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The Prose & Cons of Hair of the Dogma.

 

I was sitting in church with the kind of hangover where every stained-glass window looks like God’s considerably more ambitious version of the mirror I did cocaine off last night. I sat wondering whether God was calling me home or whether it was simply time to return to the organised weekly NA meetings held there. The priest was somewhere up front talking about Revelation: judgement, the dead rising, the books being opened, everybody eventually having to account for themselves.

 

Coincidentally, in the week leading up to this revelation: Pope Leo had published an encyclical on A.I., and somewhere between Revelation and my stomach threatening its own second coming, it crossed my mind. I had skimmed the thing. Pages and pages and pages. Which raised what felt, in my condition, like a perfectly legitimate theological question: how the fuck did the Pope write all that without ChatGPT? 

 

Perhaps he did. Perhaps the Vatican has Plus. Perhaps the Holy Spirit has simply been using autocomplete this entire time.

 

Somewhere between eternal damnation and trying not to vomit during the first waft of incense, my mind wandered to A.I. and whether God would put it, and subsequently me, on trial.

 

Put the machine on trial. Fine, I thought. Theft. Exploitation. Environmental destruction. Human labour swallowed without consent. Me? I am not even asking for an acquittal. I am in the belly of the beast doing backstroke in its bile. I just wondered who else would have to appear if we applied the charges consistently. And suddenly Revelation made perfect fucking sense!

 

St Peter at the gates with a clipboard. A.I. first in the dock. Behind it, unfortunately, the entire cultural economy. Museums clutching incomplete provenance records. Picasso arguing that influence was understood differently at the time. Getty arriving with seventeen lawyers. Auction houses unpacking packed lunches because those cunts know something we don’t.

 

This does not absolve A.I. It makes the accusation considerably more uncomfortable. If human culture should never become raw material for somebody else’s economic machinery without meaningful consent, wonderful. Fucking wonderful. Let us finally make that the rule.

 

For everybody.

 

Call the witnesses. Open the archives. Fetch the lawyers. Somebody find a Bible nobody has already looted from somewhere.

 

And perhaps a larger courtroom. Oh, much fucking larger.

 

Actually, forget the courtroom. Build me Sodom and Gomorrah inside an aircraft hangar. Give me fluorescent lights flickering over ten thousand sweating defendants, portable toilets overflowing into the car park, extension cords snaking through puddles of burnt coffee, cigarette smoke collecting beneath the rafters and television cameras breeding outside like flies on carrion. Give me enough cameras to make the O.J. Simpson trial look like somebody’s gran filming a christening through the wrong end of a Nokia.

 

Satellite trucks block the motorway. Helicopters circle overhead. Journalists elbow one another into storm drains. Somebody from the BBC is trying to explain four centuries of cultural extraction in ninety seconds while a producer screams into their earpiece that they have to cut to weather. Influencers are taking selfies beneath the ‘COURT OF HUMAN CIVILISATION’ sign. Somebody is selling bootleg T-shirts in the car park reading, ‘I SURVIVED WESTERN MODERNITY AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS FUCKING TOTE BAG’.

 

By nine in the morning the place is already fucked.

 

Picasso is sweating through his collar while three lawyers attempt to explain Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to a jury who have just discovered Google. Gauguin has missed his court date for reasons his attorney has been strongly advised not to elaborate upon. Getty has arrived with seventeen lawyers, two photographers, a videographer, a watermark and a licensing agreement for images of its own arraignment. Museum directors are crawling beneath folding chairs looking for provenance documents they suddenly remember losing in 1957. Curators are speaking in tongues. Registrars are chewing accession records into papier-mâché and swallowing the evidence. Anthropologists have formed a defensive circle around several display cases. The advertising industry shaved its head at dawn, burnt off its fingerprints and was last seen crossing the border in a rented Toyota wearing sunglasses and a moustache purchased from a children’s party shop.

 

An auctioneer has climbed onto a table and is desperately attempting to sell the fucking table. The auction houses have brought packed lunches because those cunts knew before everybody else that Judgement Day would have a buyer’s premium.

 

By ten, the queue outside has doubled back on itself. Museums, galleries, publishers, universities, corporations, fashion houses, photographers, archives, governments, missionaries, collectors, advertisers, anthropologists, ethnographers, filmmakers, record labels, streaming platforms, tech companies, artists, critics, dealers, curators and every smug cunt who ever looked at somebody else’s body, labour, misery, ritual, photograph, pattern, song, mask, textile, story, hairstyle, language, land or dead grandmother and thought: Fuck me, that would look fantastic in the collection.

 

Nobody knows where to sit.

 

The museums demand institutional seating. The artists insist they cannot be seated beside the galleries because of an unresolved invoice from Basel. The galleries refuse to sit beside the auction houses because apparently exploitation becomes vulgar when somebody else takes the commission. The auction houses insist they are merely providing market transparency and begin distributing catalogues. The universities have formed a working group to determine whether sitting down might reproduce colonial hierarchies of verticality. The working group requires funding. A symposium is announced.

 

The symposium is immediately oversubscribed.

 

By eleven, capitalism has hired counsel. Nobody remembers seeing it enter the building. It simply appears at the defence table wearing an immaculate navy suit and the expression of a man who has never personally signed anything. It denies knowing most of the defendants. Colonialism claims to have retired. Imperialism has rebranded itself as international development and asks the court to use its preferred terminology. Globalisation insists it was merely networking. The British Empire says everybody should calm down because they built railways. Belgium has stopped answering questions entirely.

 

The missionaries are furious. They insist they brought literacy. Somebody from the back shouts, “And what did you take?” and suddenly six centuries of ecclesiastical administration begin checking their watches.

 

By noon the air conditioning fails.

 

This is when civilisation starts to smell. The cultural economy sweats through its linen. Foundation makeup begins sliding off the faces of museum trustees. Dealers remove their jackets and reveal enormous damp continents beneath their armpits. Lawyers breed in the corridors. Gallerists drink communion wine directly from the bottle. Anthropologists are fighting missionaries beside a vending machine that accepts only contactless payment. Three museum trustees attempt to escape through an air-conditioning duct with a Benin Bronze wrapped in somebody’s blazer. A curator catches them halfway through and asks whether the intervention is site-specific.

 

Nobody laughs.

 

The curator writes it into a funding application anyways.

 

Outside, the sun has turned the car park into a skillet. Journalists are collapsing beneath ring lights. Camera crews fight over extension sockets. Protestors fight counter-protestors. Counter-protestors begin selling refreshments to protestors. Somebody erects a VIP tent. Within twenty minutes it has corporate sponsorship. Within forty minutes there is a champagne reception inside it discussing the urgent need to dismantle systems of exploitation. A protest is planned.

 

The champagne is sponsored. The union workers serving it are not invited to the panel. At twelve-thirty the catering arrives:

 

This causes the first genuine riot.

 

There are four thousand vegan wraps for approximately nine thousand defendants and suddenly every ethical position developed since the Enlightenment collapses beside a tray of hummus. Museum directors elbow interns away from sandwiches. Critics conceal bananas inside tote bags. Two blue-chip dealers fight over the final sparkling water while screaming about scarcity. Somebody attempts to establish a secondary market in lunch vouchers. Sotheby’s announces that the final falafel wrap has exceeded its high estimate.

 

Then God arrives.

 

Not Renaissance God, drifting through clouds with immaculate skin and suspiciously European bone structure. Not tasteful God. Not catalogue-essay God.

 

Old Testament God. Furious God. Administrative God. God with a somewhat strange resemblance to Jules Winnfield. Seriously? A pulp-fiction reference on judgement day? It really is the end of days.

 

The heavens split open above the aircraft hangar and there He is, descending through thunder carrying several thousand pages of outstanding provenance queries. Nobody is certain which pronouns to use, and the universities immediately establish another working group.

 

God does not appear interested.

 

He wants receipts.

 

The first bolt of lightning strikes the VIP tent. The second hits the gift shop. The third somehow leaves the gift shop intact because apparently even divine judgement understands revenue diversification. Sulphur begins falling into the valet parking.

 

Lot’s wife turns to salt beside the catering tent and before her husband can finish screaming somebody from an auction house has stuck a red dot on her. Sotheby’s announces an estimate. Christie’s disputes the attribution. A private collector requests a condition report. Getty photographs her from six angles and invoices the newspapers before the smoke clears. African Pictures asks whether there is an Africa territorial restriction. A curator crawls through the ash whispering that the transformation raises fascinating questions around materiality, permanence and the archive. Taschen offers her a book deal.

 

Somewhere, inexplicably, a panel discussion begins:

 

'SALT / BODY / MEMORY: RETHINKING LOT’S WIFE IN THE POST-DIGITAL T(URN).

 

Standing room only.

 

By two in the afternoon the proceeding has become less Nuremberg and more Hieronymus Bosch commissioned by Human Resources. Naked lawyers wrestle in the mud for the final available nondisclosure agreement. Collectors beat one another with auction paddles. Dealers attempt to exchange contemporary art for bottled water and discover, perhaps for the first time in their professional lives, that nobody actually needs it. Curators crawl beneath tables clutching wall labels to their chests. Museum directors stand waist-deep in acquisition paperwork begging whichever deity handles cultural patrimony for retrospective immunity. A critic sits on a burning filing cabinet trying to finish a review before deadline.

 

The review calls the apocalypse “problematic but necessary.”

 

Three stars.

 

By three, the dead have begun arriving.

 

This had not been anticipated by the organisers. The insurance apparently only covers living claimants.

 

Ancestors pour through the doors. People whose photographs were taken without names. People measured by anthropologists. People photographed as specimens. People whose jewellery sits behind glass. People whose masks became movements. People whose songs became publishing catalogues. People whose bodies became ethnographic evidence. People whose skulls crossed oceans inside labelled boxes. People whose labour-built fortunes that later became philanthropic foundations, museums, universities and tasteful little plaques thanking the family for its extraordinary generosity.

 

Suddenly the defendants stop looking at the cameras.

 

The room gets very quiet.

 

For approximately eleven seconds.

 

Then somebody from communications asks whether the institution can release a statement.

 

By four, the statements have begun.

 

‘We acknowledge’.

 

‘We recognise’.

 

‘We are listening’.

 

‘We remain committed’.

 

‘We understand there is more work to do’.

 

The language floats above the burning hangar like air freshener sprayed into an open grave.

 

God checks the clipboard.

 

“The path of the righteous man—”

 

The intern grabs Him by the coattails.

 

“Not yet, sir. We haven’t even gotten to film.” We are still several centuries behind schedule! Why the fuck is God Samuel L. Jackson?

 

The judge has aged visibly. His wig is grey with ash. His clerk has developed a drinking problem. The stenographer has worn through three keyboards. The jury has started sleeping in shifts. Somebody asks how much longer proceedings are expected to take.

 

A historian laughs so hard they need medical attention. Because we have not even reached photography yet.

 

Bring another packed lunch. Bring cigarettes. Bring a sleeping bag. Bring your charger. Bring blood-pressure medication. Bring enough underwear for the collapse of several empires. Tell your wife you will be home sometime after conceptual art. Put the dog in boarding. Cancel Christmas.

 

We are going to be here for a fucking while!

 

Because once extraction itself is dragged into the dock rather than merely its newest silicon bastard, the queue begins somewhere around the plantation and disappears backwards through modernity. Sugar. Cotton. Rubber. Tobacco. Gold. Diamonds. Oil. Land. Bodies. Photographs. Songs. Masks. Textiles. Stories. Labour. Memory. Data. Different century, different invoice. Take a fucking number.

 

And still they come. The plantation owner arrives insisting he merely increased productivity. The colonial administrator says he was following policy. The museum says standards were different then. The corporation says the supply chain is complicated. The advertising agency says the campaign tested extremely well. The platform says it merely hosts the content. The algorithm says nothing because, inconveniently, it cannot speak.

 

The owners speak for it.

 

Funny, that.

 

By sunset Sodom is burning. Gomorrah is burning. The courthouse roof has collapsed. The VIP tent is somehow hosting an afterparty. Half the defendants have fled. The other half are networking. Somebody has turned the apocalypse into an installation. Somebody else has minted it. A collector asks whether the flames are editioned.

 

The gift shop remains open. Of course, the fucking gift shop remains open.

 

And when the courthouse finally gives way, when the museums are smoking ruins, when the lawyers have eaten the last vegan wrap, when the auctioneer has sold the table, the chairs and eventually the hammer with which the judge was supposed to deliver the verdict, when Picasso has stopped sweating, the missionaries have stopped explaining, the registrars have run out of records to swallow and Lot’s wife has been flipped twice at auction, there will still be some unpaid intern standing knee-deep in ash at the gates of history, clipboard singed, shoes melted, lanyard fused permanently into the flesh of their neck, nervously shouting:

 

“NEXT!”

 

Someone nudges me in the back.

 

I am back in church, and holding up the line for the communion wine.

 

No burning courthouse. No St Peter. No Getty lawyers. No Picasso. No Silicon Valley gleefully making snow angels in the accumulated blood of human civilisation. Just Christ hanging above the altar, the priest talking about salvation, and the mechanic behind me presumably wondering whether the Blood of Christ has enough industrial solvent in it to wash lunchtime adultery off his cock before he gets home, kisses his wife, hugs the kids and asks what’s for dinner.

 

Perhaps we were all on trial after all.

 

I have apparently missed most of Revelation.

 

Probably for the best.

 

I drink the wine, genuflect and thank God for His first observable miracle of the morning: somehow putting me ahead of the mechanic in the queue. I am under no illusion that my own paperwork is clean, but if St Peter is working alphabetically by moral depravity, I would appreciate getting through customs before the man behind me has to declare what he did on his lunch break.

 

The congregation rises. I rise half a second later, performing the ancient Catholic sacrament of pretending I knew we were supposed to stand. Somebody says something about deliverance. My stomach responds with the morning’s clearest profession of faith: Lord, deliver me unto a fucking sausage roll and an ice-cold Coca Cola.

 

I look around the church.

 

Same pews. Same altar. Same little hall where the NA meetings happen during the week.

 

Ah.

 

Perhaps that was the revelation.

 

Not the Beast. Not the Seven Seals. Not Getty at the gates of Heaven trying to license photographs of the apocalypse.

 

After several thousand words putting everyone else on trial, perhaps it was finally time to take my own sad little inventory.

 

Tuesday. Seven o’clock:

 

Hi, my name is Adilson.

 

And apparently, I should start going to meetings again.