The Orbital Phase

The art market has passed into its orbital phase. Like global debt that will never be paid, auction prices circulate in a parallel universe where consequences no longer apply. Sixty-seven million for a Van Gogh. One hundred forty million for a Bacon. The figures are not prices in any classical sense — they are simulations of prices, pure signs that have broken free from any referent in use, in beauty, in cultural necessity.

They refer only to each other, rising at twenty thousand dollars a second on some invisible Times Square billboard of accumulated speculation.

What was called "the market" required at least a fiction of exchange — someone wanting something someone else had. What exists now is something else entirely: a closed circuit of liquidity seeking temporary form, a financial weather system in which artworks are merely the occasions for storms.

The work itself has disappeared into its price. Its atmosphere —what it actually does to the air of a room, to the bodies that encounter it—is not even a rounding error in the transaction.

Nonterritorial does not propose to crash this system. It simply acknowledges what the system itself cannot: that the real has already disappeared from it. The orbital phase continues indefinitely, self-referential, immune to judgment day.

Meanwhile, something else becomes possible — not an anti-market, but a parallel universe of actual encounter, actual atmosphere, actual payment to those who make the work. A universe where value descends from orbit and touches ground again. Where the work is not a sign of itself but a quasi-thing that changes the air it inhabits. The market can continue its eternal flight. We build on earth.