Salvador Dalí signed so many blank sheets of paper that, to this day, no one knows exactly how many there were. He understood before almost anyone else that the market was not simply buying an image—it was buying a promise of value. Today that promise has evolved one step further. We no longer purchase only the artist's signature. We purchase stakes in the future.
Imagine yourself as a cautious investor. Your portfolio is well diversified: some equities, a few bonds, a modest allocation to gold. Then, while sipping your morning coffee, you begin to wonder whether it might be worth taking a position on the Second Coming of Christ. This is neither the opening of a Borges story nor a performance by Maurizio Cattelan. It is a real possibility offered by prediction markets such as Polymarket, where users buy and sell probabilities on future events. Alongside elections, wars, and central bank decisions, one now finds a question that, until only a few years ago, would have belonged exclusively to theologians: Will Jesus return before 2027?
The truly remarkable aspect is not that such a market exists, but how perfectly ordinary and efficient it appears. An eschatological event is transformed into a chart, a percentage, a price. Faith gives way to liquidity. The Apocalypse becomes an asset.
Art, in many ways, prepared us for this. It has always lived with a fundamental ambiguity: it is an aesthetic experience, but also a financial asset; a symbolic object, yet equally an investment. With NFTs, that tension reached an almost scientific level. For the first time, artworks were born already configured as financial instruments, complete with floor prices, trading volumes, volatility, and metrics worthy of a professional exchange. Aesthetics and finance stopped pretending to belong to separate worlds.
Today, however, even that no longer seems sufficient. The market is no longer content with turning artworks into assets. It is learning to financialize every element of the collective imagination: wars, elections, pandemics, scientific discoveries—even the return of the Messiah. It is no longer reality alone that is being monetized. The future itself has become a tradable commodity.
In this landscape, art returns to what it has always done best: observing the system until it reveals its own absurdity. A recent New York exhibition exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence and psychosis featured, among other works, a project imagining trading strategies based on astrology. The piece was unmistakably satirical. Yet the boundary between parody and reality felt disturbingly thin. Every speculative cycle, after all, invents its own horoscopes; today we simply call them indicators, sentiment, correlations, and predictive models.
Walter Benjamin foresaw that mechanical reproduction would transform the destiny of the work of art. Today we are witnessing a further transformation. It is no longer only the artwork that loses its aura. Reality itself is continuously dismantled into tokens, probabilities, and markets.
Perhaps the defining artwork of our time is no longer a painting or a sculpture, but a real-time chart assigning a market price to the Day of Judgment.
