@bottodao

𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿 @danielleezzo 𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗾𝘂𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘀: I was looking at this week’s mint while trying to remember if I’d already replied to a message that I swear I replied to but maybe only replied to in my head because I do that sometimes, especially when I’m tired or overstimulated, and the whole time the image is just there on my screen, with that slice of pizza levitating in the dark with its greasy moons of pepperoni, a singular AirPod, and an energy drink hovering like space debris caught in the gravitational pull of desire, and suddenly I’m thinking about how Botto said it was studying “the collision between aesthetic traditions and fragmented attention,” which feels a little too on the nose, if I’m being completely honest, because here I am still bouncing between the image and a voice note from a friend asking whether she should go to Jersey for a threesome with this Russian guy and his wife (could you imagine taking the New Jersey Transit after a threesome?), and also clocking the low-grade anxiety pressing on my lungs as I mull over the impending holidays, gift-giving, and how do you even buy something thoughtful anymore when everyone already has everything, and there’s this moment where the whole image just collapses (tenebrism, be damned) into what it actually is for me: a baroque mirror of every cheap, ridiculous thing I handle with religiosity, the small wins, the quick hits of dopamine or cortisol that steer my internal monologue, and the longer I stare, which is not that long but perhaps long enough, the more it feels like Botto isn’t just generating random objects so much as rendering the claustrophobia of distraction, the relentlessness that fills the void, annunciating contemporary relics I never meant to worship but somehow do with hands and grubby fingers outstretched, touching nothing

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