Dear Franky,
It has been five months since my last entry. I apologise for the radio silence, but I've been busy, and brilliance requires absolute focus.
The Curatorial Studies program is unfolding exactly as I expected it to be: a playground for the mediocre. However, I have learnt to play their game flawlessly, and as a European, my sense of aesthetics is light years ahead of my peers here. We recently had to submit our midterm mock exhibition designs using existing artworks. Most of my classmates created chaotic, over-explained layouts, stuffing rooms with "statement pieces" to mask their total lack of vision. Needless to say, they all used extremely famous artists' works which they barely understand. Pathetic.
I submitted a blueprint titled Less is More. I'll explain it briefly to you, Franky—not because I need to show off to a notebook, but to make you understand just how incredibly low the standard of my peers is. That said, I don't think it's an awful piece of work; I actually took my sweet time conceptualising it, designing it, and placing every minute detail with intent. More importantly, I enjoyed the process.
My project was a guided path from the noisy, chaotic city to absolute minimalist abstraction, set within a circular layout. I believe it's easier if I describe the physical path a spectator would take rather than copying the theoretical part of my assignment here. I stated in the proposal that the exhibition would be held at the MoMA in New York, but any famous, modern New York museum would work, and I'll tell you why in a moment. Patience, Franky. The spectator would first encounter a sort of portal entrance within a cubic space leading off the main corridor. The entrance would be a massive round arch with the title of the exhibition hanging from it at a strategic height, meant to be read from a distance. However, the entrance is not guided by those chunky, boring paragraphs of text that nobody actually reads; rather, it's based on three distinct psychological hints. This way, the spectator feels empowered by their own free will to choose the portal on the right-hand side. In reality, it's purely behavioural: in Western cultures, the convention is to walk on the right side and read from left to right. Additionally, they would be subconsciously attracted by the noise of the first installation spilling out, which perfectly reflects the exhibition's title.
Once inside, the first of the five sections is an audio-video installation projected onto all the curved walls of the room. It features live-streamed footage of the most affluent, crowded places in New York, accurately collaged to stretch across all available surfaces, including the ceiling and floor. This part is the most chaotic in every sense: over-saturated colours, loud sounds audible from outside the cubic room, and an indistinguishable, suffocating flow of people, pedestrians, and cars. The all-encompassing projection and the aggressive volume will make the spectator feel disoriented, forcing them to naturally seek escape and walk towards the second section: Simplification.
This section will feature Paul Cézanne's series of Montagne Sainte-Victoire paintings hanging on both walls, following a progression from the most realistic depictions to the most stylised ones as you move forward. For the audio aspect of this room, a recording of the noisiest spots of the MoMA gallery during peak hours will be diffused through hidden speakers.
The third section is where the real abstraction starts: a curated collection of canvases by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian will guide people through to the fourth section, the actual Minimalism. In the third section, there will be no audio streaming because the ambient, bleeding gallery noise will act as the installation's background.
However, in the fourth and fifth sections, the walls are heavily insulated so that every single drop of unnecessary noise is filtered out, leaving the spectator entirely alone in a void with the art. In the fourth section, there will be only one installation: a Donald Judd cube that seamlessly blends into the walls and floor of the gallery.
Finally, the fifth section contains sleek tables and art supplies for people to perform their own abstraction. They will be prompted to abstract one thing that is overwhelming them in their day-to-day lives. For instance, I passionately hate the coffee here, so my personal abstraction would be a squared, highly stylised version of an Italian moka pot. In this final space, there will be a brief, elegant text on the walls explaining the psychological path the spectator just walked—from chaotic noise to simplification, abstraction, and finally, minimalism. There will also be a stack of booklets offering a thorough explanation of the concept, touching upon why art should ideally be accessible to everyone, even though only a few selected individuals are actually artists worthy of the title.
Sorry for having emptied my brain onto these pages, Franky, but I needed you to understand the complexity of my project. Every single detail was controlled and intentional.
The head professor called it "a masterclass in spatial and minimal authority." I received the highest grade in the cohort.
It confirmed my theory, Franky. People desperately want to be told what to look at and how to interpret things. They crave control, and they will unconditionally revere whoever wields the baton.
Yet, despite my academic triumphs, Marcus Thorne remains an unresolved stain in my daily life. He is still loud. He is still arrogant. And his mock exhibition was a tasteless disaster at best. His title was Chaotic Coherence, but in reality, the first word was the only accurate part of it. He crammed incredibly famous classical paintings into a random room with zero description, no curation of sound or spatial planning, and absolutely no logical, stylistic, or historical connection to one another. He defended it by saying that "chaos is the true form of contemporary harmony."
Well... I won't say that I'm not here to judge, because I absolutely am. My project had solid philosophical backing, citing Merleau-Ponty, Simmel, and Wittgenstein. I seriously doubt his has any artistic backing whatsoever. How-fucking-ever, his daddy dropped a few million to the university board to ensure he passed the semester. How utterly predictable.
Speaking of him… I have spent months in the medical library researching the perfect, invisible toxin to deal with him, but synthesising it from scratch without raising suspicions at a commercial chemical supplier, or within the university itself, was proving... tedious.
Then, yesterday, the universe delivered a masterpiece of irony.
My aunt returned from her exhibition in Italy. She arrived at the house exhausted, complaining about the jet lag and the sheer weight of her luggage. Apparently, my mother—bless her suffocating, traditional heart—insisted on sending a care package.
My aunt unpacked the suitcase on the kitchen island. Out came the usual unsolicited gifts: artisanal pasta, vacuum-sealed cheeses, and three heavy glass jars of homemade olive sott'olio—seasoned olives preserved in olive oil.
I was pouring myself a glass of water when I noticed it.
Two of the jars looked perfectly normal. But the third jar, sitting innocuously on the marble counter, had a slightly deformed metal lid. It was bulging upwards, tight and swollen from internal gas pressure. The realisation struck me like lightning. What a beautiful day to be alive.
My aunt sighed in disgust. "Ugh, your mother never boils the jars long enough to sterilise them properly. This one's gone bad. It's full of gas." She reached for it, intending to dump the contents down the garbage disposal.
"Wait," I said, my voice sharper than intended.
I walked over and gently took the jar from her hands. Through the thick glass, tiny, abnormal white bubbles clung to the submerged olives. The oil looked slightly cloudy.
My mind flashed back to the pages of the toxicology textbooks I had been studying. Anaerobic environment. Low acidity. Gas production bulging the container. "I'll throw it away outside in the main bins," I told her smoothly, offering a polite, helpful smile. "If you drop the jar in here and it cracks open, it could be highly dangerous, and I'm not just worried about the sharp glass. Plus, the smell of rancid oil will cling to the curtains for weeks."
"Good point," she muttered, rubbing her temples and heading upstairs to sleep off the jet lag. "Thank you, Vera."
I didn't take the jar to the outside bins, Franky. I wrapped it carefully in a thick towel and carried it straight to my secure atelier in the other building.
I set it on my stainless steel worktable and stared at it for a full hour. I was looking at Clostridium botulinum. The holy grail of aesthetic toxicology.
My parents, in their clumsy, suffocating attempt to show affection, had accidentally cultured one of the most lethal neurotoxins on the planet. And they had shipped it across the Atlantic directly into my waiting hands. If this is not an act of serendipity, then you tell me what is.
It was perfect. It wasn't a suspicious chemical purchased online. It wasn't a trace element that could be linked back to my aunt's restoration supplies. It was a completely natural, biological accident.
I spent the entire night in the lab. I put on my thickest gloves, my respirator, and my safety goggles. I opened the jar under a fume hood. The faint, sour hiss of escaping gas sounded like a choir of angels. Using pipettes and a centrifuge I "borrowed" from the university's biology department last week, I am now isolating and refining the contaminated oil.
I don't need gallons of it. I only need a few highly concentrated, purified drops.
A dose just small enough to go completely unnoticed in a green detox smoothie. A dose just large enough to block the release of acetylcholine in the nervous system, causing a quiet, beautiful flaccid paralysis.
It's funny, isn't it? The wealthiest women in this city pay thousands of dollars to have measured doses of poison injected into their faces. Botulinum toxin. They use it to paralyse their facial muscles, to freeze time, to silence the ageing process. They call it "beauty."
I call it a starting point.
If a micro-dose can silence a wrinkle, a curated, concentrated dose can silence a lung. It happens quietly. Without a struggle. Without ruining the aesthetics of the room.
Marcus Thorne has annoyed me for months. It is finally time to curate his exit.
I have studied Marcus for some time now. I know his schedule, his habits, the arrogant way he drinks his disgusting green detox smoothie every morning. I am planning his removal with the exact same meticulous care I would use to decide where to hang a mediocre painting in a crowded gallery: he must disappear in such a way that no one explicitly notices the gap, but everyone subconsciously feels that the room is finally, perfectly clean.
Curation, after all, is the art of deciding what deserves to be seen. And Marcus Thorne does not pass the selection process.
Wish me luck, paper friend.
Vera