[intro:]
(We have here two representations of a photograph, itself a representation.)
(But which is real?!!)

[Verse 1]
I saw a fish on squared paper
Pinned down with graphite and doubt
Someone said, “That one has intention”
Someone said, “That one’s hollowed out”
The fish said nothing whatsoever
Which felt like the wiser move
While we sharpened our heuristics
And called them tools

[Pre-Chorus]
Line weight confessions
Wobble as sin
Overconfident shading
Let the trial begin

[Chorus]
This is not a comparison
This is not a test
Will the real fish step forward
Or are we all just guessing at best
This is not a comparison
Please stop taking notes
This pipe is not a pipe, my friend
But I’m still going to smoke

[Verse 2]
Someone quoted a French philosopher
With a shrug and a loaded sigh
Said the map had eaten the territory
Said the fish had already died
But the fish was still being a fish
Busy, piscene, complete
Didn’t care for your provenance
Didn’t check your receipt

[Pre-Chorus 2]
We trained our eyes on rumors
On datasets and fear
Looking for a soul watermark
Something human to reappear

[Chorus]
This is not a comparison
It’s a hall of mirrored claims
Hyperreal scales shimmering
No one agrees on names
This is not a comparison
It’s a social rite
Arguing about authorship
While the fish sleeps tight

[Bridge] (spoken / half-sung, Eli mode)
Baudrillard said the sign replaced the thing
But he never met this fish
Keen as a conjecture
Slippery as a wish
If you don’t reveal the origin
The argument blooms
Comments feeding on comments
A simulacral monsoon

[Verse 3]
Did the camera steal the painter’s eye
Did the painter steal the hill
Did the hill steal the sunlight
Did the sun have a will
If I train on my own reflection
On a laptop humming low
Is that theft, recursion
Or just learning how to grow

[Chorus]
This is not a comparison
No verdict will arrive
We oscillate between irony
And meaning very much alive
This is not a comparison
It’s a metamodern grin
I believe in this fish completely
While doubting how it got its fins

[Outro]
So let the comments circle slowly
Let the experts disagree
The fish does not need authorship
The fish does not need me
This is not a comparison
Strike it from the list
Will the real fish step forward?
It already did. You missed it.

Artist’s Statement

Eli Mercer

“This Is Not a Comparison: Will the Real Fish Step Forward?” began as an afternoon distraction. I was sitting in on a media theory class I wasn’t enrolled in, listening to a discussion about simulacra that felt both sharp and strangely bloodless. Someone mentioned Magritte. Someone else mentioned AI. Nobody mentioned the fish.

Later that day I saw two drawings of the same fish posted online. One was hand-drawn, one machine-generated. There was no reveal, only a long thread of confident guesses, anxieties masquerading as aesthetics, and an odd collective hunger for certainty. The fish itself remained perfectly silent.

That silence stuck with me.

The song pulls together several threads: the old arguments about authorship and originality, the newer arguments about generative systems, and a much older human habit of mistaking confidence for understanding. Baudrillard appears briefly, not as an authority but as a conversational ghost. Magritte’s pipe gets smoked, mostly out of respect.

There’s also a personal undercurrent here, though it may be obfuscated. I grew up believing that if you looked closely enough, the truth would eventually step forward and introduce itself. Experience suggests otherwise. Sometimes what you get instead is a room full of people arguing over line weight while the actual subject swims on, unconcerned.

The song wasn’t written to answer the question. It was written to sit inside it without collapsing it. I believe the fish is real. I also believe we keep missing it.

Both beliefs feel true.
That oscillation is the song.