The Coming Flesh

Science has the numbers. The doctor has the charts. Your mother has the forwarded email. We’re all getting fatter—collectively, incrementally, inevitably—and the reasons aren’t particularly mysterious. We order delivery instead of walking anywhere. We wait ten minutes on the platform rather than cover one extra stop on foot. We drink our calories in volumes that would embarrass even ourselves if we bothered to add them up. The sedentary life won a long time ago and everyone quietly knows it.

So Jamie Lee Curtis Taete—a German artist named, yes, after that Jamie Lee Curtis—built a kind of realist near-future out of exactly that premise. The project imagines what bodies look like in a few years, what desire recalibrates to when the beauty standard finally catches up to how people actually live. New proportions. New sex appeal. Breasts for everyone, essentially. It sits somewhere between satire and sincere speculation, which is where the best provocation tends to live. The future it proposes doesn’t feel that far off. It’s already begun arriving.