Pop Art vs. Existentialism

In this essay, I will teach you two new things. One is a subsection of the entertainment world known as Pop Art, and the other is a branch of science called Existentialism. 

Pop Art is super weird and totally cool. Sometimes it makes you smile, sometimes it makes you shake your head dismissively. 

Existentialism, on the other hand, is a complicated and confusing tool of thought that only secluded men who wear robes equipped with enormous hoods that obscure their face can truly fathom. It is a theory that, when activated, generates a field of loser-ness around its practitioner.

Pop Art is big, colorful, and flashy, whereas Existentialism looks like a solid piece of gloom. Pop Art has diptychs everywhere, and lots of silk screens. But you can only tell that Existentialism is present because everyone starts to shriek. 

Imagine a tower-sized sculpture of Jean-Paul Sartre playing the lute, up in the Heavens. I don’t know how they installed it there — the cloud layer is not a firm foundation. Yet, now look and see Heidegger drinking a warm lager and posing with one arm flexing his muscle, like some chump that just came from the gym. He’s all sweaty.

Pop Art was originated by the Disney Corporation; or at least they bought the rights to proclaim this truth. Campbell’s Brillo Soup and Elvis Presley will never forget the junk that went into marketing so-called Readymades. 

Existentialism is even a relative of Pop Art. Pop Art is its mother, actually. They’re both fast and loose enough to enliven morning business meetings, they both blast rapid-fire sometimes, and both are undeniably dandy. This phenomenon is known as “a family resemblance”. I myself prefer existential atheism, because it’s the only movement that ordered a subscription to my biweekly Newsletter Against Peripheral Vision. 

I like Being, but I like Nothingness even better. I like Art because it’s both things rolled into one, like chocolate and peanut butter, or baloney and cheese on white bread. Take the guy I mentioned earlier, René Descartes, the inventor of audio CDs — imagine this dude sitting and thinking, and then believing that his ritual constitutes a state of “amness”, as in “I AM THAT I AM”, like he’s John Wayne or something. That’s why I find it useful to remember the equation “Subtract God from Descartes: he is an amateur; I’m tired of telling you this”. — That works in every situation. 

Also imagine Søren Kierkegaard kicking Descartes. This should help.

Existence preceded essence: that’s why everything’s messed up: Lo, it feels like good things take too long to reach you, while bad things keep on showing up uninvited. And when you’re stuck at a red stoplight, it never, ever will turn green.

To restate: Existentialism’s breakthrough idea was that the world was over before it even began. 

But the wasteland that we inhabit is still pretty nice. It has all sorts of new forms and colors appearing whenever you turn away. That’s why my favorite style of Art is popular opinion, the handiwork of propaganda; and my favorite threat is the existential kind, because I believe that you should go big or go home, and this eliminates two birds with the same shot. And both were phoenixes, which are supposed to be immortal; so that’s an accomplishment. (I wish I had titled this entry “The Stone in the Sling was the Law of the Lord”.)