Conceptual Art Quotes

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

The canvas isn’t empty. It’s full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don’t even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.

Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

The real reality is there, but everything you KNOW about “it” is in your mind and your to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent... ...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

It is the power of expectation rather than the power of conceptual knowledge that molds what we see in life not less than in art.

Conceptual art isn't art, but it is Jewish. It signals the culmination of the Jewish takeover of modern art. Conceptual art requires no artistic ability, talent or skill. That's why Jews gravitate toward it and promote it. It's an example of Jews defining art as what they do rather than defining art in its relationship to Logos.

our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.

Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.

Uniquely specific, direct, non-linguistic experience is the element in which we live, and it is radically different from conceptual thinking, which can go on only in universals. This is why works of art, embodying as they do unique particulars and insights that cannot be conveyed in words, and cannot be mirrored in conceptual thought, have their roots in lived life and also cannot be translated [into words]. It is why, if someone responds to art predominantly with his intellect, he has already misunderstood it.

Thus for Haeckel, to know is not to conceptualize but to see. What nature is, is visible on its surface.

Voltaire called the calculus "the Art of numbering and measuring exactly a Thing whose Existence cannot be conceived." See Letters Concerning the English Nation p. 152

This does not mean that science is just the art of making measurable predictions. Some philosophers of science overly circumscribe science by limiting it to its numerical predictions. They miss the point, because they confuse the instruments with the objectives. Verifiable quantitative predictions are instruments to validate hypotheses. The objective of scientific research is not just to arrive at predictions: it is to understand how the world functions; to construct and develop an image of the world, a conceptual structure to enable us to think about. Before being technical, science is visionary.

It true, Bigfoot career been in hole lately. Bigfoot mania of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s but distant memory. I famous for ability to not be see but don’t think I not notice you not notice. I blame music television and internet. People too lazy and stupid to appreciate conceptual artist like Bigfoot who appeal is absence.

Ideas, conceptual ans visual, are all forms of art are about. Everything else is nothing more than the subject matter, ans technique, which is easily learned.

This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non- enjoyment of the works.

We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.

didn’t know what was important and what was trivial. They couldn’t remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless. But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.

I have little interest in illustration, which lacks a kind of transcendental quality. It is too literal. I find typography more straightforward, conceptual, and appealing, with its strict geometric vocabulary. There is a bridge between typographic design and fine art, especially since typography possesses a complex subtlety. The idea, the method, and the honesty in expression are central to a designer who works with type.

All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is "conceptual" that all representations are recognizable by their style.

The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.

Be imprecise. Understand the concept of “by-and-large” and use approximations. Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

In his book A WHOLE NEW MIND, Daniel Pink describes how the forces of automation, outsourcing, and an overabundance of products are ushering in a new era.  Call it the Conceptual Age, or the Creative Age.  The important thing, Pink writes, is that if you want to survive  (much less thrive) you need to ask yourself three questions about whatever it is that you do: Can a computer do it for you? Can someone overseas do it cheaper? Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

Our conceptual maps tend to lack a way to conceive the immanence of violence and power in the ideals and practices that have become dominant in the Western tradition. Mass death has tended to be conceived as something accidental, something outside the ordinary run of events. I think the difficulty in coming to terms with the peculiarities of the Western will to power has to do with the absence of a central metaphor capable of describing the link between consumption and death. The consumptive mentality has in many respects been normalized, as has the violence that underpins and is the effect of systems of universal judgment. Certainly the aestheticization of difference is coextensive with the romance with violence that has become so characteristic of contemporary Western society.

that rather than attempting to implement, often through lethal force, their conceptual self across the world, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death. Becker called this “the bitter antidote,” and

Muriel Strauss, who at twenty-four only ever talks about the world in terms of conceptual authenticity and creative truth, who’s been a darling of the New York art scene since her first semester at Tisch, where she quickly realized she was better at critiquing art than creating it.

Much will have been gained for aesthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly — rather than merely ascertaining — that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollinian-Dionysian duality, even as the propagation of the species depends on the duality of the sexes, their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation. I have borrowed my adjectives from the Greeks, who developed their mystical doctrines of art through plausible embodiments, not through purely conceptual means. It is by those two art sponsoring deities, Apollo and Dionysus, that we are made to recognize the tremendous split, as regards both origins and objectives, between the plastic, Apollinian arts and the nonvisual art of music inspired by Dionysus. The two creative tendencies developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord that agon which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by the thaumaturgy of an Hellenic act of will, the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this condition, begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient features of both parents.

Can I try the dryler?" "No. No." Eyvinder grabbed it and held it to his breast. "Jonathan, I must make a confession." He grinned. "This is really a stone I painted to resemble a dryler. It's very good, no? I have done a beautiful job making it into a dryler. I wanted to give you a full Faroese meal in all its typicality, Anna and I both wanted this. But Anna cannot make dryler. Nobody can make them anymore. We've forgotten how, because they are so stinking bad to eat. They are just like rocks to eat. So, I decided,why not take a rock and make it into a dryler? It's conceptive art, isn't it?" "Conceptual," said Jonathan

Some feminist artists have chosen a fundamentally sexual or erotic imagery... Others have opted for a realist or conceptual celebration of female experience in which birth, motherhood, rape, maintenance, household imagery, windows, menstruation, autobiography, family background and portraits of friends figure prominently...

James O. Incandenza - A Filmography The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.

By formally addressing itself to the infinite without the infinite receding into a definitionless void, poetry establishes a conceptual interface between the two terms. It creates the possibility of encounter with the unknown and the other by demonstrating this interface as essential to, and indeed constitutive of, individual human being.

Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy.

In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as "dazzling obscurity," "whispering silence," "teeming desert," are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. "He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana…. When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams, when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer…. For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE…. And now thy SELF is lost in SELF, THYSELF unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.. . . Behold! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat."[277] [277] H. P. Blavatsky: The voice of the Silence. These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.

Breakthrough artists always expand the very concept of freedom.

still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually—art based on some overriding idea—and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.

From Barry White to the color white to milk to the Milky Way is a long voyage conceptually, but a short jaunt neurologically.

As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man’s response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. 281 281 - This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

Take another look at the Sun Tzu quote that opens this chapter: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” He was talking about war, but it applies here as well. To achieve our objectives, we first need to have a strategy: an overall approach, a conceptual scaffolding or mental model that is informed by science, is tailored to our goals, and gives us options.

Making art depends upon noticing things — things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter. Sooner or later, for instance, every visual artist notices the relationship of the line to the picture’s edge. Before that moment the relationship does not exist; afterwards it’s impossible to imagine it not existing. And from that moment on every new line talks back and forth with the picture’s edge. People who have not yet made this small leap do not see the same picture as those who have — in fact, conceptually speaking, they do not even live in the same world.

Passing from legality to subversion, the need of finding a minimum stimulus with a maximum effect appears—an effect that through its impact justifies the risk taken and pays for it. During certain historical periods, at the level of the object, this meant dealing with and creating mysteries. At the level of situations, and in this case, it means the change of social structure.

Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe.

Similarly the call to growth can be conceptualized as personal (a daimon or genius, an angel or a muse) or as impersonal, like the tides or the transiting of Venus. Either way works, as long as we're comfortable with it. Or if extra-dimensionality doesn't sit well with you in any form, think of it as "talent," programmed into our genes by evolution. The point, for the thesis I'm seeking to put forward, is that there are forces we can call our allies. As Resistance works to keep us from becoming who we were born to be, equal and opposite powers are counterpoised against it. These are our allies and angels.

Becker later came to the starting realization on his deathbed: that people’s immortality projects were actually the problem, not the solution; that rather than attempting t implement, often through lethal force, their conceptual self across the world, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death. Becker called this “the bitter antidote”, and struggled with reconciling it himself as he stared down his own demise. While death is bad, it is inevitable. Therefore, we should not avoid this realization , but rather come to terms with it as best we can. Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death - the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life’s frivolous ambitions - we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.

Ladles and Jellyspoons, all rise for...ʻTRIUMPHʼ. And by Jupiter what a triumph it is! ... For yet again the unfeasibly huge, nay the monstrously Gigantic, creative genius of the inimitable Mr. Greg Broadmore, delivers us from evil. Expanding the universe according to Dr.Grordbort, which teems with its ever growing cast of splendiferous characters, creatures, and (most importantly) weapons, and is led by the greatest bombast in the history of fiction, Lord Cockswain himself, GBʼs latest tome of magnificence once more separates the mere pretender from the true originator of fantasy art. This outing has me feeling that we have reached a tipping point in the evolution of the oeuvre, where we cannot BUT believe that this world is real, that these microscopically detailed inventions are not fanciful conceptual constructs, but an authentic a depiction as any of our Glorious past, present... and perhaps our future.

Brian asked, “How did you learn to think so big at CAA?” I reminded him that Airbnb had consistently thought big: it hadn’t been at all content with its original business of renting out air mattresses on floors. Then I added that one way to conceptualize how to think in business is a martial-arts precept: “If you aim at the target, you lose all your power. You have to hit through the target to really smash it.” To get where you want to go, you have to set out to go even further.

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there’s a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished — but more innovative — than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos — demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship — are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A

All of human civilization... is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in places today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die... all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die. Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people's immortality projects. ...wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people's immortality project rub up against another group's.

Courage in an artist or writer is different from the courage of firefighters, who rescue people and risk their own lives. Artistic courage might be conceptualized as an internal drama about overcoming rules or inhibitions, dicta of all kinds, the art a manifestation or result of a multitude of processes.

All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that’s the whole point. Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.

religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture – a range of interests which puts to shame the scope of the achievements of even the greatest and most influential secular movements and individuals in history. For those interested in the spread and impact of ideas, it is hard not to be mesmerized by examples of the most successful educational and intellectual movements the planet has ever witnessed.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

What distinguishes language from isolated gestures and signs, no matter how numerous, is that it forms a complex ramifying structure, which in its conceptual entirety presents a Wiltbild or comprehensive symbolic framework capable of embracing many aspects of reality: not a static representation like a picture or a sculpture, but a moving picture of things, events, processes, ideas, purposes, in which every word is surrounded by a rich penumbra of original concrete experiences, and every sentence brings with it some degree of novelty, if only because time and place, intention and recipient, change its meaning. Contrary to Bergson, language is the least geometric, the least static; of all the arts.

The exchangeability that is expressed in money must inevitably have repercussions upon the quality of commodities themselves, or must interact with it. The disparagement of the interest in the individuality of a commodity leads to a disparagement of individuality itself. If the two sides to a commodity are its quality and it s price, then it seems logically impossible for the interest to be focused on only one of these sides: for cheapness is an empty word if it does not imply a low price for a relative good quality, and good quality is an economic attraction only for a correspondingly fair price. And yet this conceptual impossibility is psychologically real and effective. The interest in the one side can be so great that its logically necessary counterpart completely disappears. The typical instance of one of these case s is the ‘fifty cents bazaar’. The principle of valuation in the mode rn money economy finds its clearest expression here. It is not the commodity that is the centre of interest here but the price—a principle that in former times not only would have appeared shameless but would have been absolutely impossible. It has been rightly pointed out that the medieval town, despite all the progress it embodied, still lacked the extensive capital economy, and that this was the reason for seeking the ideal of the economy not so much in the expansion (which is possibly only through cheapness) but rather in the quality of the goods offered; hence the great contributions of the applied arts, the rigorous control of production, the strict policing of basic necessities, etc. Such is one extreme pole of the series, whose other pole is characterized by the slogan, ‘cheap and bad’—a synthesis that is possibly only if we are hypnotized by cheapness and are not aware of anything else. The levelling of objects to that of money reduces the subjective interest first in their specific qualities and then, as a further consequence, in the objects themselves. The production of cheap trash is, as it were, the vengeance of the objects for the fact that they have been ousted from the focal point of interest by a merely indifferent means.

People certainly are affected by framing, as we know from centuries of commentary on the arts of rhetoric and persuasion. And metaphors, especially conceptual metaphors, are an essential tool of rhetoric, ordinary communication, and thought itself. But this doesn’t mean that people are enslaved by their metaphors of that the choice of metaphor is a matter of taste or indoctrination. Metaphors are generalisations: they subsume a particular instance in some overarching category. Different metaphors can frame the same situation for the same reason that different words can describe the same object […] Like other generalisations, metaphors can be tested on their predictions and scrutinised on their merits, including their fidelity to the structure of the world.

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever.

Not long ago I stood with a friend next to an art work made of four wood beams laid in a long rectangle, with a mirror set behind each corner so as to reflect the others. My friend, a conceptual artist, and I talked about the minimalist basis of such work: its reception by critics then, its elaboration by artists later, its significance to practitioners today, all of which are concerns of this book as well. Taken by our talk, we hardly noticed his little girl as she played on the beams. But then, signaled by her mother, we looked up to see her pass through the looking glass. Into the hall of mirrors, the mise-en-abîme of beams, she moved farther and farther from us, and as she passed into the distance, she passed into the past as well. Yet suddenly there she was right behind us: all she had done was skip along the beams around the room. And there we were, a critic and an artist informed in contemporary art, taken to school by a six-year-old, our theory no match for her practice. For her playing of the piece conveyed not only specific concerns of minimalist work - the tensions among the spaces we feel, the images we see, and the forms we know - but also general shifts in art over the last three decades - new interventions into space, different construction of viewing, and expanded definitions of art. Her performance became allegorical as well, for she described a paradoxical figure in space, a recession that is also a return, that evoked for me the paradoxical figure in time described by the avant-garde. For even as the avant-garde recedes into the past, it also returns from the future, repositioned by innovative art in the present. This strange temporality, lost in stories of twentieth-century art, is a principal subject of this book.

I am a firm believer that digital imaging has already rivaled the chemical process in its ability to make fine prints. An exceptional digital print, on a fine quality paper, can take on all the delicacy of a masterful photogravure. Each is, after all, ink on paper. The unfortunate thing is that skillful digital fine art photography is being created by so few, and today’s artworld is brimming with hastily made, conceptually oriented, digital bric-a-brac.

Recently, a judge of the prestigious 2014 British Forward Prize for Poetry was moved to observe that “there is an awful lot of very powerful, lyrical, and readable poetry being written today,” but we need education, because “we have lost the sense that poetry sits halfway between prose and music—that you can’t expect to read it like a novel.” A few years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed of mine, about learning poetry by heart. The response to it confirmed that people of all ages think about poetry as a kind of inspired music, embodying beauty and insight. On one hand, poetry has always flowed from music, as rap and hip-hop remind us big-time. Rappers know how poetry walks and talks. So we have music, or deeply felt recitations of poems that belong to collective memory. On the other hand, we have overly instructive prose poems, as well as the experiments of certain critical ideologies, or conceptual performance art. These aspects seem to represent the public, Janus face of poetry.

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is thie way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

We could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics, and disposable diapers. We enjoy fresh, safe milk and meat, and vegetables and tropical fruits heaped in snowbound cities. When I cross the George Washington Bridge or any of America’s great bridges, I think: men have done this. Construction is a sublime male poetry. When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception, what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. A contemporary woman clapping on a hard hat merely enters a conceptual system invented by men. Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Even Thoreau’s Walden was just a two-year experiment. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.

Perhaps even more fundamentally, it is possible to argue that there is no “reality” that is not always already a form of fantasy: that fantasy is all we have got. In other words, the very distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” is in many ways an artificial one, reminiscent of an Enlightenment worldview—one that believed in the power of the rational mind to tell fact from fiction—that has been seriously undermined in recent decades of postmodern theorizing. That is, the belief that we could ever relate to the world objectively, as it “really is,” has itself been discredited as a fantasy that occludes the recognition that the ways we perceive and interpret the world always necessarily reflect the value systems within which we operate. In effect, while the Enlightenment worldview distinguishes between “reality” and our more or less successful efforts to represent it, contemporary theorists recognize—as Nietzsche already did—that our very attempts to represent reality invariably shape the form of this reality. By this I do not mean to say that there exists no reality independently of human representations, but merely that we do not possess any immediate or unmediated access to that reality; since we only understand the world around us through the conceptual frameworks, labels, and systems of thought that we impose on this world, there is no way to know what this world might be like outside of our endeavors to comprehend it.

FV: Hasn't all art, in a way, submitted to words - reduced itself to the literary...admitted its failure through all the catalogues and criticism, monographs and manifestos — ML: Explanations? FV: Exactly. All the artistry, now, seems expended in the rhetoric and sophistry used to differentiate, to justify its own existence now that so little is left to do. And who's to say how much of it ever needed doing in the first place? [...] Nothing's been done here but the re-writing of rules, in denial that the game was already won, long ago, by the likes of Duchamp, Arp, or Malevich. I mean, what's more, or, what's less to be said than a single black square? ML: Well, a triangle has fewer sides, I suppose. FV: Then a circle, a line, a dot. The rest is academic; obvious variations on an unnecessary theme, until you're left with just an empty canvas - which I'm sure has been done, too. ML: Franz Kline, wasn't it? Or, Yves Klein - didn't he once exhibit a completely empty gallery? No canvases at all. FV: I guess, from there, to not exhibit anything - to do absolutely nothing at all - would be the next "conceptual" act; the ultimate multimedia performance, where all artforms converge in negation and silence. And someone's probably already put their signature to that, as well. But even this should be too much, to involve an artist, a name. Surely nothing, done by no-one, is the greatest possible artistic achievement. Yet, that too has been done. Long, long ago. Before the very first artists ever walked the earth.

The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.

How much does a thought weigh? While no one would deny the substance, the physicality, the realness of those qualities grouped under the banner of endosemiotics—cells, hormones, nerves, etc.—psychosemiotics is generally considered to belong to the realms of the subjective and physically insubstantial. This, however, has already been disproven. Using the neuron model for consciousness, physicists have determined that a thought (defined as a piece of information), when converted from neuro electricity to mass, possesses weight roughly equal to that of a water molecule. And regardless of its humble size, this measurement still demonstrates thought/information manifesting in the realm of physical; a real energy. Importantly, information only enters the physical upon interpretation. A man sees a piece of art. In the process of interpreting that art, information manifests as a thought—not just conceptually, but, as elucidated above, physically. Here, an essential question emerges: Where does this information go once it has been manifested?

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

One key characteristic of structure is its richness. To illustrate, recall the comparison that John Rawls drew between checkers and chess when he was describing the Aristotelian principle (see page 386). Both games are played on a board with 64 squares, but they have different structures. Checkers has one kind of piece, while chess has six different kinds of pieces. The movement of any checker piece is restricted to a single square per turn unless it is capturing, while movement in chess is different for each piece. In checkers, the goal is to capture all the opponents’ pieces. In chess, the goal is to trap one particular piece. The structure of chess is objectively richer than the structure of checkers. It is no coincidence that chess has thousands of books written about tactics and strategy for every aspect of the game while checkers has a fraction of that number. The nature of accomplishment in checkers and chess is also objectively different, as reflected in their relative places in Western culture.[1] I measure the richness of a structure by three aspects: principles, craft, and tools. The scientific method offers convenient examples. Conceptually, a scientific experiment proceeds according to principles such as replicability, falsifiability, and the role of the hypothesis that apply across different scientific disciplines. The actual conduct of a classic scientific experiment involves craft—the generation of a hypothesis to be tested or a topic to be explored, the creation of the methods for doing so, and meticulous observance of protocols and procedures during the actual work. The details of craft differ not only across disciplines but within disciplines. They also have a family resemblance, in the sense that a meticulous scientist behaves in ways that are recognizable to scientists in every field—“meticulous” being one of the defining characteristics of craft practiced at a high level. Tools play a double role. Sometimes they are created in direct response to needs generated by principles and craft—accurate thermometers are an example—but at least as often, a tool turns out to have unanticipated uses that alter both principles and craft, independently expanding the realm of things a discipline can achieve. An example is the invention of the diffraction grating to study spectra of light, which 40 years later turned out to enable astronomers to study the composition of the stars.

While native cultures had inhabited the Maine woods for ten thousand years and left the ecosystem intact, white colonizers devasted it in a matter of decades. Enlightenment science was showing how false traditional cosmology was and replacing it in intellectual history by various kinds of post-Christian/scientific pantheism-most notably Deism, which had been the prevailing conceptual framework among America’s intellectuals…including America’s Founding Fathers. Deism considered art and science to the true religion because those practices engaged us with the immediate reality of the cosmos and that reality itself was the divine. There were various versions of pantheism among Romantic poets and painters, for who the natural world evoked a profound sense of awe, awe they could only explain as a kind of religious experience.

In the arts terms frequently cross boundaries, as when the concept of metaphor transfers from literature to architecture. The strict definition of metaphor is that it describes a link between disparate concepts that avoids ‘like’ or ‘as’. There is no point-to-point correspondence, the association being on the level of suggestion rather than simile – ‘I see a cloud that’s dragonish . . .’ // A metaphor creates a bridge across unexplored territory, connecting two unlikely entities. The aesthetic ‘spark’ is generated by the novelty or poignancy of the association; the arcing across conceptual space. The emotional reward comes from the recognition of a new pattern of relationship. The phenomenon of metaphor operates in parallel with the formal aesthetic qualities of a building being a variation on the theme of binary aesthetics, introducing the poetic element into architecture.

The avant-garde is a connotation, every act here is a connotative value. The whole series of avant-garde movements do not signify, and yet their concepts are reconnotation.

A great perfume can express the intangible, but essential, intentions of a designer and convey the constant, enduring, and driving identity of the fashion house. It was through Marc Rosen's advocacy that I came to realize that the greatest modern perfume bottles were an art reflecting art. They exist as design objects in their own right, but are directly responsive to the composition of the scents they hold. A perfume, based on a series of layers and combinations of scent and composed of "notes" in a system that is at once science and subjectivity, is dependent on the sensory and the intuitive. With evocative qualities that are an amalgam of references framing it conceptually, a perfume can inspire possibilities of representation through graphics and the form of its flacon. Perfume bottles reside at the intersection of aesthetics and technology. They are, at their most artful, the sculptural manifestations of the ideas, emotions, and poetry elicited by a fragrance.

Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die.

We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability—on some unconscious level—scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence—our conceptual self—will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist. Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects: the cities and governments and structures and authorities in place today were all immortality projects of men and women who came before us. They are the remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die. Names like Jesus, Muhammad, Napoleon, and Shakespeare are just as powerful today as when those men lived, if not more so. And that’s the whole point. Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die. Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects. Becker argues that wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub up against another group’s. Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s. But, when our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror—that horrible, depressing anxiety—creeps back into our mind. Trauma can cause this, as can shame and social ridicule. As can, as Becker points out, mental illness. If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence.

Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’ Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’ Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.

For about five years (1983-1987), when the main bulk of Modern Pranic Healing was being validated, conceptualized, synthesized, formulated, systematized, and developed, MCKS “ate, drank and slept Pranic Healing”. This was one of the toughest and most difficult part of His life. To formulate and develop Modern Pranic Healing from a zygote state (fertilized egg) to adulthood in a few years time was just almost impossible. The completion of the Spiritual Thesis was extremely difficult. The effort required was monumental. Modern Pranic Healing as a science was finally born in late 1987 when the book, The Ancient Science and Art of Pranic Healing, by Master Choa Kok Sui was finally published.

Our attitude towards knowledge is more natural: we have the libertinage of the spirit in all innocence, we hate the pathetic and hieratic manners, we delight in what is forbidden, we would hardly know an interest in knowledge if we were bored on the way to it would have. Our attitude towards morality is more natural. Principles have become ridiculous; nobody allows himself to speak of his "duty" without irony. But one appreciates a helpful, benevolent disposition (one sees morality in instinct and deduces the rest ). In addition, a few honor point terms. Our position in politicis is more natural: we see problems of power, of the quantity of power against another quantity. We do not believe in a right that does not rest on the power to assert itself: we see all rights as conquests. Our esteem for great people and things is more natural: we count passion as a privilege, we do not find anything great unless a great crime is involved; we conceptualize all being great as placing oneself outside in relation to morality. Our attitude towards nature is more natural: we no longer love it for the sake of its “innocence”, “reason”, “beauty”, we have “demonized” and “dumbfounded” it. But instead of despising it for that reason, we have since felt more related and more at home in it. It does not aspire to virtue: we therefore respect it. Our attitude towards art is more natural: we do not ask of it the beautiful false lies, etc.; the brutal positivism prevails, which takes place without being excited. In sum: there are indications that nineteenth-century Europeans are less ashamed of their instincts; they has taken a good step towards admitting their unconditional naturalness, that is, their immorality, to themself without bitterness: on the contrary, strong enough to endure this sight alone. This sounds to certain ears as if the corruption had advanced: and it is certain that man has not approached the "nature" of which Rousseau speaks, but has "taken" a step further in the civilization which he perpetuated. We have strengthened ourselves: we have come closer to the 17th century, the taste of its end in particular.

Indeed, it’s easier to conclude that ‘the only definition of art,’ as the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth put it, ‘is art.’ Which is another way of saying that art is not a theory, it’s an activity. And, by extension, that art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live.

A person who believes in a particular conceptual system believes that everything can be explained by reference to that conceptual system. Whereas the artist sees the pattern and feels the mystery that looms beyond the pattern. […] Great art is pattern over mystery, it is juggling words over whirlpools of silence.

One morning at breakfast he pointed out an article in the newspaper to me. It was about a Japanese artist, Yoko Ono, who had made a film that consisted of close-up shots of people’s bottoms. ‘Cyn, you’ve got to look at this. It must be a joke. Christ, what next? She can’t be serious!’ We laughed and shook our heads. ‘Mad,’ John said. ‘She must be off her rocker.’ I had to agree. We had no understanding at all of avant-garde art or conceptualism at that point and the newspaper went into the bin. We didn’t discuss Yoko Ono again until one night when we were lying in bed, reading, I asked John what his book was. It was called Grapefruit and looked very short. ‘Oh, something that weird artist woman sent me,’ he said.

To Poincaré’s suggestion that the fourth dimension be represented as a succession of scenes, Picasso added a visually ingenious twist: Set down different views of a scene all at once, simultaneously. These were the essential elements in Picasso’s discovery of a representation of nature that caught the enormous conceptual transformations occurring in art, science and technology at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sliding through professions and geography, minimizing race and class, the yearning for androgyny and psychological environmentalism are all unsatisfying because they neglect or deny the category-making nature of cognition itself. The fashionable ideal that everyone should be free of imposed definition in order to be whatever he wants, to choose and change identity in spite of the accidents of birth, and to define self according to ideology and personal taste is very appealing, though in some grievously frustrating way appallingly inadequate and wrong. The adolescent, caught between the modern world's chronic shortage of order and the chic psychology of identity by assertion, is on queasy ground. The ideal conflicts with the thrust of his mental development, which is to distinguish, define, and classify. The central task of his first twelve years is to develop his powers of discrimination, linking them to speech, and to master the art of conceptualizing and abstracting by searching out the commonalities and differences among plants and animals—traits given, not chosen.

No complicated mathematical considerations are necessary because Einstein went right to the conceptual core of the problem. A hallmark of high creativity is having such complete command of all technicalities that one can soar over inessential details and go right to the heart of the problem. Mozart did it in music, Picasso in art, and Einstein in physics.

Datos Importantes de la Apología 1.- El orden de los tres primeros diálogos: Eutifrón, Apología y Critón. 2.- Sócrates trata de recuperar la estructura de la polis o ciudad. 3.- Sócrates transforma los conceptos de los antiguos filósofos en “práctica moral”, los reduce a un plano “concretamente humano”. 4.- En lo moral, dice que es preferible padecer una injusticia que cometerla. 5.- Sostiene que el alma humana es el lugar en donde se conjugan todas las fuerzas del universo. Y, por su parte, Platón la identifica como viviendo en una casa que es el cuerpo físico. Dice que el cuerpo es como una esponja que absorbe los efectos del exterior. 6.- Topus Uranus: Es el lugar en donde se encuentra el alma. 7.- La Justicia es dar a cada quien lo que le toca. 8.- Autoconocimiento es conocerte a ti mismo. 9.- Mayéutica es el arte de hacer parir ideas en la mente de los hombres. Este era el método de Sócrates, quien era hijo de una partera, siendo de su imagen que concibió su método. 1.- Huerística es el arte de hacer reflexionar a los hombres. 11.- El Teetetes nos habla de tres tipos de conocimiento: Sensible: Este es muy limitado; Inteligible, limitado; y conocimiento racional: que es juicioso, meditado y conceptual. En su apología, vemos a un Platón con ideas propias, pero que está dispuesto a defender las geniales concepciones de su maestro. Dice que la virtud es hacer lo que mejor sabemos hacer. ¿Es posible, o no, enseñar la Virtud? Sócrates dice que no.  Todos la tenemos internamente desde que nacemos, lo único que tenemos que hacer es recordarla.  Lo que sí se puede enseñar es el método para el buen uso de la Virtud. La Apología de Sócrates muestra la preocupación de los griegos por los problemas del hombre (periodo antropológico). Captar en los diálogos la presencia de las ideas de Sócrates y las de Platón es básico.  Podemos pensar en un Sócrates Platonizado o en un Platón Socratizado.  Aunque es más conveniente pensar en términos de períodos y decir que una idea determinante pertenece a tal periodo socrático. La importancia del contenido del diálogo se resume en tres conceptos básicos: 1.- LA INJUSTICIA: Se cometió una injusticia con Sócrates. 2.- METODO DIALOGICO: Este es el estilo, es un diálogo. 3.- LA VIRTUD MORAL: Asumir en justicia lo que hay que asumir.  A pesar de que se defiende con todos sus recursos, sostiene su virtud moral y recibe la muerte, creyendo que es mejor sufrir una injusticia que cometerla. La Importancia formal: son las enseñanzas que podemos sacar: Este diálogo está en la transición del período cosmológico y el antropológico. En el vemos la opinión socrática y sus planteamientos originales. La pedagogía usada es mayéutica y dialógica, es una enseñanza que se puede extraer.

having directly grasped the mind through meditative practices, these definitions are just words. It’s important to be able to identify the mind through direct experience, not just as an abstract concept. So the purpose of this exercise is to be able to directly feel or grasp the conventional nature of the mind, so when you say the mind has qualities of ‘clarity’ and ‘cognition,’ you will be able to identify it through experience, not just as an abstract concept. “This exercise helps you to deliberately stop the discursive thoughts and gradually remain in that state for longer and longer duration. As you practice this exercise, eventually you will get to a feeling as if there is nothing there, a sense of vacuity. But if you go farther, you eventually begin to recognize the underlying nature of the mind, the qualities of ‘clarity’ and ‘knowing.’ It is similar to having a pure crystal glass full of water. If the water is pure, you can see the bottom of the glass, but you still recognize that the water is there. “So, today, let us meditate on nonconceptuality. This is not a mere state of dullness, or a blanked-out state of mind. Rather, what you should do is, first of all, generate the determination that ‘I will maintain a state without conceptual thoughts.’ The way in which you should do that is this:

Generally speaking, our mind is predominantly directed towards external objects. Our attention follows after the sense experiences. It remains at a predominantly sensory and conceptual level. In other words, normally our awareness is directed towards physical sensory experiences and mental concepts. But in this exercise, what you should do is to withdraw your mind inward; don’t let it chase after or pay attention to sensory objects. At the same time, don’t allow it to be so totally withdrawn that there is a kind of dullness or lack of mindfulness. You should maintain a very full state of alertness and mindfulness, and then try to see the natural state of your consciousness—a state in which your consciousness is not afflicted by thoughts of the past, the things that have happened, your memories and remembrances; nor is it afflicted by thoughts of the future, like your future plans, anticipations, fears, and hopes. But rather, try to remain in a natural and neutral state. “This is a bit like a river that is flowing quite strongly, in which you cannot see the riverbed very clearly. If, however, there was some way you could stop the flow in both directions, from where the water is coming and to where the water is flowing, then you could keep the water still. That would allow you to see the base of the river quite

What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture?

religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metaphysics with a practical involvement in education, fashion, politics, travel, hostelry, initiation ceremonies, publishing, art and architecture

This great church is an incomparable work of art. There is neither aridity nor confusion in the tenets it sets forth. . . . It is the zenith of a style, the work of artists who had understood and assimilated all their predecessors' successes, in complete possession of the techniques of their times, but using them without indiscreet display nor gratuitous feats of skill. It was Jean d'Orbais who undoubtedly conceived the general plan of the building, a plan which was respected, at least in its essential elements, by his successors. This is one of the reasons for the extreme coherence and unity of the edifice. —REIMS CATHEDRAL GUIDEBOOK[1] Conceptual

The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won’t let them think. Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it’s going to show.

In the repertoire of Buddhist practices that are available to us, reflection is one of the most neglected by contemporary writers on Buddhist practice. In fact, reading some books, you’d think that Buddhists aren’t supposed to think at all, as if thinking somehow contaminates the mind. Of course, if we’re honest, we have to admit that a lot of what we think about does contaminate our minds, but that doesn’t mean that all thinking is bad. Someone who eats only junk food will become ill, but they shouldn’t stop eating altogether; they need to eat nutritious food, and similarly, we shouldn’t stop thinking, we just need to be careful what we think and how we think about it. It’s also possible to think too much, to over-conceptualize, to be ‘too much in our head’ as we say, and when we do that we lose touch with our actual lived experience. The remedy for this is not to stop thinking altogether, but to learn to think more consciously and when it’s appropriate.

Arts of energy management and of combat are, of course, not confined to the Chinese only. Peoples of different cultures have practised and spread these arts since ancient times. Those who follow the Chinese tradition call these arts chi kung and kungfu (or qigong and gongfu in Romanized Chinese), and those following other traditions call them by other names. Muslims in various parts of the world have developed arts of energy management and of combat to very high levels. Many practices in Sufism, which is spiritual cultivation in Islamic tradition, are similar to chi kung practices. As in chi kung, Sufi practitioners pay much importance to the training of energy and spirit, called “qi” and “shen” in Chinese, but “nafas” and “roh” in Muslim terms. When one can free himself from cultural and religious connotations, he will find that the philosophy of Sufism and of chi kung are similar. A Sufi practitioner believes that his own breath, or nafas, is a gift of God, and his ultimate goal in life is to be united with God. Hence, he practises appropriate breathing exercises so that the breath of God flows harmoniously through him, cleansing him of his weakness and sin, which are manifested as illness and pain. And he practises meditation so that ultimately his personal spirit will return to the universal Spirit of God. In chi kung terms, this returning to God is expressed as “cultivating spirit to return to the Great Void”, which is “lian shen huan shi” in Chinese. Interestingly the breathing and meditation methods in Sufism and in chi kung are quite similar. Some people, including some Muslims, may think that meditation is unIslamic, and therefore taboo. This is a serious mis-conception. Indeed, Prophet Mohammed himself clearly states that a day of meditation is better than sixty years of worship. As in any religion, there is often a huge conceptual gap between the highest teaching and the common followers. In Buddhism, for example, although the Buddha clearly states that meditation is the essential path to the highest spiritual attainment, most common Buddhists do not have any idea of meditation. The martial arts of the Muslims were effective and sophisticated. At many points in world history, the Muslims, such as the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks, were formidable warriors. Modern Muslim martial arts are very advanced and are complete by themselves, i.e. they do not need to borrow from outside arts for their force training or combat application — for example, they do not need to borrow from chi kung for internal force training, Western aerobics for stretching, judo and kickboxing for throws and kicks. [...] It is reasonable if sceptics ask, “If they are really so advanced, why don't they take part in international full contact fighting competitions and win titles?” The answer is that they hold different values. They are not interested in fighting or titles. At their level, their main concern is spiritual cultivation. Not only they will not be bothered whether you believe in such abilities, generally they are reluctant to let others know of their abilities. Muslims form a substantial portion of the population in China, and they have contributed an important part in the development of chi kung and kungfu. But because the Chinese generally do not relate one's achievements to one's religion, the contributions of these Chinese Muslim masters did not carry the label “Muslim” with them. In fact, in China the Muslim places of worship are not called mosques, as in many other countries, but are called temples. Most people cannot tell the difference be

The art of spirituality is to act in the conceptual world with the attitude of oneness. You move from one conceptual role to the other but never identify with either.

Generally speaking, our mind is predominantly directed towards external objects. Our attention follows after the sense experiences. It remains at a predominantly sensory and conceptual level. In other words, normally our awareness is directed towards physical sensory experiences and mental concepts. But in this exercise, what you should do is to withdraw your mind inward; don’t let it chase after or pay attention to sensory objects. At the same time, don’t allow it to be so totally withdrawn that there is a kind of dullness or lack of mindfulness. You should maintain a very full state of alertness and mindfulness, and then try to see the natural state of your consciousness—a state in which your consciousness is not afflicted by thoughts of the past, the things that have happened, your memories and remembrances; nor is it afflicted by thoughts of the future, like your future plans, anticipations, fears, and hopes. But rather, try to remain in a natural and neutral state. “This is a bit like a river that is flowing quite strongly, in which you cannot see the riverbed very clearly. If, however, there was some way you could stop the flow in both directions, from where the water is coming and to where the water is flowing, then you could keep the water still. That would allow you to see the base of the river quite clearly. Similarly, when you are able to stop your mind from chasing sensory objects and thinking about the past and future and so on, and when you can free your mind from being totally ‘blanked out’ as well, then you will begin to see underneath this turbulence of the thought processes. There is an underlying stillness, an underlying clarity of the mind. You should try to observe or experience this ...

LORNE MICHAELS: I taught at an art school in Toronto, I was teaching improvisations, the conceptual art movement which was being talked about and on the edge of things in the early seventies. Where that and entertainment met was what Andy Kaufman was doing. It wasn’t just that he lip-synched to “Mighty Mouse”; it was that he only did that one part in it, that one line, and stood around for the rest. It was very conceptual, and it instantly signaled to the brighter part of the audience that that was the kind of show we were going to do. And they weren’t getting that anywhere else on television. In the first couple years, Andy must have been on close to ten times. One night he even read from The Great Gatsby. In the beginning I had Penn and Teller on a few times, because that was the DNA, but I couldn’t do that now. The pure variety show part of it is over. It’s a straight comedy show now.

Koans take the art of questioning into the realm of practice. Koans are questions that emerge from dualistic, conceptual mind. Yet we cannot answer them in the same way in which we asked them. In search of an answer they take us beyond the mind of objectification. We usually associate koans with Zen practice. Perhaps Zen practitioners got the idea of koan practice from the Buddha himself.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle.