"The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it's graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it's Raphael, and I prefer the latter." Dave Hickey "This period led me into personal contact with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno, and the writings of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse. Strange though it may sound I do not hesitate to say that the new development of Marxist thought which these people represent evolved as the theoretical and ideological superstructure of the revolution that never happened. In it re-echo the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of … [Read more...]
Archives for March 2015
That Which Will Not Let Itself be Said — part one
March 18, 2015 by 9 Comments
"The ruin, still with us after six centuries of obsession, is no longer the image of a lost knowledge, nor of the inevitable return of repressed nature, nor even of a simple nostalgia for modernity. Instead, it seems almost a means of mourning the loss of the aesthetic itself. Ruins show us again—just like the kitsch object—a world in which beauty (or sublimity) is sealed off, its derangement safely framed and endlessly repeatable." Brian Dillon "Unfamiliarity is much more of an experience than familiarity." Ludwig Wittgenstein "Blue and Brown Books" "Don Quixote is always at my side... Don Quixote is the best book of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth... Better than … [Read more...]
State of the Art
March 10, 2015 by 13 Comments
"As a preamble to their performances, traditional storytellers in Majorca would say, 'It was and it was not so'". David Shields "The first apprentice we took was an old skateboarding friend of mine who was working as a garbageman. He just loved hanging around the shop so we offered him a spot, and now, a year and a half of training really hard later, he's working as a full-time barber. Because of all the photos we post on the internet, we think we're making it look more attractive to become a barber, and now we get a lot of guys asking for apprenticeships." Bertus, Schorem Haarsnijder en Barbie Rotterdam "Artists’ long-faltering, sporadic, but not inconsiderable identification … [Read more...]
House of Tards
March 3, 2015 by 31 Comments
"The same summer I was on Lewis, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player … [Read more...]
