Taking ‘The Plague’ as a starting point, this discussion explores how might we constitute contemporary art in an era of geo-political instability. With Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump’s twitter warfare, threatening to pre-empt thermonuclear war, can we not see art swept up in this accelerating global vector? Is not our current, contemporary and exemplary art form the performative staging of an ongoing free-market apocalypse, from which none will survive?