Reality TV is the opiate of the masses. Expanding waistbands and compressed sofa springs. Junk food and junk sitcoms. We see the stars from here, gazing into a gilded future of our own construction. We follow in the footsteps of celebrities and drop-outs, visionaries and maniacs, dream-weavers and hope-destroyers. They teach us to have dreams but keep the doors under lock and key, greased up like a palm and impenetrable as a fortress. We claw at the entrance, shivering in the cold of night and stamping on each other to get to the front. We are living the dream, supported by nothing but the stream of cultural waste being pumped down every airwave. Slack-jawed, uninformed and hopeless, we’re taught to chase the ever-receding rainbow.

Culture is a black hole, the seething mass in the centre of it all so self-absorbed and all-encompassing that once you fall in, you’ll never get back out. It’s dragging us all in – luring us with lurid details about its listless output and tempting us with the false carrot of riches dangled in front of our faces – and most of us don’t even see it happening. Genuine, raw creativity is lost forever, translated from dead languages and left floating in the void of nothingness.

Sometimes – just sometimes – something real is brought to the attention of the gate-keepers. They hold in it in their hands like a historic artifact, a powerful weapon that cannot be allowed to enter the confines of their self-consuming, all-attracting mass. The answer is simple: defile it, rape it, destroy it, twist it, contort it, re-arrange it, mangle it and strangle the last drop of humanity from it. Only then is it ready, slapped with a quick-fix paint-job and cranked out to coincide with peak shopping times. The money is all that matters – if you don’t comply, your art can’t even drown in the void of culture, it must starve in the belly of anonymity.

The corridors of power are wall-papered with profit, carpeted in the blood of dissenters and kept alive by fear. They power the machinery of the system, hide the broken cogs from the outside world and desperately strain to convince us that it’s all for our own good. The heart is decaying, being eaten alive by bribery and threats, and the soul – the culture that is supposed to empower the masses to think – it’s turned against us for the same reason. Thought does not equal profit; thinking “why” makes you not want to buy. We’re in the market for stupid. Otherwise who is going to pay for the lavish holidays, the home extensions and the privileged lifestyles we enjoy? If we encourage them to think, then they’ll realize that they’ve been trapped in our cultural void all of this time. They might leave us to rot here alone.

The trick – the savior that shows you how things truly are – is to be a citizen of the world.

There are no boundaries if you step out of the ones you’ve built for yourself. The further away you are from your own surroundings, the more they fall into view, like the patchwork collection of pixels on your TV screen which only turns into a picture when you look from afar. This is where the vision comes from. There the scene paints itself before your eyes; you see the twisted reality of it all, the pre-designated ups-and-downs, the loops, the track laid out for the ride we’re not supposed to realize we’re on.

That’s the picture art is supposed to paint. That is the cosmic cleaver we need to massacre our facile and diseased culture, to cut it into pieces and disseminate it into the wider universe where it can be dissolved, destroyed and re-built in an image of how things really are.

That’s how we will escape…