Fish looking at Vasily Wormeshchagin's painting "War Feeds the Worm"

In this work, fish are looking at a fictional painting by Vasily Wormeshchagin, a reference to The Apotheosis of War. Where Vereshchagin once painted a mountain of human skulls, Wormeshchagin from a parallel universe leaves a mountain of fish skulls instead. Worms crawl from some of the eye sockets, and one of the fish-viewers is crying. The work is about the meaninglessness of war and the fact that no one truly wins in it. Victory, heroism, and glory disappear; what remains is only a dead mass. If in the human world war becomes covered with ideas, slogans, and justifications, nature reduces its outcome to one simple and terrible truth: war feeds only worms. Here the fish are no longer watching with irony, but with compassion and horror. Before them is not simply a painting about war, but its final result: silence, empty eye sockets, and worms that do not care who won. Life has been turned into mass, memory into dust, and victory into food for worms.