The bright lemon light of the following morning—and the remembered promise of a new studio—blotted out any lingering sadness. I took the long walk back to my truck, taking in the leaves, the dappling light, and every new color of green. The trees shimmied and shook in the breeze, leaves flickering to the ground in bursts and rushes.

I kept thinking about Tyler’s question as I walked, whether or not I was one of them. The Carey Logan fans.

I didn’t like that phrase. I wasn’t a fan. I was more like a disciple.

This is it. This is the end: This is late-stage capitalism. My generation does not get to consider the things that other artists did. The 1950s, ’60s, ’70s—those photos I used to fetishize of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell in the Village—they’re a cruel joke to me now. I can’t imagine meeting with the Art Workers’ Coalition, like Lucy Lippard and Faith Ringgold did, and having demands—not the meeting, that I can imagine. Rather, it is the having of demands that I cannot fathom. What would we ask for? And—from whom?

Because—now—nothing exists outside the market. Everything I could ever afford was designed by sub-sub-contracted freelancers, manufactured by modern-day slaves, and shipped through oceans lined with trash by seasonal hourly workers whose schedule is controlled by a computer, whose commute is two hours each way, who are longing for health insurance, who will die in debt. I cannot imagine what it was like to resist before every emotion I had, including resistance, was commodified. What it was like before—before we dug our own graves? Or, maybe more accurately, before someone else dug them and we woke up inside? Imagining resistance feels like a dream I cannot quite remember.

There’s no avoiding it. We make work and it goes in the machine. If I don’t make the profit on the first sale, then somebody else does the second time it sells, the third and fourth times, and whenever, say, the content aggregator “cultural brand” occupying the glass tower they built over the grave of 11 Dutch sees an art-related traffic spike on the horizon for whatever the upcoming art fair might be. “Eight Women Painters You Should Know,” writes a penny-a-word freelancer working remotely for an anonymous advertising firm employed by the data contractor of the publicist of my gallery. Then it is reposted forever, until the end of time, accompanied by images of my paintings that don’t belong to me because I didn’t press the shutter, racking up money trees across the landscape of capital in which I am simply another thing to look at.

There are so many ways to exclude me from the profit margins.