Here is what you need to understand about New York City at seven in the morning: it is the most aggressively convincing simulation of importance ever constructed by human beings. The simulation runs continuously without maintenance breaks or moments of self-doubt. Everyone inside it has agreed, through a compact so old no one remembers signing it, to treat the simulation as the real thing. The yellow cabs and the cigarette smoke and the newspaper headlines and the bench-sitting: all treated as the actual substance of a life rather than the set dressing for one. Most days this agreement holds. Then occasionally someone makes a painting that blows the whole operation.

Sandy Cohen made one. Specifically, it is called It Was All a Dream. Seventy-two inches by sixty inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, $49,000. A Doberman in a suit sits on a park bench. He is reading a newspaper that says FAKE NEWS, smoking a cigarette, smoke rising in a white zigzag above his left shoulder. A speech bubble floats to his upper left containing the single word COFFEE with an ellipsis. Yellow taxis idle in the background traffic. Somewhere in the brushstrokes, hidden, is the word LOVE appearing multiple times, and the phrase ONLY LOVE IS REAL. If you read the newspaper closely, beneath FAKE NEWS, you can make out the words IT WAS ALL A DRE, the last letter swallowed by the figure’s hand.

The Man Who Has Processed the Bad News

Michael Lewis, writing about the Salomon Brothers trading floor in the 1980s, identified a specific genus of human animal that thrived in the noise. This was the man who had figured out that the chaos was not a problem to be solved but a medium to be surfed. These were men who could hold three conversations and read a ticker and light a cigarette and still know, with absolute precision, when to move. Cohen’s Doberman is this man, distilled to archetype and then dressed in a suit and given a bench and a cigarette and the morning paper.

He is not agitated by the fake news, the taxis, or the relentless sensory percussion of a New York morning. Coffee is what he wants. His posture is the posture of someone who has been inside the maximum noise long enough that the noise has become silence to him. Traders stopped hearing the floor after their first few months. Same principle. The ellipsis after COFFEE is the whole thing. Not an exclamation. Not a question. An ellipsis is the sound a man makes when he has already processed the fake news and the city noise and the morning chaos. He has arrived at the one genuine need still present in his body. That need is at least honest, at least not performing.

The Simulation and What It Cannot Simulate

FAKE NEWS is not really about media criticism. Cohen is not making a cable news argument. The painting makes a more radical claim, which is that the entire information environment, not just the overtly political parts but the whole thing, is the fake news. It is the dream that the title names. Not some of it. All of it.

Consider what the Doberman is actually sitting inside. The bench is fake news. His suit is fake news. The cigarette and the taxis and the speech bubble are all components of the dream, the dream the soul runs in order to have something to do while it waits to remember what it actually is. Also, the paper is right but not in the way anyone reading it thinks, because the paper itself is also part of the dream. Beneath all of it, Cohen hid the answer. She hid it the way you hide the most important thing: in plain sight but submerged. Visible only to people who are already looking past the surface.

LOVE is in the brushstrokes. ONLY LOVE IS REAL is in there too. Look for it. Decide to look. Be willing to stop reading the fake news long enough to notice that the canvas has a different story running underneath the one on the front page. This is not a small thing to ask. Yet Cohen asks it anyway.

The Body Still Knows

The Doberman is not the villain. He is just the person on the bench. He showed up to the morning the way everyone shows up to the morning, already inside the dream. Already past the point where you could have declined the invitation to participate. The coffee is not a symbol of consumption or a critique of Starbucks or a nod toward the commodification of small pleasures. The coffee is simply the thing his body wants. After the fake news and the traffic and the noise, the body still knows what it wants. Indeed, the body is reliable that way. Still, the body is smarter than the dream. This is what Cohen knows.

You can find LOVE in this painting if you look. It is there. Cohen put it there multiple times. She is making the argument that the capacity to see what is actually there, underneath the fake news and the taxi horns and the morning cigarette and the perfectly reasonable desire for caffeine, is a capacity that has to be practiced. The dream is specifically designed to make it unnecessary. The culture rewards continuously for not practicing.

For the soul-level version of this same argument, see Many Lives, Many Masters. That piece shows the soul at the end of its long accumulation, holding nothing but the word on its hand. For the cash-for-love substitution this painting circles, see I’m a Self Made Dream. That is where Cohen names the replacement directly. The full collector circle around Cohen’s work is documented in Sandy Cohen: The Hamptons Artist Whose Collectors Are Already the Canon.

Where to Find the Work

It Was All a Dream is available at SandyCohenArt.com. Follow Cohen at @sandycohensart on Instagram. To feature your collection or brand in Social Life Magazine, visit sociallifemagazine.com/submit-a-paid-feature. Twenty-five thousand print copies, Westhampton to Montauk, Memorial Day through Labor Day.