This documentary put me into a state of shock! I'm still recovering from this shock, which erupted into bad dreams about neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, the World Bank, and 21st-century human suffering. You must watch this documentary! Everyone who is interested in art—and an interest in art must always be an interest in politics (and politics is nothing but an interest in economics, the management and distribution of resources/wealth in a society)—cannot ignore Waste Land. What's so shocking about the documentary, which is by Lucy Walker (Blindsight, Countdown to Zero), is the size/scale of Vik Muniz's madness (and there is no genius in any of this madness). Muniz, a New York–based and Brazilian-born superstar artist, has no idea that his mind (and as a consequence, his art) is not bigger than the world, bigger than the sky, bigger than human misery. Because he has no idea of his own limits (in the way the self-taught execution expert in Mr. Death had no idea of his limits), Muniz went to a massive dump site outside of Rio de Janeiro and made some of the dump site's catadores—people who make a living by sifting through tons of fresh trash—make art out of the slimy, filthy, stinky, rat-infested rubbish that ruins their lives every day, every hour, every goddamn minute.

Recall one of the best scenes in Astra Taylor's Examined Life: The philosopher Slavoj Zizek walks around a London trash depot. The philosopher thinks great things around stinking garbage. The philosopher philosophizes as trucks roll in and dump trash onto piles of trash. The scene is funny because we know that at the end of the day, the philosopher and the waste management people go home. The pickers in Brazil do not go home. The dump site is their whole world. And nothing chains them to this awful place but a poverty that is enforced and daily deepened by a global economic system that has Wall Street as its center of control. If we saw Zizek philosophizing around their misery, we'd think he had gone mad. He has choices in this world—not the pickers. As for one young woman in Waste Land (she is 18 and already the mother of two kids), it all comes down to either picking garbage or prostituting her body. There is no philosophy here, no hope. It is the terminal point of the official world. Beyond the dump site, there's only crime and punishment.

Vik Muniz attempts to bring a little lightness, a touch of humor, a small smile to the catadores. He makes art out of them and their garbage, sells it to the international art market (one of his pictures goes for $50,000), and returns the money to the pickers. Yes, this is exploitation. Yes, this is not exactly exploitation. Yes, the pickers are grateful and pleased to be artists even for a day. Yes, the pickers hate his guts, his arrogance, and his madness, and just want to get their dirty little hands on some of his American cash. The confusion of motives is maddening. And the film itself is troubling because it feels like a reality TV show: Waste Land borders on Hoarders. The artist appears, surveys the dump site (fucking huge!), and promises to transform it into works of art that reference the great works of Western art: Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat and Jean-François Millet's Sower. This is the Vik Muniz show.