First published in 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” became more of a phrase than a thesis in my fleeting encounters with it. Never elaborated upon by students & their academic supervisors, The End of History was served up mid-sentence, as if history & the future had all played out. The hope was that the Hansels & Gretels of the world would take the breadcrumbs to lead them out of the forest without trees & trees without a forest. The End of History was meant as the endgame in a string of phases of civilisation, from feudalism to capitalism to communism-kind of, leaving us with liberal democracy (in the West anyway). Liberal democracy is our best guess & bet for the present & future generations. We can’t see beyond its all-encompassing horizon, because we are presently drowning in it. We can’t escape capitalism’s lifebuoy, which forever hugs us to death & shapeshifts via technological developments as soon as we try to resist. We protest from time to time, but this is just catharsis disguised as criticism. Today, with more history in the rear-view mirror, the question of ‘End’s’ seems closer, more intimately entwined with the present. Can we say that social media is The End of Art? as we once knew it. Is this all there is, this virtual territory that doesn’t need any more deterritorialization, just acceptance, what we call the democratisation of art on Instagram? Is this just capitalism shapeshifting again? As liberal democrats we definitely like ways to totalise the world in representations, images & ideology. Artists are producers. If we are not producing, we are losers. Being an artist is about filling up what we insecurely perceive as a lack. Yet production subjugates seduction. I get now why Jean Baudrillard liked Warhol so much, & why he thought seduction is the opposite of production. As seducers we periodically produce & withdraw, whereas production alone, everything becomes—as Baudrillard puts it—“visible, & marked with the sign of effectiveness… this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our whole culture, whose natural condition is obscenity”.