ephemeral

A four-panel comic at the beach. Panel 1: a red-haired woman stands over a man sitting in the sand stacking small rocks into a balanced cairn; she asks what he's doing and he says he's "making ephemeral art." Panel 2: a close-up of the man beside his rock stack as he waxes poetic — "A short-lived pattern of beauty, brought by my hand into a chaotic universe. Here it will stand briefly before returning to that vast sea of entropy." Panel 3: a close-up of the woman asking whether he's making it as a rebellion against a society that pushes people to build permanent edifices of achievement rather than accepting human impermanence. Panel 4: wide shot of the two on the beach; the man, now holding a phone, flatly answers "Internet points," and the woman replies "Ah." Votey: an extreme close-up of the man's glum, frowning face with the caption "No art is ephemeral now." — the joke being that photographing the rock art for online clout makes it permanent, defeating the whole point.