World Building.

You’ve probably seen this painting before. This is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus  Bosch, an artist that truly believed in hell. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on oak panels, 205.5 cm × 384.9 cm (81 in × 152 in)

Little is known about Bosch’s life. His career, spanning 1470 to 1516 in modern day Netherlands, straddled the end of late medieval Europe and the beginning of the humanist revolution. The discovery of the new world and the spreading European renaissance would shake up long held understandings of morality, belief, and the meaning of life, but not for Bosch. A devout catholic, Bosch was still subsumed by the biblical realm. A world of narratives and torment beyond comprehension. Hence, in his eponymous triptych, Bosch depicts the fall of man. The first panel depicts The Garden of Eden in which God presents Eve to Adam amongst a backdrop of tranquility. Animals roam the plains of Eden in moral innocence, drinking and preying on each other. Many of which still lacked anatomically accurate depictions, explaining the surreal appearance of the giraffe and what may be a Turkey. Despite the serenity, tension hangs over the garden. Adam looks lustfully upon Eve. Eve glances down in shame. A single fruit lay on the ground to Adam’s right as a snake descends a tree in the background. All while God gazes directly out at the viewer, a foreshadowing of the judgement to come.  

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Central Panel 

What exactly is depicted in the central panel has been long debated. Most agree that it is a continuation of Eden, not from the biblical perspective, but rather the human perspective. Characterizing utopia as a world of endless pleasure, the sin of lust. No children or elderly are to be found in the scene, just nude, young adults partaking in orgiastic pleasure. Answering God’s question from Genesis “Who told you that you were naked?” with a simple “nobody… not yet at least". Fruits are depicted in monstrous proportion signaling endless abundance. Humans shamelessly play, dance, converse, and bath. There is no structure to this world, no power games being played or authority to answer to, just dopaminergic joy. This is a life we all want. One without stress, competition, and mortality. Forever young and free to fuck and indulge without consequence. Sadly, humans aren’t utopic ideals, we’re dirty animals. The original sin of self awareness has made us cunning, jealous, and status seeking beasts. This Garden of Earthly delights is a world free of responsibility, and therefore, a world devoid of meaning. Chasing the pleasure depicted here would lead us down a dark path of hedonism and eventual suffering, this brings us to the third and final panel.  

The Garden of Earthly Delights, third panel

Devoid of color and joy, the third panel depicts the consequences of lust. Cast all around the frame are the dead or tortured bodies of humans, eaten by the very animals they once frolicked with. Musical instruments are used as torture devices referencing the Christian superstition of music’s corrupting power. Depicted on one body is accurate sheet music posthumously titled “Butt Song From Hell”. Many of the previously shameless people attempt to cover themselves for they are now not only aware of their nudeness, but also the folly of their behavior. Sitting center frame is what seems to be a self portrait of Bosch himself painted as a tree man. His face held at an angle common with artists' self portraits. Within his torso are men drinking and gambling at a tavern, perhaps signaling his own internal struggles with lust and addiction, but regardless of our readings, this is hell. This isn’t an allegory of hell, this isn’t symbolic of the concept of suffering. This is a depiction of hell from a man who truly believed in eternal damnation and the consequences of sin, but what’s fascinating is what happens when you close the three panels together. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Exterior

Pictured on the exterior of the paintings is the world during creation, probably on the third day. Before God’s addition of humans to earth but after plant life was added. The shutting of the triptych revealing the third day of creation creates a closed circuit. An internal narrative logic where man is created, sins, and falls into the depths of hell. This narrative richness has cemented Garden of Earthly Delights as a seminal work in the western art canon right alongside the Sistine Chapel and Mona Lisa. A painting you can fully disappear into as you become subsumed by subliminal narrative and hyperreal imagery. A perfect example of world building. 

Internal Realism 

World building is a concept familiar to anyone who has ever engaged with fiction at least once. So rather than do the video essay thing of over explaining a basic idea to fill runtime, I’m going to paraphrase someone who did it better. 

In A Closer Look’s video where he compares the mechanics of Skyrim to Hideo Kajima’s Death Stranding, he perfectly illustrates what makes a believable world, something he calls “internal realism”. In Skyrim there are thousands of mechanics, many of which aren’t fleshed out in a way that makes sense. For example, there’s a spell called transmute that gives the player the ability to transmute iron ore into gold. Skyrim’s economy is based on gold pieces, meaning that, were this spell to be used by anyone besides the player, they could single handedly crash the economy by literally printing money. Causing hyperinflation the likes of which would put Venezuela to shame. This lack of foresight for the implications of game mechanics breaks the game's internal realism. It makes the world unbelievable. Contrast Skyrim with Death Stranding, and the differences in world building become painfully obvious. 

Rather than having thousands of shallow, gimmicky mechanics like Skyrim, Death stranding has a few that the game explores in painstaking depth. In Death Stranding the rain rapidly ages everything it touches, a mechanic called “time fall”. If the rain touches your hair it goes grey, if it touches your skin you wither into an elderly person, a mechanic that has massive implications for Death Stranding's universe. For example, the game takes place in a post apocalyptic America but the terrain looks nothing like the US. There are no trees, forests, or bushes, just grass and moss. This is because time fall has aged any tree or bush out of existence, not allowing them to grow, leaving only grass and moss the ability to grow for a few days before it inevitably rains again, killing everything. This mechanic is never explained to you or shoved down your throat, it just exists because it makes sense to the world's internal realism. A Closer Look also points out that people have utilized time fall to speed up production of crops, illustrated by a brewery that selectively exposes its barley to rain in order to mass produce beer. Again, something that just exists within the world because it just makes sense. Like Bosch with his illustrated sin of lust,  Death stranding creates a vacuum tight seal. The world is contained with no logical leaps or lapses, but unlike Bosch, Kojima doesn’t believe in the world he created, it’s fictional.

The Garden of Earthly Delights isn’t a fictional game world, it’s a reality that Bosch genuinely believes in, along with any good God fearing Catholic at the turn of the 15th century. Bosch is expressing real fear of eternal damnation the same way a cave painting of a bear attacking people is expressing real fear. This painting isn’t some machination to express how seeking dopamine will leave one feeling empty. This is saying that if you commit objective sin you will go to literal hell.  Knowing this, what if we take the concept of world building and flip it around? Instead of using internal realism to project inward and create a self contained universe, we employ world building techniques to project outward. Creating art that holds a mirror to the reality we already exist within, exploring and articulating preexisting aspects of life and society. It is here that we find the true purpose of art, a communication tool that reflects something about the society in which it was created. Whether that be religious beliefs, existential warnings, or ideals of power. 

Manifest Destiny

During the late 18th and early 19th century, visual art was shifting away from the aristocratic decadence of the rococo style and into something more highminded and idealistic. The first excavations of ancient Roman sites like Herculaneum and Pompeii had thrust classic Greco-Roman art into public consciousness, inspiring the anthropologist Johann Jaochim Winckelmann to create a chronology of ancient classical art. His book History of the Art of Antiquity is considered to be one of the first modern works of history. Proposing a grand theory of the purpose of art and detailing ancient Greek and Roman art from inception to collapse. Most importantly, Winckelmann suggested that the goal of art was beauty, not subjective beauty in the eye of the beholder but objective beauty. The ancients were searching and attempting to encapsulate what they believed to be universal ideals. Evident through not only the Greek obsession with form and harmony, but also the Greek’s philosophical fixation on absolute truth. An artist mimics this by subordinating individual style to the pursuit of universal forms. On this Winckelmann would say 

“One way for us to become great, perhaps inimitable, is by imitating the ancients.”

Winckelmann’s theory of art’s purpose would ripple throughout European culture, inspiring his friend, an artist known as Anton Raphael Mengs, to pivot into a more classical style. Starting the movement we now know as neoclassicism. Winckelmann advised Mengs for his 1761 ceiling fresco Parnassus, encouraging him to keep the form simple and the figures static, drawing influence from frescos Mengs had seen during his trips to Pompeii. All in an attempt to imitate the ancients obsession with universal beauty. Neoclassicism would become the dominant art movement, serving as a morally instructive art that preached virtue through historical examples and form rather than catering to individual taste. This is all happening during the European enlightenment. A time when reason, rationality, and science reigned supreme, reflected in the moral authority of neoclassicism. Chief among the neoclassicists was Jacques Louis David, a man who would become the illustrator of the French revolution. 

Oath of the Horatii, Jacques Louis David, 1784

In his 1784 work Oath of the Horatii, David depicts three brothers agreeing to sacrifice their lives to save Rome from an imminent war. An image that became a paragon of masculine self sacrifice and enlightenment ideals. Sticking with neoclassical form, the lines are sharp, the palette is somber, and the message is clear. What’s interesting about this piece though is how its themes of sacrifice for the state were ultimately co-opted by the revolution. As the revolutionary vibes loomed on France, art began to shift from championing the church to worshiping the state and the monarchy in a bid to reinforce state power. David was commissioned to paint Oath by the King’s assistant while he was staying at the Louvre with direct permission from King Louis XVI. He was instructed to create a work that would inspire loyalty to the state and the monarchy, but David departed from the original task, choosing instead to move to Rome and finish the piece. Filling the canvas with scenes of fraternal loyalty and brotherhood, communicating that we control our destiny through sacrifice for the greater good. We must put our lives on the line for what we believe in. At first glance, the piece seems to preach loyalty to the state like the commissioners intended but the painting's ambiguity is ultimately what made it so powerful.

What’s reflected here in our world building frame is the belief in destiny and the use of mythology and religion to expound agency and free will, core principles of enlightenment thinking in the late 18th century. From the inception of neoclassicism by Winkelmann, we witness the a shift towards a more secular pragmatism in Western European society and the beginning of modernism. David would go on to paint masterworks like Napoleon Crossing the Alps, The Death of Marat, and The Coronation of Napoleon. Using the neoclassical style and symbolism. David represents self sacrifice for higher ideals while glorifying the revolutionary mantra of Liberty, Equality, and fraternity. There’s something super natural about David’s work, it’s not explicitly religious but it clearly believes in itself, it believes there’s a point to all of “this”, a goal to reach. This is what people believed in at the time, this was the meta-narrative of 19th century France. Self sufficiency as a tool for manifesting destiny has basically created the western world, but it’s also an isolating force. 

As the 19th and 20th century unfolded, self sufficiency became selfishness outright. The uniting principals that once built our collective mythos gave way to bootstrap capitalism and self exploitation in service of chasing the bag. Our third places began to disappear, the public sphere corroded, and we became evermore isolated from each other. What then is the art which holds a mirror to this reality? Who is the artist that projects a world of modern loneliness and social isolation? In our world building journey we jump forward to the early 20th century to discuss an artist famous for being bleak, although he hated those allegations. None other than Edward Hopper. 

Fundamental loneliness 

Hopper's world-building centers on constructing a visual architecture of modern loneliness and secular isolation. Unlike David's heroic neoclassical world of civic virtue, Hopper builds a reality where destiny is dead, leaving only anxiety and in its place. His paintings don't just depict loneliness, they construct an entire universe where isolation is the fundamental condition of existence.

Soir Bleu (detail) Edward Hopper, 1914

Hopper’s work, created mostly between the 1920s and 1960s, has a landscape-like quality. Even when figures are present, they have no dynamism. They lack the strong verticality of David’s moral imperatives. Rather, they fade into the background, holding the same weight and value as any other object in the frame. The harsh light and horizontal lines paired with the voyeuristic point of view give the viewer a feeling of bleakness, like the liminality of a vision test or a dead mall. Works like A Room in New York and Office in a Small City paint an image of an incurably lonely life. Created during the late modern period in America, Hopper’s work reflects the viewer's life back at them. Hopper isn’t painting what ought to be, he’s painting what already is.  this is you, alone in your room or office, sitting in front of your computer, not doing much of anything.

Office in a Small City, Edward Hopper, 1953

This lack of progress is a reflection of mid 20th century America. Not in a literal sense, the 20th century is marked by technological progress unprecedented at any other point in history, but this technological progress is what’s key to understanding Hopper’s work. Hopper lived at 3 Washington Square in Manhattan from 1913 until his death in 1967. He saw the mass introduction of the automobile, the replacing of man with machines in factories, the great depression, world war II, and mass suburbanization in the 1950s, all of which he painted from a front row seat of modernity. 1927’s Automat and 1931’s Hotel Room are snapshots of the psychological fallout caused by the stock market crash. 1942's Nighthawks was finished weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor while New York was running blackout drills to prepare for a potential air raid. Hence why the streetlights are off, leaving only the light from the diner in which patrons ponder wartime anxiety over a late night coffee. And 1953's Office in a small city isn’t an accidental scene, it's a reflection of suburbanization as people moved away from big cities and life became private and domestic. Beginning 50s culture we associate with the quiet desperation of drunk, abusive fathers and valium addicted mothers. The stasis hopper painted isn’t a reflection of the material conditions of the 20th century, but the spiritual conditions. With all the growth of the 20th century, society has regressed spiritually, we’ve become lonelier and more isolated than ever, this is the world that hopper is building, the world he’s reflecting. 

What’s important about Hopper is that these paintings aren’t a judgement, these paintings are life as it is. they aren’t patronizing the audience, they aren’t screaming in your face “HEY, the way we think about life in the West? It’s bad, it’s EVIL”. They simply represent stasis, free from the deep cynicism we have come to associate with art that is critical of modern life. To find that cynicism, we have to progress further. To the late 20th century when moral bankruptcy had begun to take its toll. If Bosch Truly believed in God, and Hopper truly believed in loneliness, then our next artist truly believed in evil. 

Pragmatic Evil

Gigantomachy II, Leon Golub, 1966

After finishing university in Chicago, a young artist named Leon Golub moved with his wife Nancy to Paris to study masterworks and ancient sculpture, the very same works that David studied during his stint at the Louvre. Golub was inspired to paint the brutality of man. Raw violence in its purest form. His early 60s works like the Gigantomachy series are in direct conversation with Greek relief sculptures of wrestlers, with their platonic ideals of aggression and power, but something fundamental was eating at Golub. After moving back to the US during the height of the Vietnam war, Golub saw unfolding on the news, not abstract images of the idea of violence, but real violence. Men in uniform torturing and being tortured, mass graves and crimes against humanity. Faced with the realism of war, his work began to feel opulent. When asked about his work after returning to the US he would say “It became embarrassing. I was painting guys struggling with each other; an aggressive, male kind of power, they were nude, not in uniform and fighting with their hands.” It is here in the late 1960s that Golub’s work takes a dramatic and brutal shift. 

Vietnam II (detail), Leon Golub, 1973

By the early 1970s, Golub was painting almost journalistic paintings of Violence. His work Vietnam II is complete with men in uniform, tanks, and terrified civilians, reflecting to the viewer that evil is real and it’s happening right now. There are no winners or losers, and America specifically is not justified nor is it seeking a higher ideal, there is only irrational brutality. Similar to Hopper’s scenes of modern American loneliness, Golub isn’t making a judgement. These paintings aren’t moral prescriptions or warnings, they just are. They represent the post-modern death of meta-narratives that characterized philosophical and political thought in the late 20th century. On this he would say  "The actions that I paint are incipient: they could take place under almost any circumstances. Political violence and political interrogation can happen anywhere. "

Mercenaries II, Leon Golub, 1979

Golub doubled down on what he called “brutal realism” as the Vietnam war came to an end. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Golub’s Mercenaries, Interrogation, and White Squad series directly engaged with Cold War brutality, U.S. foreign interventions, and the normalization of torture and political violence. Golub’s work deliberately implicated viewers, forcing them to confront their own complicity in systems of power. Paintings to show that evil is no longer a moral category but simply another tool of control. When asked who the people in his paintings are, Golub replied “You and me. You can be on one side of the other. You can be on the ground as a victim or you can be the guy holding the gun to the victim’s head. Given the circumstances, any of us could play different roles”.

Interrogation II, Leon Golub, 1981

Golub painted some of his greatest works, the interrogation series, on the heel of the 1980s during a period when American power structures were revealing their most brutal realities. The Iran-Contra Affair (1985-1987) exposed how government officials operated completely outside legal and moral frameworks, secretly funding death squads while lying to Congress and the American people. Simultaneously, the crack epidemic was devastating American cities, with murder rates doubling in affected communities and creating a permanent state of violence. In Central America, U.S.-backed death squads were killing 800 people per month during the early 1980s, while income inequality reached levels not seen since the 1920s. These weren't aberrations, they were the normal functioning of late capitalist power structures. Golub's mercenaries and interrogators weren't fantastical monsters; they were portraits of how power actually operated when traditional moral restraints had completely collapsed. It’s here, in the full embrace of moral collapse, that we move onto our final artist, or should I say art movement. 

Return on Investment. 

Rather than cover a singular artist, I’m going to cover a movement. This movement has gone by many names, neo-pop art, pop-street art, and other monikers that aim to legitimize it. I’m going to call it something different, a name that perfectly encapsulates the ethos of this movement, the ROI Movement. Return on investment. 

Ballon Dog (Blue), Jeff Koons, 2021

The sales of ultra-contemporary artists have exploded over 300% from 2019 to 2021. Artists like Romero Britto, Richard Orlinski, Damien Hirst, Murikami, George Condo, KAWS, Jeff Koons, and Kasing Lungs Labubu toys. The significance of these artist’s works are measured by their hype and resale value. They are created like a business through brand identity rather than artistic vision or commentary. Repeatable motifs that can be reproduced across multiple price points and objects, similar to the Louis Vuitton monogram or the Nike swoosh. You can buy into the artist with a $15 dollar t-shirt or a multimillion dollar original sculpture, allowing all classes of people to participate. These artists exist in a super-position between low class street culture and high art. Their work is endlessly propagated in sneaker stores, luxury street wear collabs, Rodeo Drive, and Brickell in Miami. These objects spread virally through social media as simulations of status and paragons of desire, and what they reflect about the culture which created them is the fact that only hype matters, nothing else.

Labubu Dolls advertisement. 

Lisa, a member of the K-pop group Blackpink, was spotted wearing a Labubu keychain in April 2024. A year later and the American website is fully sold out, leaving only eBay markups and resellers. Romero Britto got his break with an Absolute Vodka collab in the late 80s. His work is now prebuilt into new luxury condos as a selling point. Orlinksi’s sculpture “La Poan” was chosen as the centerpiece of the Masion Albar hotel chain. Critics and curators have referred to this as “hotel lobby art”, ostentatious decoration that exists to increase the perceived status of the building.  A feature that clearly lessens the merit of the work, but that doesn’t matter, this work doesn’t have to have merit, it makes money. In an Orwellian fashion, these artists come and go leaving barely a memory of their existence, pumped and dumped like a memecoin or NFT. Like a casino economy, the value of these art objects are their ability to produce more value. 

"contemporary art value is driven by the extension of market principles rather than by art itself"     - anonymous

We're witnessing the fossilization of a culture that has ceased to believe in anything except its own capacity to generate value. -anonymous

Contemporary capitalism dematerialized as financialization now comprises a naturalized ambience that is both everywhere and nowhere - Alex Gawronski 

ROI art is reflective of culture's lack of belief in itself. A culture void of Bosch’s religion or David’s Destiny, a culture that has moved through Hopper’s isolation and Golub’s evil. A culture that not only accepts the worship of capital, but one where capital worship is the highest ideal, analogous to the morality and theology artists used to preach. A culture propagated through deterritorialized hype moments and aura. A culture that is fed back to us recursively through social media which we swallow and regurgitate back to the world, always a few degrees of separation from our true desires and tastes. A culture where every interaction with someone feels like they just watched a tik tok on how to act like a human. In a simulation culture, nothing is real, you don’t know who you are, nobody does. Our desires are hijacked by social media posts and our personalities are a coagulation of trends. In a world of actors, the art acts like art, we act like people, but everything is less real than it used to be. A copy of a copy of a copy, recursively propagating itself. The pieces of us there, but they no longer make a whole.  

Mausoleums of Truth 

When you go to a museum or a gallery, you’re not just looking at art. The frame holds the artifact but also  acts like a window into a past where people used to believe in something. Galleries are mausoleums of truth, showing us who we used to be and what we’ve lost. We look at a David or a Hopper and gawk at the fact that these men believed in something, these men were reflecting the society that produced them, this is the true purpose of art. All art is reflective of the culture that produced it. Whether it’s the recursive void of the ROI movement or the deep belief in Moral imperatives of the neoclassicists. Art is world building, art made in a world that lacks belief still reflects something fundamental about culture, even if that culture is built on the consequences of post-modernism and post-truth. A culture that used to believe in its own future. Perhaps culture is a train going off a cliff, but rather than trying to stop the train, we’re trying to upgrade to first class. 

Similar to Bosch’s garden, we worship ourselves and our own happiness, a world free of responsibility to something bigger than ourselves, and therefore, void of meaning. We are in the third panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, reaping what we sowed. For Bosch, an artist who truly believed in hell, we’re already there.