Archives for May 2022

"...the artist who has the habit of art has a hand that trembles." Dante ( Paradiso 13.77–78) "Newspeak is the new lingua franca. All Ur-Fascist literature, including scholastic texts, revel in the use of an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments of complex and critical reasoning. A related objective is also to undermine culture and the cultivated taste for quality, because quality, in the fascist’s book, is retrograde." Anjan Basu (Fascism Come in All Shapes and Sizes But the 'Family Resemblances' Can No Longer Be Denied, The Wire, July 2021) "Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose … [Read more...]

"...artificial intelligence is a registry of power.” Kate Crawford (The Atlas of AI) “Cornell’s art assumes a romantic universe in which inexplicable events can and must occur. Minimal art, notwithstanding the cartesian disclaimers of some of the artists, draws its being from this charged, romantic atmosphere, which permits an anonymous slab or cube to force us to believe in it as something inevitable.” John Ashbery (Reported Sightings) "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; and in the lowest deep a lower deep..." John Milton (Paradise Lost, IV) "It is not true that the human mind has undergone no development since the earliest times and that, in contrast to the advances in … [Read more...]