I first heard about Elon Musk’s #DearMoon lunar tourism publicity stunt by accident. I was at a restaurant bar, and the mixologist asked me what I did for a living. “I’m an artist,” I told her and her eyes lit up. “Wow, you should send your art work to Elon Musk. Who knows- maybe you’ll get to go to the moon!” Her enthusiasm for sending me off to the moon frightened me. I literally thought I was hallucinating, which scared me only because it had
been at least a few days since I had used any psychedelics and I typically don’t spontaneously hallucinate or have flashbacks. I asked her point blank, “What the heck are you talking about? Go to the moon? Send my art to Elon Musk? You did just say that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, he announced it very recently. ‘Dear Moon’ or something like that is what it’s called. He’s sending a Japanese billionaire and a bunch of artists to the moon. So they can come back and show people what space is like! One from each art form. A painter. A photographer. A filmmaker. Something like that. Look it up.” Then her excitement level went through the roof. “Imagine if your art could be sent to the moon! How cool would that be!?” I wasn’t aware of any art buyers living on the moon, so I didn’t see much moneymaking potential, but maybe there was some other value I was
still missing.
A chill ran down my spine. Only a couple of weeks earlier, I had channeled a drawing about Elon Musk’s space colonization plans from the late master artist, Victor Vasarely. You can read the whole story in my chapter “Elon Musk and the Blueberry Polenta Cupcake.” Suffice it to say that the channeling was a dystopian vision of a totalitarian
society on a barren planet, where everyone works for Musk, with no rights, no
human dignity, no connection to their ancestral planet, Earth. A handful of carefully selected, engineer types are able to escape a cataclysmic
climate disaster on earth, only to be whisked away to Musk’s Mars and live the rest of their days in glass helmets, under his 24/7
surveillance. There’s nowhere to go in your free time on Mars, so there is no “free time.”
So how will Musk dupe artists into falling for this nonsense? It takes a
sophisticated hype machine and Musk seems to be a master at it.
1) Get a billionaire to claim that he came up with the idea- rather than Musk.
Yusaku Maezawa is the perfect partner in crime. A Japanese online fashion retail billionaire who uses his wealth to create
headline producing purchases of Basquiats.
And as Maezawa is a former rock band drummer who was about to sign with a major
label when his Internet business began to take off, his story becomes an even
bigger fantasy for the countless struggling young musicians and artists who are
awed by “one of their own” who moves into the tiny “billionaire class” that is the new brass ring in a post-industrial society where the middle class
is disappearing and the 1% control a vastly disproportionate amount of wealth.
2) Dumb it down! As recently as the last SxSW conference, Musk trivialized the
discussion about space colonization by joking about “cool bars on Mars” and other fantasy-fueling silliness. Musk is no idiot- he understands the importance of creating and controlling a
narrative. These narratives are very powerful- they can define history. Musk has turned colonizing Mars into the kind of stoner conversation we can
expect from a guy like him. “Dude, imagine what kinds of bars we could have on Mars!”
3) Use artists to put a human face on an inhuman venture. And the astronomical amount of money that will be spent to send 6 artists into
space could easily be used to support a massive number of artists and art
events right here on earth.
According to the cosmic download I received from the spirit of 20th Century modern artist Victor Vasarely, himself
no stranger to space program, Musk is up to no good. You can learn more about my psychic channeling from Vasarely in my story “Elon Musk and the Blueberry Polenta Cupcake.”