In the opening pages of Ben Lerner’s debut novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” his narrator goes to Madrid’s Prado museum and observes a stranger breaking into sobs in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s “Descent From the Cross,” a votive portrait attributed to Paolo da San Leocadio, and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” He watches the man until he leaves and follows him out into the sunshine. The narrator has worried for a long time that he is incapable of having such a profound experience of art. Many of us, I imagine, have experienced the failure to be moved by a painting as we’d hoped to be. I thought of this passage as I watched the first major ad for Meta, Facebook’s rebranding as a metaverse company, which also takes place in a museum. But here the art is moving — quite literally.

The video begins with four young people looking at Henri Rousseau’s “Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo,” which hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art. As they peer into the frame, the tiger’s eyes flicker and the whole painting comes to life and opens up into a three-dimensional animated jungle. The tiger and the buffalo, the toucans and monkeys and the mandrills in the trees, all start dancing to an old rave tune; the kids bop along, too. Fruit trees grow around them in the gallery. Above the rainforest canopy, in the distance, stands a mysterious hexagonal portal, and beyond that, in the misty red hills, the towering skyline of a great tropical city. It’s a scene that suggests Facebook may be returning to Silicon Valley’s countercultural origins: a psychedelic dream of a global community sharing in collective hallucinations.

The video keynote that Meta released to explain itself to investors also features art prominently, opening with a demo in which a couple of Mark Zuckerberg’s co-workers find a piece of augmented-reality street art hidden on a wall in SoHo. It’s brought to life by 3-D animation and ported over from Lower Manhattan to virtual reality, growing into a nightmarish Cthulhu-like blob that surrounds their avatars. (Zuckerberg: “That’s awesome!”) For some reason, the company wants us to think about art when we think about its new product. Perhaps it’s because they want us to see it as a platform for creative self-expression — or perhaps just because fine art provides a more edifying context than video games or working from home.

This apparent stance toward art is at once moronic and apt; moronic because it reduces art to a mere gewgaw, apt because other entrepreneurs have already embraced this view. The animated Rousseau assumes the popular logic of the “Van Gogh immersive experience,” in which the dour old Dutchman’s paintings of starry nights and ominous wheat fields are projected onto the walls and floors to create an enveloping spectacle, attraction and selfie backdrop. Both presume that audiences can enjoy artworks only when they’re in the process of being ruined. And in the case of the Van Gogh experience, the market has proved them right: There are currently at least five different competing Van Gogh experiences touring the country. The copy has surpassed the original. This has remained a consistent theme throughout the history of Facebook, which offers a pale simulation of friendship and community in place of the real thing. Meta promises to lead us farther into the forest of illusions.

And yet the return to an art of dreaming and escapism is an enticing proposition. Rousseau, painting jungles in his studio in Paris beginning in his middle age, was escaping his own humdrum life as a retired municipal toll-service employee. He is said to have often told stories of his youthful adventures and how his tour of duty in Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico had inspired his jungle pictures; but these were all lies. In reality he played in an infantry band and never once left France.

An important thing to remember about the metaverse is that none of this has been made, neither the jungle nor the technology to display it.

Rousseau found his actual inspiration in travel books and regular visits to the Jardin des Plantes, of which he once told an art critic, “When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.” It was this uncanny dream space, where fierce animals have the quality of children’s book illustrations and bananas grow upside-down on the trees, that he conjured in his paintings; and it was the childlike originality and naïve purity of these depictions that his fellow artists would come to admire.

In late-19th and early-20th century Paris, Rousseau and his contemporaries (Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, etc.) were busy inventing bohemian modernity, creating new ways of living and of seeing the world. In our century, that visionary role appears to have passed from the artists to the engineers, to Zuckerberg and his ilk. Who else tries to invent new universes? Who dares spin grand utopian fantasies? Artists don’t anymore. It’s Silicon Valley’s Promethean founders who try — and routinely fall short.

Meta’s offering is not an appealing one: It’s somehow both childish and cynical. But a vision of the future ideated by a creative agency for a megacorporation was always going to be dreadful. The problem is not that kids today cannot appreciate a Rousseau masterpiece, but that their elders, my generation, are unsure of how to come up with anything that might compare to it — we have forgotten how to imagine a different world entirely.

An important thing to remember about the metaverse is that none of this has been made, neither the jungle nor the technology to display it. You can’t really go to a museum and do this. It’s just an idea, a whisper on the wind. An ad about nothing. It’s Meta. The more times I watch the ad, and the keynote where Zuckerberg explains his vision in detail, the more it seems that he has no idea what he’s making or selling. That’s bad for a company but not for artists, who flourish with an open brief. Indeed, much of the keynote is a call for thousands of “creators” to help build a functioning metaverse and a promise that they’ll be paid to do so.

Contemporary art is currently dominated by painting and sculpture, by traditional materials and old ways of making. Companies outside of the art world, meanwhile, are using digital technology to remake timeless masterpieces as evanescent gimcracks, as projected tourist attractions and animations. But few artists are doing what Rousseau and his peers did: accepting the realities imposed by new technologies — in their case, photography — and breaking the old ways apart to create something new. An artist with the spirit of Rousseau might appreciate the potential of this new medium and want to make art for the metaverse and the wider public. Now, as in his day, he wouldn’t be remaking old works from the past but coming up with fantastical scenes from his dreams: sights he’d never witnessed in his own life, rendered in a style that nobody had ever seen. Today it feels possible, perhaps for the first time this century, to invent completely new aesthetics — so long as someone takes the reins from the technologists.

Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube

Dean Kissick is a writer and the New York editor of Spike Art Magazine. He last wrote for the magazine about the Pomodoro technique.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — For four days, Elizabeth Holmes took the stand to blame others for the alleged fraud at her blood testing start-up, Theranos. On the fifth day, prosecutors tried making one thing clear: She knew.

Over more than five hours of cross-examination on Tuesday, Robert Leach, the assistant U.S. attorney and lead prosecutor for the case, pointed to text messages, notes and emails with Ms. Holmes — and with her business partner and former boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani — discussing problems with Theranos’s business and technology. Mr. Leach had a common refrain: No one hid anything from Ms. Holmes. As Theranos’s chief executive, he argued, she was to blame.

“Anything that happens at the company was your responsibility at the end of the day?” Mr. Leach asked.

“That’s how I felt,” Ms. Holmes said.

It was the culmination of three months of testimony and nearly four years of waiting since Ms. Holmes was indicted on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in 2018. Prosecutors have shown jurors evidence of faked product demonstrations, falsified documents and communications with the goal of showing that Ms. Holmes knowingly misled investors, doctors, patients and the world about Theranos.

The outcome of her case has consequences for the tech industry at a moment when fast-growing start-ups are amassing wealth, power and cultural cachet. Few start-up founders have been prosecuted for misleading investors as they strive to hustle their long-shot business ideas into existence. If convicted, Ms. Holmes, 37, who has pleaded not guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison.

Theranos rose to a $9 billion valuation in 2015, raising $945 million on Ms. Holmes’s promise that its blood testing machines could perform hundreds of tests quickly and cheaply using just a few drops of blood. She started the company in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University.

But in reality, prosecutors have argued, Theranos’s machines could conduct only a dozen tests, and those were unreliable. Instead, it secretly used commercially available machines from Siemens. After that and other misrepresentations were exposed, Theranos voided two years’ worth of blood test results. It also settled lawsuits with investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission, ultimately dissolving in 2018.

In her initial testimony, Ms. Holmes tried dismissing the fraud accusations as too simple and as a misunderstanding of her statements. She also pleaded ignorance to many of Theranos’s problems, emphasizing her lack of experience and qualifications to run a scientific lab.

Under cross-examination on Tuesday, Ms. Holmes admitted to making mistakes. “There are many things I wish I did differently,” she said.

Theranos mishandled a 2015 exposé in The Wall Street Journal about problems with the company’s technology, she said.

“We totally messed it up,” Ms. Holmes said. She also admitted to reaching out to Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Journal who invested in Theranos, to quash the story.

Ms. Holmes said she also regretted the way Theranos treated Erika Cheung, an employee who raised concerns about the company’s lab practices. After Ms. Cheung left the company, Theranos hired a private investigator to track her down and serve her with a legal threat.

“I sure as hell wish we had treated her differently and listened to her,” Ms. Holmes said.

The testimony followed dramatic revelations about Ms. Holmes’s relationship with Mr. Balwani. On Monday, she said through tears that she had been raped as a student at Stanford and that Mr. Balwani had emotionally and physically abused her in the wake of that experience.

She accused Mr. Balwani, who is 20 years her senior, of controlling what she ate, how she presented herself and how much time she spent with her family. She said he forced her to have sex with him against her will and told her she had to “kill herself” to be reborn as a successful entrepreneur.

It was the first time Ms. Holmes told her side of the story of Theranos’s rise and fall, which had been held up in podcasts, documentaries and scripted series as a tale of Silicon Valley arrogance and comeuppance. Her testimony complicated that narrative, casting new light on the behind-the-scenes relationship between herself and Mr. Balwani, which they had kept secret as her profile rose.

Ms. Holmes tried tying her relationship with Mr. Balwani to her fraud charges by stating that he impacted “everything about who I was,” including Theranos. She said she pushed him out of the company and broke up with him after she learned that Theranos’s lab, which Mr. Balwani oversaw, had major issues.

“There was no way I could save our company if he was there,” she said on Tuesday.

Mr. Balwani has denied assault accusations. He was indicted on fraud charges alongside Ms. Holmes and will be tried separately next year. He has also pleaded not guilty.

Over a long and detailed day of testimony, Mr. Leach lingered on the relationship, using text messages between Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani as evidence. He asked Ms. Holmes to read text messages that showed her exchanging affectionate remarks with Mr. Balwani. The pair called each other “tiger” and “tigress” in between pep talks about building Theranos.

“No one but you and I can build this business,” Mr. Balwani wrote in one exchange.

After each, Mr. Leach asked Ms. Holmes to verify that she had just read an example of Mr. Balwani acting lovingly toward her. Reading the messages, Ms. Holmes cried for a second time on the stand.

Jill Hasday, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who has written a book on intimate partner violence and the law, said the prosecution’s tactic could work to undermine Ms. Holmes’s previous testimony, depending on jurors’ understanding of abuse.

“My gut is, it can be effective, because people have a lot of misconceptions about intimate partner violence, among other things that it’s constant,” Ms. Hasday said.

The trial, which is scheduled to end in December, resumes next week.

Erin Woo contributed reporting.