MARK WILSON: DIE WITH THE MOST LIKES

Mark Wilson: (laughs) I get this question all the time. I'm not just eating fistfuls of pulverized animal parts on a daily basis. I enjoy it from time to time. My obsession with meat spawns from the comical nature of how we observe an animal in dissent or decay. For some reason, all these years ago, society decided: Hey, we're going to put pink spaghetti in plastic wrap and sell it to people at the grocery store.

It's a combination of both the hilariousness and absurdity of the product itself that triggers me because we are that exact thing that we are constantly consuming. We are essentially waiting for our own slaughterhouse. We are waiting for somebody to tag us with a discount sticker and bleed through the grill grates of a fourth of July cookout.

A while ago, we moved from Chicago to Indiana. Chicago was very, very vegan. Indiana is the opposite. People eat pork tenderloin sandwiches all the time. Every portion is like the size of your face. The amount of senseless consumption here is crazy.

MW: Consumption is relentless in America, it’s psychotic and full of madness in terms of just filling your insides with whatever you can.

Whether it’s the senseless accumulation of digital adoration or suffocating the desire to grow with feelings of regret, sadness, and nostalgia—the thoughts about a hometown you wish you had left or left, the memories of something you wanted to get away from but couldn't—are universal. Everyone has a horrible hometown. (laughs)

MW: It's the inevitable cycle of humanity. The things that you despise and wanted to get away from growing up are often the things that you find comfort in now. I certainly do. Fast-casual chain restaurants, doorbuster savings as adult bookstores, decorative popcorn tins, freshly paved strip mall parking lots and all sorts of different things in that realm. I truly enjoy those things because they are constructed for enjoyment. There's nothing challenging about them. That's what we crave most as humans: being comfortable. This craving contributes to our demise and lubricates the indifference to that demise. If you want to sit at a truckstop and eat biscuits smothered in adderall Mountain Dew, it's on you to do that.

In some ways, I enjoy misery tourism, like the state fair. Horribly constructed fairs go up overnight. They build shoddy rides and offer deep-fried everything. People just go there, get hammered drunk, and ride these dangerous attractions that were built overnight. I just go there and observe because it's a remarkable achievement to build a steel carrion for us insects to exist in. And spinning eternally in these rides is preferred to our stagnant life.

MW: Digital artists are purveyors of content that is consumed and barely digested. At the same time, we are creating and curating these beautiful and sad remarkable art pieces that people take a minute to think about versus the flavorless slopped force-fed through most social channels. We are the antithesis of celebrity influencers documenting bowel movements.

MW: People even just call me Die. When I met the artist Skyegolpe for the first time in Italy he said: Hey, Die! I wasn’t anticipating that. But I thought: Alright, cool! Roll with it! The entire weekend everyone was calling me Die. You would even hear it across the bar. Somebody would literally just scream: Die, come over here! It felt like a sequitur to my art. I am cool with it. I am cool with whatever anyone wants to call me though.

Mark Wilson: I think all of us know the feeling of being suffocated on a daily basis with ads promising salvation or family members barraging you with mundane issues that you don't want to deal with but are forced to interact with. Our entire existence is based on transactions. We're born to transact. We sit around and wait for the next transaction. At some point, I was really frustrated about the tragedy of that prescribed existence and made art about it. I drew old people lying in hospital beds being kept alive by little bits of adoration that were flying in from oxygen machines and heart monitors. The only reason they were still alive were the random acts of worship they received from strangers on the internet. I found that piece to be powerful. I became obsessed with the idea that if we didn't accumulate enough likes on any given day, we would be slaughtered and fed to the next generation of influencers.

It’s holding up an absurdist mirror to our own perpetual self-flagelation and the meaningless achievements that we're compulsively celebrating through digital adoration. My obsession with holding us accountable for that ultimately fuels the name Die with the most likes. I want to bring people back to reality.

MW: That was such a funny incident. I sold an NFT for 30,000 $RARE on SuperRare, the Walmart crucifixion. The piece sold in Rare, their Token but the bot from SuperRare made a mistake and tweeted the price in ETH. I was the second highest selling artist in NFTs next to Beeple. It was hilarious because people reached out to me asking whether this was real. I had my moment of validation and played along with it on Twitter. It was very comical.

MW: Yes, it's a combination. The process itself is both writing and drawing. So generally, I write short pieces of prose. I start out with five or six lines of prose or poetry, and then I’ll make the piece. After the piece is done, I hone in on the exact human emotion that I want to extract from it or the experience in my life that I want to distill in that piece, and then I am able to build on that with the prose that I write. This is also such a vital part of self-exploration.

MW: You're not wrong. The prompts that I write dictate the stroke of the pen or the brush, and vice versa. Those brush strokes also dictate the final words that I write that accompany the piece. I find some art to be so incredible when it has no description because it's completely subjective. You look at it, and you can elaborate your own emotions: happiness, sadness, or regret. For me personally, without the writing, a piece is not complete in my mind. My artistic process isn't complete, either.

MW: My work is extremely sad, introspective, and remorseful. But at the same time, meditating on those feelings and the absurdist aspect of them creates light and a sense of humor. Not only do I want to plunge people into my world, my existence, and the retention pond that I birthed from, I want them to experience those feelings that I feel so heavily. As an artist and a creative, I tend to feel things a bit more intensely, so my main goal is to bring people into that world and submerge them in it.

With the sadness and decay in my pieces, I prefer that people laugh and find humor in their own existence, in the absurdity of our endless toil and things that don't really matter. We're all going through this shit together. To not laugh at it is to doom oneself in life. If you can't find humor in how stupid everything is, I think there's no possible way that you're going to thrive or live a fulfilling existence.

MW: It’s possible. It’s easy to take things too seriously. Especially post-pandemic. There is a weight to the world and a weight to existence, and you're constantly feeling like you're one step away from just becoming a skin sack on the ground. At this point, it appears that our bones and flesh prefer the soil to the sky. To examine that and to laugh is what makes us human.

MW: It has once been described as "poison candy." The contrast of happiness and sadness and using those super-bright colors to convey sadness same time, it’s a carnival, a fun land, but then there is all this horrific shit happening in there. I take people on a journey: you are drowned in the storyline, brought up by the beautiful colors, and then brought back down by the tragic happenings encompassed in the flesh of the piece.

MW: I think it would. All my pieces exist in the same universe. I tell stories about a not-too-distant future in which we succumb to our own stupidity and become lifeless transient meat blobs capable only of consumption.

MW: I am omnipresent, yes. (laughs) I just love sharing absurd, insane stories. People enjoy looking at things that I make as much as I enjoy making them. I've been creating things both digitally and physically for as long as I can remember. Digitally, I was making things and posting them on Instagram. And again and again, I only got 10 likes from porn spam bots. I never thought about that at all. It's difficult to describe happiness. It's been a wild ride so far.

MW: I had a conversation with someone the other day and they were complaining about Twitter engagement. I just said: Well, would you not be making art anyway? As much as I love people enjoying my art I would have made all of it regardless of if I had one follower or 50.000 followers. For all those years, that's what I was doing. I was just making stuff for friends and family and just joking around. I was born to create. That’s something that I have to do to get out of my head and have it realized on paper or iPad or through writing.

MW: No, not at all. I took high school art class, and I think I got a B minus. I have no artistic background, although I've probably done 15,000 hours on that iPad at this point. And probably an additional 10,000 hours plus just painting stuff that I wanted to paint. I 100% would have loved to take art classes and gone to art school, but it just wasn't in the cards at that point in my life.

MW: I read all the time. I read so many books. There wasn't an art museum in my hometown. There was only a museum where you could look at recreational vehicles.. Where I grew up, it was the pinnacle of artistic climax. So, I read all the time. Kafka, Michel Houellebecq, and Haruki Murakami Through their words, I developed my own style of writing. Those words also influenced the motion of my hand and the things that bled out of my pen.

MW: Yes, art brings me so much happiness. It's unbelievable. My assumed human state was to die alone doing something I despised. And then experience a sparsely attended funeral where people pick at a rapidly decaying fruit tray. I'm going to be creating stuff, regardless of anything else. That is the gasoline that fuels a dying flame another day.