The Artist

I, Scott, stood in my own cage now—a Tasmanian father trapped in a twisted fever dream of performance art. My face was a map of volcanic acne, each bump a landmark of my misfortunes, each pore a crater where confidence once bloomed. They called it art here at MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, but to me, it felt more like being ground into dust between the gears of something I couldn’t see but could feel pressing on my bones.

My job? To sit. Just sit. Sit there while crowds shuffled past, blinking like sheep confused by the moon. I was a living installation now, a body sold to the idea of itself, encased in glass as though I were precious—or perhaps something that needed to be kept out of the world, quarantined. I wasn’t sure anymore. My skin, full of pus and shame, gleamed in the fluorescent light. It hurt, but not as much as the silence of the spectators, their eyes grazing me like cattle over dead grass.

And let’s be honest, I was never going to win against the wall of vaginas or the electronic cow that endlessly pooed into a plexiglass tube just down the hall. Next to a pooing machine, my mere hunger paled into irrelevance. They could’ve hired anyone to sit here starving, but apparently my acne was what elevated it to art—turns out cystic embarrassment really speaks to the soul.

“Starving for art!” That’s what they called it. They hired me for my presence, my aura of a man who had been eaten alive by life and spat back out onto the sidewalk. Here, I wasn’t even eating sidewalks anymore—I was devouring nothing. They gave me a corner and a clock, and I was expected to disappear. The audience thought I was deep—spiritual, even. They marveled at my "dedication," the way my ribs began to stretch beneath the skin like fingers reaching for something just out of sight. But they misunderstood it all.

I wasn’t starving for art. I wasn’t starving for transcendence. I was just hungry. Hungry for something that wasn’t another smashed avo toast or the cold comfort of instant noodles in the dark. I wasn’t an artist. I was just a bloke too poor to be picky and too tired to pretend otherwise.

The guards? Oh, they were a laugh. Sat there with their meat pies and sausage rolls, keeping one eye on me and the other on their phones. They weren’t worried about me sneaking a bite of something. As if I could have found anything edible in this gilded hellhole. No, they were there for the spectacle, guarding me like some ancient treasure no one understood but wanted to make sure stayed in its box.

And then, as always, forty days passed. Forty days felt like a lifetime, but also like nothing at all. I was thinner now, my body a collection of raw angles, like a bad sculpture someone had abandoned halfway through. I waited for them to drag me out, to applaud the performance I didn’t understand myself. They would shove a stale sandwich in my hands and smile, thinking they’d done something profound. But the thing is, the longer I went on, the clearer it became that no one really cared. Not about me. Not about the art. The whole thing was a shadow of something grander, some deeper truth I could never touch.

It was about control. About holding back from the world until you vanished into a mirage of discipline and deprivation. But was that art? Was it worth it? Was my suffering supposed to say something, or was I just the unfortunate punchline of a joke nobody told me?

The crowds grew thinner. The days grew longer. Eventually, no one came at all. MONA moved on to its next curiosity. There was talk of a new exhibit—a panther, sleek and alive in ways I’d never been. They would love the panther. It would roar and they would listen. Its hunger would be real, sharp, immediate, understood.

I, on the other hand, was becoming a ghost. Fading. My acne felt like the only part of me that still had a voice, each swollen pimple screaming into the void. I wanted to scream with them, but I had no words, just a hollow kind of hunger that gnawed at me, not from my stomach, but from somewhere deeper. Somewhere older. There was a past—one that felt distant now, like an old coat you suddenly realize you left on a train years ago. I knew it existed, but damned if I could remember where. Maybe it was a time when my skin was clear, my belly full, and my kids still saw me as more than just the bloke in the glass box. But that past was like fog in a rearview mirror—blurred, unreachable.

One day, someone—an overseer? a manager?—noticed I hadn’t eaten in what must’ve been weeks. He leaned in, close enough that I could smell the sweat on his neck. “Why?” he asked, “Why keep going? No one cares.”

I blinked at him, feeling my throat dry, my skin tightening like a drum stretched too thin. The answer was simpler than anything he could have imagined, though maybe not as poetic as they wanted.

"I never found anything I liked," I whispered. And there it was—the great truth of my existence, ridiculous and tragic all at once. It wasn’t some grand artistic statement. I just never found anything worth the bite.

I think he understood then, in his own way. Or maybe he didn’t. It didn’t matter. Shortly after that, I died. Or at least, I think I did. Death here in this museum felt more like an exhibit change than anything else. They swept me away without a second thought, just as they would sweep away my glass box and replace it with the panther—a living, breathing creature, full of strength and hunger, but of a different sort. It would bask in the attention I’d never craved and roar with a vitality I’d never known.

The audience would come back. They’d marvel at its power, its rawness, its life. They’d forget about me—the man who sat in a cage, too lost to find a way out, too stubborn to let go of the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was something worth tasting out there.

But in the end, the panther would stay. It would live. And me? I was nothing more than a whisper in the halls, a smudge on the glass where once I sat, staring into the abyss, waiting for something that never came.