The world has become so real that this reality is only bearable at the expense of perpetual denial. “This is not a world,” after “this is not a pipe,” Magritte’s surrealist denial of evidence itself – this double movement of, on one hand, the absolute and definite evidence of the world and, on the other hand, the radical denial of this evidence – dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world. We are not talking here about philosophical morals, we are not saying “the world is not what it should be” or “the world is not what it used to be.” The world is the way it is. Once transcendence is gone, things are nothing but what they are and, as they are, they are unbearable. They have lost every illusion and have become immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary. At the same time this unsurpassable reality does not exist anymore. It has no reason to exist for it cannot be exchanged for anything. It has no exchange value.

“Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?” – here is the leitmotif of our current culture. This only expresses the fact that the world is prey to reality and it is only bearable as radical denial. All this is logical: as the world can no longer be justified in another world, it needs to be justified here and now and to find strength in reality while purging itself of any illusion. At the same time, as the very result of this counter-transfer, the denial of reality as such grows.

For reality is no longer prey to its natural predators, it proliferates very much like an algae, or like the human species in general. The real grows like a desert.

“Welcome to the desert of the Real” (The Matrix).

Illusion, dreams, passion, madness, drugs but also artifice and simulacrum were the natural predators of reality. All these have lost their energy as if they were suffering from some incurable, surreptitious disease (that might very well be reality itself ). One needs then to find an artificial equivalent for them. Otherwise, once it has reached a critical mass, reality will spontaneously destroy itself. It will implode by itself – which it is already doing now, making room for the Virtual in all its forms.

The Virtual is the ultimate predator, the plunderer of reality. Reality has generated the Virtual as a kind of viral and self-destructing agent. Reality has become prey to virtual reality. The ultimate consequence of a process that started with the abstraction of objective reality and ends in integral reality.