"People are essentially red meat. They are"
About this Quote
“People are essentially red meat” lands like a gallery wall slap: blunt, bodily, a little obscene. Max Cannon, working as an artist, isn’t trying to win an argument so much as force an image into your mouth. Red meat is muscle, appetite, price per pound. It’s what gets packaged, branded, consumed. By reducing “people” to meat, Cannon raids the oldest dehumanizing metaphor in the book, then turns it back on a culture that already treats bodies as commodities: labor units, content farms, dating-market profiles, influencer physiques, political “bases.”
The unfinished tail - “They are” - matters. It reads like a cut-off thought or a deliberate refusal to tidy up the ugliness. That fragment creates a vacuum the audience can’t help filling: they are for sale, for sacrifice, for feeding someone else’s hunger. It’s also a sly jab at the way hot takes and slogans work. The sentence starts with false authority (“essentially”) and ends in a stumble, exposing how quickly “truths” about humanity collapse into rhetoric.
As art-world provocation, the line sits in the tradition of anti-romantic realism: no halo, no “human spirit,” just flesh and the systems that process it. The intent isn’t misanthropy for its own sake; it’s a pressure test. If you flinch, good - you’re noticing how normalized it’s become to speak about people in the language of consumption, extraction, and waste. The cynicism is the point, and the discomfort is the medium.
The unfinished tail - “They are” - matters. It reads like a cut-off thought or a deliberate refusal to tidy up the ugliness. That fragment creates a vacuum the audience can’t help filling: they are for sale, for sacrifice, for feeding someone else’s hunger. It’s also a sly jab at the way hot takes and slogans work. The sentence starts with false authority (“essentially”) and ends in a stumble, exposing how quickly “truths” about humanity collapse into rhetoric.
As art-world provocation, the line sits in the tradition of anti-romantic realism: no halo, no “human spirit,” just flesh and the systems that process it. The intent isn’t misanthropy for its own sake; it’s a pressure test. If you flinch, good - you’re noticing how normalized it’s become to speak about people in the language of consumption, extraction, and waste. The cynicism is the point, and the discomfort is the medium.
Quote Details
| Topic | Dark Humor |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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