is watching her through a sliding window in the wall She's looking at pics of dinosaurs on her phone (video?)

The forest is fake and painted on a wall

Value Palace 07

Autumn Room

Fascist cops worship the impossible body in a display of power

Was thinking about the aesthetics of fascism including not only a denial of death, of weakness, but the bizarrely expressed fantasies of the body that go into a pornographic realm of impossibility

Value Palace 06
Exhibition hall

Another particularly brutal image Evil gerontocrats, possibly military or just decorated, weird fake intimacy and power relations, was thinking the mask that the woman is wearing is like those glasses at the zoo that were made so it never looks like you're making direct eye contact with the gorillas, to not enrage the gorillas

Quote from shakespeare, much ado about nothing,

Value Palace 05

Skylight

The police officers brutalizing someone, which is hidden behind some gaudy expensive furniture. The cops in this series are dressed in some strange like early 20th century football gear. This series is about fascism (amongst other things) and this is a particularly brutal image. The only print that did not sell, which I don't blame anyone for not buying.

paraphrase of Foucault

Value Palace 04

Parlor