Archives for May 2024

"Can there be culture without melancholia? " Homi K. Bhabha (A Question of Survival) "The notion of “bad conscience” developed at the same time as the art of the portrait and accompanied the rise of both individualism and the sense of responsibility. A connection surely exists among guilt, anxiety, and creativity." Jean Delumeau (Sin and Fear) “Everything happens as if there were an original defect in man.” Henri Gouhier (The Tyranny of the Future) "...paintings in the age of the internet need to be clever far more than they need to be good." John Seed (The Disrupted Realism of the New King Charles Portrait, Hyperallergic 2024) Increasingly I feel the that the 21st century … [Read more...]

“If freedom is the condition of life, it cannot be employed to abolish life and so to destroy and abolish itself … suicide is in no circumstances permissible…. Moral philosophers must, therefore, first and foremost show that suicide is abominable.” Immanuel Kant (Suicide) "Nessus, [a Centaur], carries the Poets across the river of boiling blood and leaves them in the Second Round of the Seventh Circle, The Wood of the Suicides. Here are punished those who destroyed their own lives and those who destroyed their substance. The souls of the Suicides are encased in thorny trees whose leaves are eaten by the odious Harpies, the overseers of the damned. " Dante (Canto 13, Inferno {Ciardi … [Read more...]