Welcome To The Mental Institution Of The Universe*

Fig. 1. Antony Gormley - Critical Mass, 1995

'You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.'

Octave Mirbeau

* 'We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.' (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

A Little Evil Goes A Lot Further Than A Little Good

Fig. 1. 'Don Draper' (John Hamm) - Mad Men

Power and agency are synonymous, but they are not isomorphic. At its worst, power is an end in itself, with the means to match; while agency, when it is predominantly benign, can never be utterly self-serving. Of course, agency without power, or power without agency, are rare. In order to set the two apart, we need to locate them within the matrix of human desire: agency is what we crave, power is what seduces us.


Addendum:

Nirvana -The Man Who Sold The World (click to watch music video)

Hopefully, There Will Always Be An Artist At My Table

Fig. 1. Vincent Van Gogh - Still Life with a Plate of Onions, 1889


'Yesterday I sent you [Theo] a wire asking you for another 20 francs, I shall have nothing but that for my food all the week, but I have my frames at last and some stretchers.'

Vincent van Gogh (9th October 1888)

If Bored, Try Thinking Of Earth As An "Alien" Planet

Fig. 1. Man Ray - London Transport, 1938


'To the degree that a work breaks through the realm of art and becomes utopian perception, it is creation - meaning that it is subject to moral categories in relation not just to human beings in the act of conception, but to man's existence in the sphere of perception. The moral nature of creation gives the work the stamp of the expressionless.'

Walter Benjamin

Wherever We Lay Down Our Troubled Heads To Sleep

Fig. 1. William Kentridge - (drawing for the film) WEIGHING . . . and WANTING, 1997

'The place of art is for me a transport-station of trauma ... the transport-station does not promise that passage of the remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this occasion The passage is expected but uncertain; the transport does not happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject.'

Bracha Ettinger

Violence Against Beauty Is, In A Way, Beautiful Too

Fig. 1. Joel Peter Witkin - Las Meninas, 1987


Melissa Holbrook Pierson: What is "taste"?
Peter Schjeldahl: Sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's.

The Cat Will Be Away For A Spell ... Feel Free To Play