Critique And Art Quotes

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.

Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

Well, I'm not defining good and bad art, except, that art that appeals to me or repels me is good. Art that bores me is bad.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.” [Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts Its click Creates perpetual motion ("The Head")

To Jacob the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That's why he didn't read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

It's always up to other people to say if something is art. I hate it when people say, "I'm an artist." I think, well, I'll be the judge of that. And I don't think "artist" is a job description. It's a critique, a favorable critique, that someone else might apply to your work.

Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique. But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.

One of the best ways to recharge is by simply being in the presence of art. No thoughts, no critiques. Just full-on absorption mode.

I am an author of the analytical critique. And because of that, a ton of research is done by me in order to bring an examination into comprehensive being. ("Interviews With Writers," 2018).

The great art is to endure

Fantasy like thought that no man could rain Just let her reign Run wild with her unafraid Of any rain storms They only wash the mud away and make way For double rainbows and sunny days

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!

In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.

La solitude qui enveloppe les oeuvres d'art est infinie, etil n'estrien qui permette de moins les atteindre que la critique. Seul l'amour peut les appréhender, les saisir et faire preuve de justesse à leur endroit:

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

Very well.” In a voice as cool and detached as if he were critiquing a work of art, he said, “Starting at the top: your brow is marked with intelligence, your gaze is direct, your features are delicate, your skin is fair, your voice is refined, your speech reflects education . . .” He paused. “Even the way you hold your head is elegant.” I was suddenly, excruciatingly self-conscious. I dropped my gaze, my face on fire. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “And then there is your modesty. No milkmaid could have blushed like that.” To my mortification, I felt my blush deepen until the tips of my ears were tingling with the heat. “Shall I continue?” he asked with a hint of a laugh in his voice. “No, that is quite enough, thank you.

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces...

However one must ask not just, is it amusing, is it exciting, but is it a work of art?

An artwork doesn't become a masterpiece the moment it's finished in the atelier. It comes from the praise and critique of the vast numbers of people who've seen it. After receiving such influence, it then starts becoming a piece that art history can't ignore at that point.

Craignez-vous pour vos vers la censure publique ? Soyez-vous à vous-même un sévère critique. L’ignorance toujours est prête à s’admirer. Faites-vous des amis prompts à vous censurer ; Qu’ils soient de vos écrits les confidents sincères, Et de tous vos défauts les zélés adversaires. Dépouillez devant eux l’arrogance d’auteur, Mais sachez de l’ami discerner le flatteur : Tel vous semble applaudir, qui vous raille et vous joue. Aimez qu’on vous conseille, et non pas qu’on vous loue.

Art isn’t indiscriminate shit-flinging. It’s pure communication, crafted with intention and care. Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find? The

...the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician - a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

Nude paintings and sculptures are called "art" only in the museums.. Outside of the museums, It is "Absurdity" and "Vulgarity". To respect your own creative talent and the prosperity of your "art", let only the Gurus critique, suggest and guide you; don't let your work be affected by others' choices and understandings.

Judging art is like caging a bird. Instead of seeing it soar, you can only watch it flutter.

What if I began to believe that the critique isn’t just an unwelcome part of the art-making process but might actually make the art better?

...I fell asleep and had a dream that a king was liquidated by a group of kind faces....

And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth.

It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.

I write because… I write because I love the art and the magic of Literature. I write because it keeps me safe, sane, and connected to you. I write because it takes me to the places I want to go and those who wish to join me in the journey; may grasp my hand and my heart; in this stroll through this moment of time. I write because when no one was there, the word was there: The word has always been and always will be the preeminent being in my universe. I write because it allows me; to allow you to be understood and we are joined for a moment in time. I do not write because it comes from a place of grammatical perfection; free of line breaks in perfected poetry; for my history is one of line breaks and imperfections. I do not come to you from a place of polished and perfected; educated and critiqued. No! I come to you from a place of raw, real, gutsy, and riveting. What I give you is raw, real, gutsy and riveting; with all of its imperfections and inconsistencies. You have been touched, you have been curious, and you have been intrigued; you have come back looking, longing, expecting or not… But then suddenly you were surprised; surprised that you could be moved; surprised that your preconceived ideas had been shattered by one who writes because…

Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique. Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly.

What we are missing is a self-critique of science; the verdicts of science given by art, religion and sentiment are just as numerous as useless. Perhaps this is the ultimate destination of mathematics.

To Jacob, the act of critiquing art was essentially imprecise. That’s why he didn’t read reviews on anything he liked, be it a book, a movie, or a record. He believed that any work an artist puts forth which contains the truth as he or she sees it is worthy of consideration, and any commentary of the work beyond that is nothing more than pure individual opinion and should not be considered relevant to the work itself.

Being satisfied: this is the general model of being and living whose promoters and supporters do not appreciate the fact that it generates discontent. For the quest for satisfaction and the fact of being satisfied presuppose the fragmentation of 'being' into activities, intentions, needs, all of them well-defined, isolated, separable and separated from the Whole. Is this an art of living? A style? No. It is merely the result and the application to daily life of a management technique and a positive knowledge directed by market research. The economic prevails even in a domain that seemed to elude it: it governs lived experience.

We need to stop believing that our bodies exist in the world just to be looked at by other people. Our bodies are not objects; we're not inanimate pieces of art hanging in a museum for people to gaze at and critique.

Ne vous comparez à personne. La comparaison crée le manque. Cessez de vous critiquer. Vous êtes en pleine évolution. Appréciez votre unicité. Vous êtes un mystère à découvrir. Célébrez votre différence. Vous êtes un miracle en devenir.

Unexpected snags can arise on a ride; just as unexpected snags arise in life. But the pain is temporary, the emotions are temporary, and the setbacks can provide the space for a valuable lesson, if we're open to learning. Keep pedaling.

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.

Part of Wordsworth’s complaint was directed towards the smoke, congestion, poverty and ugliness of cities, but clean-air bills and slum clearance would not, by themselves, have eradiated his critique. For it was the effect of cities on our souls, rather than on our health, that concerned him. The poet accused the cities of fostering a family of life-destroying emotions: anxiety about our position in the social hierarchy, envy at the success of others, pride and desire to shine in the eyes of strangers. City dwellers had no perspective, he alleged, they were in thrall of what was spoken of in the street or at the dinner table. However well provided for, they had a relentless desire to new things, which they did not genuinely lack and on which happiness did not depend. And in this crowded, anxious sphere, it seemed harder that it did on an isolated homestead to begin sincere relationships with others. ‘One thought baffled my understanding,’ wrote Wordsworth of his residence in London: ‘How men lived even next-door neighbors, as we say, yet still strangers, and knowing not each other’s names.

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.

When I read the critiques about painter Song Sangki, there was one part that touched me most. As far as I remember, it said, "I think that the greatest artists are the ones who can take their most personal experiences and distill them into the most universal of truths. Isn't this person art itself?

People, even smart ones, come up with weird or silly reasons to entertain bad ideas all the time. In fact, smart people may be more prone to creating irrational stories and engaging in dumb behavior than lesser smart people, for the simple fact that there are more (cognitive) tools at their disposal.

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.

Before we look at Perkins’s critique and Fitzgerald’s revision, I should say why I chose to discuss Gatsby and not another novel. In truth, the book chose me. When I read it on a whim to see how it matched Berg’s account of its making, I was floored. Every sentence and event felt necessary. Fitzgerald managed to fuse ultramodern prose—taut, symbolic, elliptical—with splendid lyricism: ornate, fluid descriptions of parties, for example, that rival Tolstoy’s descriptions of war. Gatsby is a case study of Flaubertian froideur—the cold that burns. Finally, and heroically, Fitzgerald maintained compassion for a humanity he portrayed in the most sinister terms.

Au contraire  ! Le public n'est pas si bête que ça. Il n'y a de bête, en fait d'art, que 1 le gouvernement, 2 les directeurs de théâtre, 3 les éditeurs, 4 les rédacteurs en chef des journaux, 5 les critiques autorisés  ; enfin tout ce qui détient le Pouvoir, parce que le Pouvoir est essentiellement stupide. Depuis que la terre tourne, le Bien et le Beau ont été en dehors de lui.

Se développent aujourd'hui des tendances "curatoriales", dont la forme la plus accomplie s'annonce comme curator as artist, tandis que les principaux acquis de la critique des institutions faite par les artistes dans les années soixante et soixante-dix étaient, au contraire, la prise en charge par les artistes eux-mêmes des institutions qui traditionnellement leur échappaient entièrement

In contemporary culture, we are concerned that everything we do be useful for something. [...] we find ourselves in the land of half-baked pseudoscience like the “Mozart makes you smart” fad. The fact that Mozart’s fantastic play has value in itself is not sufficient because in order to justify financial and other kinds of support for the arts, we have to demonstrate that Mozart will raise a fetus’s IQ, which will make the fetus grow into a productive unit in the economy.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism - better dead than dying. There is no way of making an aged art young again; it must be born anew and grow up from infancy as a new thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear and trembling.

To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

The assertion that only sex is power and the arrogation of creativity to the masculine sex and the rendering of all creativity as sexual—this is patriarchal aesthetics. Patriarchal passion sees violent sex as the essential creative act, even aesthetically, through a sort of metaphysical transubstantiation. This is their romantic belief that sex with the Master can produce the artistic spirit in the student. Male creativity is thus born in another, her work is given depth through the violent transgression of her boundaries.

In his book Real Presences, George Steiner asks us to "imagine a society in which all talk about the arts, music and literature is prohibited." In such a society there would be no more essays on whether Hamlet was mad or only pretending to be, no reviews of the latest exhibitions or novels, no profiles of writers or artists. There would be no secondary, or parasitic, discussion - let alone tertiary: commentary on commentary. We would have, instead, a "republic for writers and readers" with no cushion of professional opinion-makers to come between creators and audience. While the Sunday papers presently serve as a substitute for the experiencing of the actual exhibition or book, in Steiner's imagined republic the review pages would be turned into listings:catalogues and guides to what is about to open, be published, or be released. What would this republic be like? Would the arts suffer from the obliteration of this ozone of comment? Certainly not, says Steiner, for each performance of a Mahler symphony is also a critique of that symphony. Unlike the reviewer, however, the performer "invests his own being in the process of interpretation." Such interpretation is automatically responsible because the performer is answerable to the work in a way that even the most scrupulous reviewer is not. Although, most obviously, it is not only the case for drama and music; all art is also criticism. This is most clearly so when a writer or composer quotes or reworks material from another writer or composer. All literature, music, and art "embody an expository reflection which they pertain". In other words it is not only in their letters, essays, or conversation that writers like Henry James reveal themselves also to be the best critics; rather, The Portrait of a Lady is itself, among other things, a commentary on and a critique of Middlemarch. "The best readings of art are art." No sooner has Steiner summoned this imaginary republic into existence than he sighs, "The fantasy I have sketched is only that." Well, it is not. It is a real place and for much of the century it has provided a global home for millions of people. It is a republic with a simple name: jazz.

...one of the main questions for me is in the genre of dealing with real life: how to deal with it formally. There is a standard set of formal expressions that are used in traditional journalism. And some of them are really necessary, like fact-checking. But my conviction is that, now more than ever, real life is much stranger than any fiction one could imagine. So somehow the forms of reporting have to become crazier and stranger, too. Otherwise they are not going to be “documentary” enough, they are not going to live up to what’s happening.

Anxiety, and mental disorder more generally, can be exceptionally difficult to process, and for good reason. At the time of this writing, in 2023, humans are still battling the stigmas derived from centuries of misconception, fear, and discrimination around mental illness. It still has an attribution to demonic possession, evidence of witchcraft, or is labeled as a hysteria tied to an animal-like 'wandering uterus,' that could attach itself to organs in the female body, and cause disruption in bodily function and painful symptoms (seriously).

The wonder we feel when we look at the stars is not concerned with the mechanical how of things, but with their form and purpose—the why of it all. “Why?” is a problem science can’t lick; in fact, the very nature of science prevents it from even framing the problem. What science does—and does beautifully—is to enrich the mystery by revealing ever deeper layers of the physical universe, which becomes more puzzling with each new discovery. Any adequate response to the mystery of existence must be poetic, for only the poetic can take on the “why.

Ce dernier talent correspond proprement à ce qu’on appelle l’âme ; car exprimer et rendre universellement communicable ce qu’il y a d’indicible dans l’état d’esprit associé à une certaine représentation – et ce, que l’expression relève du langage, de la peinture ou de la plastique -, cela requiert un pouvoir d’appréhender le jeu si fugace de l’imagination et de le synthétiser dans un concept qui se peut communiquer sans la contrainte de règles (un concept qui, précisément pour cette raison, est original et fait apparaître en même temps une règle nouvelle qui n’a pu résulter d’aucun principe ou d’aucun exemple qui l’eusse précédée).

Sometimes I think we know on some level the person we’re going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information. I find it strange when people don’t know what they want to do in life. Because even when I was a young kid pushing around clay objects at the UCLA Lab School, I knew I wanted to be an artist. Nothing else mattered. I cringe when I recall Andrea Fraser, the performance artist and one of the most fearless artists I know, using that line in one of her performances to critique art institutions and artist myths: "The exact words are, 'I wanted to be an artist since I was five'." Because that was my line.

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

The main thing is not to be deceived, that is, to lie and and simulate better than the others. All Stendhal's great novels revolve around the problem of hypocrisy, around the secret of how to deal with men and how to rule the world; they are all in the nature of text-book of political realism and courses of instruction in political amoralism. In his critique of Stendhal, Balzac already remarks that Chartreuse de Parme is a new Principe, which Machiavelli himself, if he had lived as an emigre in the Italy of nineteenth century, would not have been able to write any differently. Julien Sorel's Machiavellian motto, "Qui veut les fins veut les moyens," here acquires its classical formulation, as used repeatedly by Balzac himself, namely that one must accept the rules of the world's game, if one wants to count in the world and to take part in the play.

Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask.

We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall. I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”. Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world. “Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real” And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student. Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be. ~~~~~ art is always real. all of it. even the stuff you don’t understand. even the stuff you don’t like. even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder? still art. the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death? it’s art. the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world? definitely art. the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows? art. art. art. the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light. the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing. the clay you’ve not yet molded. everything you have made or will one day make or imagine making in your wildest dreams. it’s all real, every last bit. because there is no such thing as art that is not real.

Appartenir à une patrie, c'est aussi s'engager pour le siècle où l'on y vit" (source: émission sur la Russie sur Arte le 28/02/2012). "L'honneur d'un peuple appartient aux morts et les vivants n'en ont que l'usufruit - Georges Bernanos - Nos démocraties ne valent que par les hommes qui les servent. Elles ne sont donc jamais parfaites mais elles reposent sur un socle inamovible , selon Gandhi : “La véritable source des droits est le devoir.” Tout le reste est une question d’organisation. "Le passé renforce le présent et les pas hésitants qui conduisent à ce présent trouvent le chemin de l'avenir..." "TELL ME WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE AND I WILL TELL YOU HOW YOU ARE" Pour juger de la beauté d'un ouvrage, il suffit de le considérer en lui-même ; mais, pour juger du mérite de l'auteur, il faut le comparer à son siècle FONTENELLE ------------------------------------------- "La quantité de critiques reçues concernant tout sujet est inversement proportionnelle à la valeur exacte du sujet". (Louis de Potter, 1850)

To know how to say no to modern excitement was also the condition for the autonomous construction of one’s own personality. He that ‘does not want to be part of the masses’ and did not want to be ‘factory goods’ was to pay great heed. Certainly, to ‘“give style” to one’s character is a great and rare art’, which required an effort of self-discipline from which ‘the weak characters with no power over themselves’ flinched back. And here Nietzsche appealed to the youth: ‘Always continue to become what you are—educator and moulder of yourself’. To achieve this result, it was necessary never to lose sight of the ‘true liberation of life’, and to swim against the stream rather than chase blindly and recklessly after the ruling ideologies and myths of an age ruled not ‘by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings’. No doubt this appeal was part of a reactionary critique of modernity, but that in no way detracted from the charm of this lesson in living and this appeal for autonomy of judgement.

I have shown [the categorial imperative] to be a futile assumption so clearly and irrefutably, that no one with a spark of judgment can possibly believe any longer in this fiction. - "well, and so [the Kantian professors have probably engaged with your critique of the categorial imperative]." - Oh no! They take good care not to venture on such slippery ground! Their ability consists in holding their tongues; silence is all they have to oppose to intelligence, earnestness, and truth. In not one of the products of their useless scribblings that have appeared since 1841, has the slightest notice been taken of my Ethics - undoubtedly the most important work on Moral Philosophy that has been published for the last sixty years - nay, their terror of me and of my truth is so great, that none of the literary journals issued by Academies or Universities has so much as mentioned [my] book. Zitto, zitto, lest the public should perceive anything: in this consists the whole of their policy. The instinct of self-preservation may, no doubt, be at the bottom of these artful tactics.

Cannabis, the sensation that had reignited in America and helped bring hemp’s recreational usage back to prominence in a quiet, steady British counter-culture, had helped dispel much of the prejudice, entitlement and arrogance that had eluded the careful eye of Simon’s mother, undermining her care during the once-restlessly energetic yet gentle soul’s dedicated mothering of the studious boy. It took root in his thoughts and expectations. Bravado and projection replaced genuine yet understated confidence; much of that which had been endearing in him ceased to be seen, to his mother’s despondency. A bachelor of the arts, the blissfully apathetic raconteur left university, having renounced his faith and openly claiming to feel no connection, either socially or intellectually with the student life and further study. Personal failures and parental despair combined to sober the-21yr old frustrated essayist and tentative poet. Cannabis, ironically sought following the conclusion of his stimulant-fuelled student years, had finally levelled him out, and provided the introspection needed to dispel the lesser demons of his nature. Reefer Madness, such insanity – freely distributed for the mass-consumer audience of the west! Curiosity pushed the wealthy young man’s interest in the plant to an isolated purchase, and thence to regular use. Wracked by introspection, the young man struggled through several months of instability and self-doubt before readjusting his focus to chase goals. Once humorous, Reefer Madness no longer amused him, and he dedicated an entire afternoon to writing an ultimately unpublished critique of the film, that descended into an impassioned defence of the plant. He began to watch with keen interest, as the critically-panned debacle of sheer slapstick silliness successfully struck terror into the hearts of a large section of non-marijuana smoking people in the west. The dichotomy of his own understanding and perception only increased the profound sense of gratitude Simon felt for the directional change in which his life was heading. It helped him escape from earlier attachments to the advantage of his upbringing, and destroyed the arrogance that, he realised with shock, had served to cloud years of his judgement. Thus, positive energy led to forward momentum; the mental readjustment silenced doubts, which in turn brought peace, and hope.

Before art school, I approached art as though it illustrated social relations and history, upholding or denouncing the political status quo. During my years in art school I increasingly concentrated on visual meaning, on how artwork looked—its composition, its color, its artist’s style, as separate from what it said about society. Critics call a preoccupation with appearance that ignores social meaning formalism, which carries a negative taint these days when formalism divorces art from the power relations surrounding its creation and circulation. Coming from the Left, I began as an anti-formalist. But as a maker of art, I moved toward formalism as I sought to discover processes of how art was made, a move prompted by the neglect of the formal qualities of the work of black artists, assumed to be important only according to the degree to which it critiqued American racism. Where Romare Bearden had figured in my mind as celebrating blackness and black Harlem, I now investigated how he made his work, step by step, how he decided what to depict and how to depict it. I was now seeing my father’s prized Sharecropper, by Elizabeth Catlett, which he bought from her in her studio in Mexico, less as a salute to black workers and more as a masterly lino print. From the opposite starting point, my relationship to Warhol encapsulated my trajectory.

I’ve claimed—so far sort of vaguely—that what makes televisions hegemony so resistant to critique by the new Fiction of Image is that TV has coopted the distinctive forms of the same cynical, irreverent, ironic, absurdist post-WWII literature that the new Imagists use as touchstones. The fact is that TV’s re-use of postmodern cool has actually evolved as an inspired solution to the keep-Joe-at-once-alienated-from-and-part-of-the-million-eyed-crowd problem. The solution entailed a gradual shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us. This in turn reflected a wider shift in U.S. perceptions of how art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values. And this wider shift, in its turn, paralleled both the development of the postmodern aesthetic and some deep and serious changes in how Americans chose to view concepts like authority, sincerity, and passion in terms of our willingness to be pleased. Not only are sincerity and passion now “out,” TV-wise, but the very idea of pleasure has been undercut. As Mark C. Miller puts it, contemporary television “no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but—like the ads that subsidize it—actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us.” 24

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

WE’RE GOOD AT WRONG SPOTTING If you’ve ever received feedback at work—or had an in-law—you are familiar with the many shapes and sizes of wrong: It’s 2 + 2 = 5 wrong: It is literally incorrect. I could not have been rude at that meeting because I was not at that meeting. And my name is not Mike. It’s different-planet wrong: Somewhere in the universe there may exist a carbon-based life form that would have taken offense at my e-mail, but here on Earth everyone knows it was a joke. It used to be right: Your critique of my marketing plan is based on how marketing worked when you were coming up. Before the Internet. And electricity. It’s right according to the wrong people: Some see me that way, but next time, talk to at least one person who is not on my Personal Enemies List. Your context is wrong: I do yell at my assistant. And he yells at me. That’s how our relationship works—key word being “works.” It’s right for you, but wrong for me: We have different body types. Armani suits flatter you. Hoodies flatter me. The feedback is right, but not right now: It’s true that I could lose a few pounds—which I will do as soon as the quintuplets are out of the house. Anyway, it’s unhelpful: Telling me to be a better mentor isn’t helping me to be a better mentor. What kind of mentor are you anyway? Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there’s almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you’re under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.

One of the best means of preserving the balance of political community and promoting the necessary social and political changes is by keeping the dialogue open with all the political actors who accept the basic rules of the game and are committed to preserving the basic values of the society. This ... explains why many of the thinkers studied in this book, from [Raymond] Aron and [Norberto] Bobbio to [Adam] Michnik, successfully practiced the art of dialogue across the aisle and refused to see the world in black-and-white contrasts. If they adopted the role of committed or engaged spectators, they also maintained a certain degree of detachment and skepticism in their attitudes and political judgments. Their invitation to dialogue and their willingness to speak to their critics illustrated their courage and determination not to look for 'safe spaces' and lukewarm solutions. Instead, they saw themselves as mediators whose duty was to open a line of communication with their opponents who disagreed with them. The dialogue they staged was at times difficult and frustrating, and their belief in the (real or symbolic) power of discussion was an open act of defiance against the crusading spirit of their age, marked by political sectarianism, monologue, and ideological intransigence. Aron and the other moderates studied here were convinced that we can improve ourselves not so much by seeking a fictitious harmony with our critics as by engaging in an open debate with them, as long as we all remain committed to civility and rational critique. In this regard, they all acted as true disciples of Montaigne, who once acknowledged that 'no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite they may be. ... When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath.' This is exactly how Aron and other moderates felt and behaved. They were open to being challenged and did not shy away from correcting others when they thought fit. Yet, in so doing, they did not simply seek to refute or defeat their opponents' arguments, being aware that the truth is almost never the monopoly of a single camp or group.

For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called it “the new tribalism of the Electric Age.” Hair and dress and music played a significant part in shaping this culture, but what defined it more than anything was its glorification of the peer attachment that gave rise to it. Friends took precedence over family. Physical contact and connection with peers were pursued; the brotherhood of the pop tribe was declared, as in the generation-based “Woodstock nation.” The peer group was the true home. “Don't trust anyone over thirty” became the byword of youth who went far beyond a healthy critique of their elders to a militant rejection of tradition. The degeneration of that culture into alienation and drug use, on the one hand, and its co-optation for commercial purposes by the very mainstream institutions it was rebelling against were almost predictable. The wisdom of well-seasoned cultures has accumulated over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Healthy cultures also contain rituals and customs and ways of doing things that protect us from ourselves and safeguard values important to human life, even when we are not conscious of what such values are. An evolved culture needs to have some art and music that one can grow into, symbols that convey deeper meanings to existence and models that inspire greatness. Most important of all, a culture must protect its essence and its ability to reproduce itself — the attachment of children to their parents. The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth and destroys child-parent attachments. We may observe the cheapening of cultural values with each new peer-oriented generation. For all its self-delusion and smug isolation from the adult world, the Woodstock “tribe” still embraced universal values of peace, freedom, and brotherhood. Today's mass musical gatherings are about little more than style, ego, tribal exuberance, and dollars.

[T]o look back on our life and also to discover something that can no longer be made good: the squandering of our youth when our educators failed to employ those eager, hot and thirsty years to lead us towards knowledge of things but used them for a so-called 'classical education'! The squandering of our youth when we had a meagre knowledge of the Greeks and Romans and their languages drummed into us in a way as clumsy as it was painful and one contrary to the supreme principle of all education, that one should offer food only to him who hungers for it ! When we had mathematics and physics forced upon us instead of our being led into despair at our ignorance and having our little daily life, our activities, and all that went on at home, in the work-place, in the sky, in the countryside from morn to night, reduced to thousands of problems, to annoying, mortifying, irritating problems so as to show us that we needed a knowledge of mathematics and mechanics, and then to teach us our first delight in science through showing us the absolute consistency of this knowledge! If only we had been taught to revere these sciences, if only our souls had even once been made to tremble at the way in which the great men of the past had struggled and been defeated and had struggled anew, at the martyrdom which constitutes the history of rigorous science! What we felt instead was the breath of a certain disdain for the actual sciences in favour of history, of 'formal education' and of 'the classics'! And we let ourselves be deceived so easily! Formal education! Could we not have pointed to the finest teachers at our grammar schools, laughed at them and asked: 'are they the products of formal education? And if not, how can they teach it?' And the classics! Did we learn anything of that which these same ancients taught their young people? Did we learn to speak or write as they did? Did we practise unceasingly the fencing-art of conversation, dialectics? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they did? Did we learn anything of the asceticism practised by all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single one of the antique virtues and in the manner in which the ancients practised it? Was all reflection on morality not utterly lacking in our education not to speak of the only possible critique of morality, a brave and rigorous attempt to live in this or that morality? Was there ever aroused in us any feeling that the ancients regarded more highly than the moderns? Were we ever shown the divisions of the day and of life, and goals beyond life, in the spirit of antiquity? Did we learn even the ancient languages in the way we learn those of living nations namely, so as to speak them with ease and fluency? Not one real piece of ability, of new capacity, out of years of effort! Only a knowledge of what men were once capable of knowing!

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

Critique don't criticize.

Most common of all, however, is an ambiguity of meaning in which different interpretations – even mutually contradictory ones – may be held at the same time. Such interpretive conflict, which might have been regarded as artistic failure in an earlier moment of modernist autonomy or postmodern representational critique, is now regarded as a sign of desirable openness, reflecting the layered reality of experience in our time. It is not a coincidence that the younger photographers cited in this chapter are all women; feminist theory has been very influential in creating a more relativist worldview. The female photographers in this chapter are all starting from the position that identity is something to be negotiated rather than assumed, as reflected in their hybridized versions of portraiture.

Clearly, the “midlife crisis” genre draped a veil of narcissism over the entire enterprise of individual development. In the era of Levinson’s Jim Tracy, an individual problem, “I’m unhappy with my wife,” gave rise to an individualistic solution, “I need a divorce.” But the resulting critiques leveled against “individualistic marriage,” “consumer marriage,” and “expressive divorce” were also problematic; in their effort to protect children from their parents’ misguided seeking, they shortchanged people’s authentic emotional longings. The “heroic” midlife crisis genre wrongly characterized the connection of individuality and intimacy, by suggesting that we develop ourselves by casting off relationships we’ve done little to change. But if we’ve learned anything from the profusion of research on marriage and emotions, it’s that emotions are not best managed by simple suppression. Staying married by stifling individual needs isn’t a solution either. Happily,

Unlike most realists, Marx does not see art as precious because it reflects reality. On the contrary, it is most relevant to humanity when it is an end in itself. Art is a critique of instrumental reason. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to a publisher for five pounds, but he produced it for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity wholly natural to him. In its free, harmonious expression of human powers, art is a prototype of what it is to live well. It is radical not so much because of what it says as because of what it is. It is an image of non-alienated labour in a world in which men and women fail to recognise themselves in what they create. London Review of Books, 29 June 2023

Black students’ “oppositional gaze” was not an opposition to learning itself but a way of looking that critiqued the practices of antiblack exclusion and confinement in education and that challenged the racist ideas that animated these experiences of domination. It was a way of looking that documented and destabilized relations of power by cultivating an awareness from black students’ marginalized perspectives. This looking back challenged the position of black learners as “substudents”—whereby black people were written into the social contract of the American School or included through distorted ideas that defined blackness as the antithesis of the human subject: the ideal (white) citizen / student.

Racial socialization took place in schools and society, whether done explicitly or not. The prevalence of antiblackness in US popular culture and school content made it necessary to offer purposeful and humanizing perspectives on blackness to support the healthy development of black student identities. The learning aesthetic offered through Woodson’s program presented resources that supported the development of student identities that were historically grounded, aware of their oppression, and committed to imagining and building new possibilities for their collective futures. It was enacted discursively through curriculum development, materially through decorative educational resources produced for classrooms and schools, and affectively through performances and dramatizations during Negro History Week celebrations and classroom activities. This aesthetic presented new symbols of being and belonging that were distinct to black students, all of which offered explicit critiques of the master narrative about black life shaping their Jim Crow surroundings.

All modern painting is at once a language and a criticism of that language. A painting is a system of relations, values, and signs; each painting is an investigation and a critique of itself. Modern art is a critique of meaning and an attempt to show the reverse side of signs

It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as really transcending his own location. The advice of the new critique of cognition was to stop jumping out of one’s skin for the sake of the phantom of a transpersonal wisdom and, instead, to slip completely into one’s skin in order to exploit to the limit the cognitive opportunity offered by the untenable perspective of a singular existence. There is no need to explain how this leads to science converging with belles lettres and theory being transformed into creed, without a decision being made in advance on the precedence of one or the other.

Nunca critiques abiertamente a la gente; esto la hará sentirse insegura, y se resistirá al cambio. Siembra ideas, insinúa sugerencias.

Même s’il n’est pas douteux que la liberté objective à l’égard des pouvoirs temporels et des puissants qu’assure la rente favorise la liberté subjective, il reste qu’elle n’est pas une condition nécessaire et moins encore suffisante de l’indépendance, ou de l’indifférence envers les séductions mondaines, même les plus spécifiques, comme les louanges de la critique et les succès littéraires, que seul peut assurer l’investissement sans partage dans un véritable projet intellectuel

C’est sans doute parce qu’il a vécu, avec la lucidité des commencements, toutes les contradictions, éprouvées comme autant de double binds, qui sont inhérentes au champ littéraire en voie de constitution, que personne n’a vu mieux que Baudelaire le lien entre les transformations de l’économie et de la société et les transformations de la vie artistique et littéraire qui placent les prétendants au statut d’écrivains ou d’artistes en face de l’alternative de la dégradation, avec la fameuse « vie de bohème », faite de misère matérielle et morale, de stérilité et de ressentiment, ou de la soumission tout aussi dégradante aux goûts des dominants, à travers le journalisme, le feuilleton ou le théâtre de boulevard. Critique

critiquer. En fait, leurs stratégies discursives

prophétique de la grande critique d’auteur et le ronron sacerdotal de la tradition scolaire ? Mais,

When sharing your thoughts about an incident, such as a microaggression, approach the person who made the comment as an ally. Social advocacy is more effective when you start with “calling people in” to dialogue instead of “calling them out” or simply critiquing them. Todd Kashdan, author of The Art of Insubordination, said that “calling in” is ultimately about admitting that we’re all of the same nature. “We all have flaws, make mistakes, and often don’t have the energy or mental capacity to do the things we care about. What’s important is we acknowledge it and choose to do better,” Kashdan adds.

The philosopher of tragic knowledge. He masters the frenzied instinct for knowledge but not through a new metaphysics he establishes no new belief he feels tratically that the grounding of metaphysics has been taken away from him and yet cannot be satisfied by the gaudy vortex of sciences. He works at building a new life: he restores its right to art. ... The tragic Philosopher sees a complete image of existence emerge, in which everything that fills under the province of metaphysics seems merely anthropomorphic. He is not sceptical. He must create here a concept: for scepticism is not the goal. When the instinct for knowledge reaches its limit, it turns back on itself and becomes a critique of knowledge. This is knowledge at the service of the best kind of life. We must even want illusion―that is what the tragic is.

AN artful critique can be one of the most helpful messages a manager can send.

When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

Critique is another strategy for responding to patriarchal texts and artifacts, one that is also fitting and can also be theologically narrated. Like attunement, it is a way of responding to sin and to the type of creatures we are: creatures that grow. Critique claims a distance that can be salutary for navigating states we are leaving behind, either because they are corrupt or because they no longer fit who we are or are becoming. But we cannot live by critique alone. Excluding strategies of attunement or claiming a methodology of sola critica denies something of our creatureliness, the ways we have been mothered into this world and its traditions by forces that continue to sustain us, even as such sustenance can be laced with poisons, even as our mothers wound us.

Le Zola « engagé », « édifiant », voire « missionnaire » que la tradition militante, relayée par la dévotion scolaire, a inventé de toutes pièces masque que le défenseur de Dreyfus est le même qui défendait Manet contre l’Académie, le Salon et le bon ton bourgeois, mais aussi, et au nom de la même foi dans l’autonomie de l’artiste, contre Proudhon et ses lectures « humanitaires », moralisantes et socialisantes, de la peinture : « J’ai défendu M. Manet comme je défendrai toute ma vie toute individualité franche qui sera attaquée. Je serai toujours du parti des vaincus. Il y a une lutte évidente entre les tempéraments indomptables et la foule. » Et plus loin : « J’imagine que je suis en pleine rue et que je rencontre un attroupement de gamins qui accompagnent Édouard Manet à coups de pierres. Les critiques d’art – pardon, les sergents de ville – font mal leur office ; ils accroissent le tumulte au lieu de le calmer, et même, Dieu me pardonne ! il me semble que les sergents de ville ont d’énormes pavés dans leurs mains. Il y a déjà, dans ce spectacle, une certaine grossièreté qui m’attriste, moi passant désintéressé, d’allures calmes et libres. Je m’approche, j’interroge les gamins, j’interroge les sergents de ville ; je sais quel crime a commis ce paria qu’on lapide. Je rentre chez moi, et je dresse, pour l’honneur de la vérité, le procès-verbal qu’on va lire23. » C’est un tel procès-verbal que dressera le « J’accuse ».

When perceived correctly, the world is a mirror which, disinterestedly, maintains a current record of our nature and constitution. Within this vast parabolic mirror, we should be able to see clearly the forms our faults have taken--which daily stand in our way. Yet, for the sake of allotting our inadequacies a wide berth and so as to avoid running into them head-on, we have learned to artfully avoid our own reflections. Our most regrettable qualities have successfully overwhelmed our nobility and now the image of a man has become indistinguishable from the form of his fault. Of a man, it can no longer be said that he is as a monkey aping the behavior of angels. For in our avoidance of ourselves, we have given up even on strife. The purpose of this critique is not to aide in the composition of an epic satire; rather, I would like this knowledge to serve as a launching pad. We can correct the human model--there is a method.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

L’œuvre d’art ne prend un sens et ne revêt un intérêt que pour celui qui est pourvu du code selon lequel elle est codée. [...] Le spectateur dépourvu du code spécifique se sent submergé, «noyé», devant ce qui lui apparaît comme un chaos de sons et de rythmes, de couleurs et de lignes sans rime ni raison.

even if Christianity offers the most compelling explanation of beauty, this does not mean that Christian artists will produce the finest art. As anyone who has encountered contemporary Christian music can attest, Christians are responsible for a great deal of highly inferior art. One reason for this seems to be a tendency in the past generation, at least in the West, for Christian artists to copy or critique rather than to create, as one cultural critic puts it.

An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done. As Larson observes, “A character attack—calling someone stupid or incompetent—misses the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so that he’s no longer receptive to what you have to tell him about how to do things better.

Ce qui caractérise, entre autres, l'esprit rationaliste, c'est un sens critique rétrospectif, non prospectif ; la psychose de la « civilisation » et du « progrès » en témoignent à satiété. De toute évidence, le sens critique est en lui même un bien qui s'impose, mais il exige un contexte spirituel qui le justifie et le proportionne. Il n'y a rien de surprenant à ce que l'esthétique des rationalistes n'admette que l'art de l'Antiquité classique, lequel inspira en fait la Renaissance, puis le monde des encyclopédistes, de la Révolution française et, très largement, tout le XIXe siècle ; or cet art — que d'ailleurs Platon n'appréciait pas — frappe par sa combinaison de rationalité et de passion sensuelle : son architecture a quelque chose de froid et de pauvre — spirituellement parlant — tandis que sa statuaire manque totalement de transparence métaphysique et partant de profondeur contemplative. C'est tout ce que des cérébraux invétérés peuvent désirer. Un rationaliste peut avoir raison — l'homme n'étant pas un système clos — avons-nous dit plus haut. On rencontre en effet, dans la philosophie moderne, des aperçus valables ; n'empêche que leur contexte général les compromet et les affaiblit. Ainsi, l'« impératif catégorique » ne signifie pas grand chose de la part d'un penseur qui nie la métaphysique et avec elle les causes transcendantes des principes moraux, et qui ignore que la moralité intrinsèque est avant tout notre conformité à la nature de l'Être.

I don't judge a scene or a line of dialog by whether or not it advances the plot, for example. Imagine an edit of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction wherein only dialog that advances the plot was allowed to remain. I don't obsess over the balance of conflict and interaction. I don't generally fret over the possibility that something I do may cause some reader to experience a "disconnect" (what an odious metaphor). I don't think in dramatic arcs. I don't spend a lot of time wondering if the plot is getting lost in description and conversation. To me, this all seems like a wealth of tedious confusion being introduced into an act that ought to be instinctive, natural, intuitive. I want to say, stop thinking about all that stuff and just write the story you have to tell. Let the story show you how it needs you to write it. I don't try to imagine how the reader will react to X or if maybe A, B, and C should have happened by page R. It's not that I don't want the story to be read. I desire readers as much as anyone. But I desire readers who want to read what I'm writing, not readers who approach fiction with so many expectations that they're constantly second-guessing and critiquing the author's every move, book in one hand, some workshop checklist in the other, and a stopwatch on the desk before them. If writing or reading like this seems to work for you, fine. I mean, I've always said that when you find something that works, stick with it. But, for me, it seems as though such an anal approach to creating any art would bleed from it any spark of enjoyment on the part of the artist (not to mention the audience). It also feels like an attempt to side-step the nasty issue of talent, as if we can all write equally well if we only follow the rules, because, you know, good writing is really 99% craft, not inexplicable, inconvenient, unquantifiable talent.

It was music first of all that brought us together. Without being professionals or virtuosos, we were all passionate lovers of music; but Serge dreamed of devoting himself entirely to the art. All the time he was studying law along with us, he took singing lessons with Cotogni, the famous baritone of the Italian Opera; while for musical theory, which he wanted to master completely so as to rival Moussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, he went to the very source and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. However, our musical tastes were not always the same. The quality our group valued most was what the Germans call Stimmung, and besides this, the power of suggestion and dramatic force. The Bach of the Passions, Gluck, Schubert, Wagner and the Russian composers – Borodin in ‘Prince Igor’, Rimsky and, above all, Tchaikovsky, were our gods. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Queen of Spades’ had just been performed for the first time at the Opera of St Petersburg, and we were ecstatic about its Hoffmannesque element, notably the scene in the old Countess’s bedroom. We liked the composer’s famous Romances much less, finding them insipid and sometimes trivial. These Romances, however, were just what Diaghilev liked. What he valued most was broad melody, and in particular whatever gave a singer the chance to display the sensuous qualities of his voice. During the years of his apprenticeship he bore our criticisms and jokes with resignation, but as he learned more about music – and about the history of art in general – he gained in self-confidence and found reasons to justify his predilections. There came a time when not only did he dare to withstand our attacks but went on to refute our arguments fiercely.

One could certainly call Diaghilev a creative genius, although it is not easy to analyse the nature of his creative gift. He practised neither painting not sculpture, nor was he a professional writer; for his few critical essays, remarkable as they were as proofs of his taste and judgement, did not amount to much – and anyway Serge hated the business of writing. He even lost faith before long in any vocation he may have felt for music, which was his real speciality. In no branch of art did he become an executant or a creator: and yet one cannot deny that his whole activity was creative.

Car tout art a son médium, son matériau, que ce soit celui des morts mis en rythme, de la couleur qui séduit, ou des sons suaves et subtilement agencés, et, comme l'a relevé un des critiques les plus fascinants que connaissent notre époque, c'est aux qualités inhérentes à chacun de ses matériaux, et spécifiques à lui, que nous devons la sensualité de l'Art et donc tout ce qui est art est par essence artistique.

I believe you write the book you want to read. As a reader what I craved was some recognition, however refracted, of the tumult of lived experience, of the pain and absurdity of trying to reach other human beings with some modicum of honesty and openness. And so without quite realizing what I was doing, over the course of the next few years, I wrote a series of stories that eventually became my first book, each of which dramatized in one way or another this struggle: how to find intimacy in a culture that has hollowed out the very language we use to describe it. How to capture the experience of grief when our terms for it have been overrun by the commercialization of confession. The enemy wasn’t New Criticism. It was cliché. I was trying to write prose whose rhythm created an atmosphere, a music, that allowed the nuances of human isolation, the desire to overcome it, and what it felt like to fail or sometimes briefly succeed in defying that isolation rise into the consciousness of a reader. What I believed then, and still do, is that in a violent, distracted, media-saturated world the most needed artistic resource is no longer a critique of the possibility of meaning—mass culture itself has become that critique. What is needed, rather, is the production of meaning that resists distraction. Consumer capitalism thrives by simultaneously creating human loneliness and commodifying a thousand cures for it. One form of resistance to it is the experience in art and life of a human intimacy achieved through sustained attention to what lies beyond and outside the sphere of the market.

Les écrivains qui se voient plus importants que monsieur et madame tout le monde parce qu'ils ont pondu un ou deux ou dix livres; Les écrivains qui croient que leurs œuvres vont changer le monde; Les écrivains qui pensent que tout ce qu'ils écrivent est digne de lecture; Les écrivains qui se regardent trop dans le miroir et qui se trouvent toujours beaux; Les écrivains qui pensent que la vérité absolue se trouve dans leurs mots; Les écrivains qui ne tolèrent pas une pincée de critique, même positive; ..... Les écrivains qui se la pètent trop... me font trop rire. Pardonnez-leur Seigneur, ils ne savent pas... que tout cela n'est qu'une scène ratée de la Commedia dell arte. (21 Oct 2015, FB)

Thus, for an adequate interpretation of the differences found between the classes or within the same class as regards their relation to the various legitimate arts, painting, music, theatre, literature etc., one would have to analyse fully the social uses, legitimate or illegitimate, to which each of the arts, genres, works or institutions considered lends itself. For example, nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class', nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.

The defining elements of criticism, the theory, the philosophy, and ideas behind it, are the same no matter what type of critique you're writing.

In breaking with history, art has broken with all primitivism. Art may still seek plenitude and participation, therapies and ceremonies, a repeal of the dissociation of sensibility, but not routed through the past. Today the challenge to an obtuse and callous classicism is no longer mapped onto a rejection of tradition, nor does it ironically re-embrace traditions previously rejected. Now classicism, or intellectual vassalage, is internal to the present. The ancien régime targeted by modernism is no longer found in the past but rather embedded within our own society: mass culture, entertainment, the superstitions and stupidities, the half-hearted democracy, the disguised cruelty of the modern economy. It is just as in the era of religious conflict: content provides the resistance. Art is a struggle against false content. This struggle gives history its shape. Since the content of contemporary art is often topical, basically current events, there is a constant obligation to keep up the pace. This is consistent with the overall project of Enlightenment, whose successor is modernism. Within the project of emancipation, there is finally no tolerance for relativism. The Enlightenment was antirelativist; we saw that with Diderot, who did not allow historical perspective to deflect his present-tense opinions. Historicist relativism was allied instead with the neo-Christian reaction to Enlightenment. The Enlightenment critiques itself, of course, pointing out that the Enlightenment of the philosophes, or last year's enlightenment, was not enlightened enough. Ongoing self-castigation is the very shape of the Enlightenment project. However, anyone today who dares to revive the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment, namely, to take up again the illiberal call for remystification and recovery of trust in myth an ritual - anyone who dares to exit the Enlightenment - is vilified.

an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professional to critique it. Merely

Postmodernism. An intellectual movement critiquing modernism and the notion of objective truth, and seen in academia, the arts, architecture, etc. It regards knowledge as traditionally concocted by Western assumptions and thought systems. Postmodernism is particularly focused on the power of language, and it rejects grand narratives.

Exhibition, in all its forms, whether it’s in visual arts or science or humanities, is incredibly important to the cycle of the learning process. It’s one thing to be working in your sketchbook, another to do research from a prompt that your teacher gives you, another to struggle in the studio, and yet another to go through a critique. But the exhibition is really the final, and an extremely critical, bookend piece that students have to experience—where your work becomes public. It would almost be like rehearsing and never performing. To go through the process is really valuable and to be specific and transparent about what those skills are that go into creating an exhibition really matters. —Kathleen Marsh

When perceived correctly, the world is a mirror which, disinterestedly, maintains a current record of our nature and constitution. Within this vast parabolic mirror, we should be able to see clearly the forms our faults have taken―which daily stand in our way. Yet, for the sake of allotting our inadequacies a wide berth and so as to avoid running into them head-on, we have learned to artfully avoid our own reflections. Our most regrettable qualities have successfully overwhelmed our nobility and now the image of a man has become indistinguishable from the form of his fault. Of a man, it can no longer be said that he is as a monkey aping the behavior of angels. For in our avoidance of ourselves, we have given up even on strife. The purpose of this critique is not to aid in the composition of an epic satire; rather, I would that this knowledge serve as a launching pad. We can correct the human model―there is a method.

When perceived correctly, the world is a mirror which, disinterestedly, maintains a current record of our nature and constitution. Within this vast parabolic mirror, we should be able to see clearly the forms our faults have taken―which daily stand in our way. Yet, for the sake of allotting our inadequacies a wide berth and so as to avoid running into them head-on, we have learned to artfully avoid our own reflections. Our most regrettable qualities have successfully overwhelmed our nobility and now the image of a man has become indistinguishable from the form of his fault. Of a man, it can no longer be said that he is as a monkey aping the behavior of angels. For in our avoidance of ourselves, we have given up even on strife. The purpose of this critique is not to aid in the composition of an epic satire; rather, I would like this knowledge to serve as a launching pad. We can correct the human model―there is a method.

Feminist critique of the cross as a symbol has been a hallmark of modern theology, as writers have argued that the image of the crucifixion has been used as a justification for abuse and even violence against women and marginalized peoples. The argument focuses on the way that the traditional Christian emphasis on Christ’s suffering has been used to encourage meek and submissive self-sacrifice (especially of women) or simply to validate and even glorify suffering more generally. Some even take the position that the cross and the medieval atonement theory that lauded it are sadomasochistic.34 A more widespread view among feminist theologians is that Christian theology has been suffused with patriarchal values and often used to oppress women and that Jesus’s admonition to “take up your cross” could be understood as a justification for tolerating abuse.

An diesem Punkt gibt es keinen einzigen ihrer »Werte« [der Zivilisation des Westens] mehr, an den sie noch auf irgendeine Art zu glauben vermöchte, und jede Affirmation wirkt auf sie wie eine schamlose Tat, wie eine Provokation, die man besser zerlegen, dekonstruieren und in den Zustand des Zweifels zurückführen sollte. Der westliche Imperialismus heute, das ist der des Relativismus, des »Das ist deine Ansicht«, das ist der kleine Seitenblick oder der verletzte Protest gegen all das, was dumm genug, primitiv genug oder selbstgefällig genug ist, um noch an etwas zu glauben, um noch irgendetwas zu behaupten. Es ist dieser Dogmatismus der Infragestellung, der in der gesamten universitären und literarischen Intelligenzija komplizenhaft mit dem Auge zwinkert. Unter den postmodernistischen Geistesgrößen ist keine Kritik zu radikal, solange sie ein Nichts an Gewissheit umhüllt. Vor einem Jahrhundert verursachte jede ein wenig lärmmachende Negation einen Skandal, heute liegt er in jeder Affirmation, die nicht zittert.

And so I come somewhat trembling to this … book project – because what I offer may sound like an unfair critique. I believe, even so, that I, and every one of us, should reflect on the language we reflexively use in order to become more aware of words and phrases that sound out of touch with reality, maybe misunderstood, or worse, maybe dishonest and even harmful.

This collection consists of the following pieces: COGNITIVE SCIENCE 1. The Embodied Cognition View 2. On Flanagan's Ideas On Dreams and Ahead: An Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness 3. "The Pragmatics of Cartoons: The Interaction of Bystander Humorosity vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity." 4. Integrationist School or on 'Rethinking Language'. 5. On Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' or Some Remarks on Evolutionary Psycholinguistics 6. On the (Im)Possibility of Psychotherapist Computer Programs: An Investigation within the Realm of Epistemology 7. Thai Language: A Brief Typology. ART NARRATIVES 8. Armenians As Ingroups in William Saroyan's Stories from the Framework of the Theory of Social Representations: A Social Psychological Inquiry. 9. A Critique of The Stories By South East Asian Writing Awardees 10. Mulholland Drive: Another impasse for the American film industry. 11. On 'About Schmidt' 12. On Black spirituals. 13. The possibility of an African American poetry.

critique, and it’s an art school thing, where you have to put your assignment up in front of the whole class so everyone can talk about it. Kind of like getting up in front of a firing squad.

Leur défaut, la cause véritable de leurs malheurs et de leurs désillusions, c’est qu’ils travaillent sans méthode, digèrent mal et trop vite ce qu’ils absorbent, manquent d’esprit critique, et demandent à la Science ce qu’elle n’est pas faite pour donner, un bonheur tangible et complet, des certitudes immédiates et définitives. Leur tort, nous l’avons démontré tout à l’heure, c’est de confondre Science et compilation laborieuse de notions superficielles; d’aborder la Science avec un esprit intéressé, avec la préoccupation d’idées ou de réalisations pratiques étrangères à son véritable objet, de ne pas cultiver la Science pour la Science, comme on doit faire de l’Art pour l’Art.

Classical education seeks rather to build upon a robust poetic and moral education before it moves to analysis or critique.

A critique of someone’s work always reveals more about the critic than their understanding of the work.

À quoi donc sert le critique ? À faire lire l’auteur à un certain point de vue.

Garrett Hongo gives an eloquent account of the personal essay as one means for a community to come to know itself, to reject both external and internal stereotyping, to hear “stories that are somehow forbidden and tagged as aberrational, as militant, as depraved.” For a writer, as you live in this kind of silence, in this kind of misery, not knowing quite what it is that the world is not giving you, .. . that your work cannot address as yet, you are at the beginning of a critique of culture and society. It is the moment when powerful personal alienation slips into critical thinking;—the origin of imagination. It is this initial step of intellection that enables the emergence of new, transformative, even revolutionary creativity. It occurs at the juncture between the production of art and the exercise of deep critical thought.

picked up in art school was learning how to take a punch. He and his fellow classmates were absolutely brutal during critiques. “We were basically trying to see if we could get each other to drop out of school.” Those vicious critiques taught him not to take criticism personally.

True democracy, the French were teaching me, involves swallowing loads of shit to arrive at a consensual second choice we can now all critique.

Every intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us.

In ancient Greece, an artist was not responsible for their artwork. It was on the head of their Daemon. This gave artists a degree of separation from their art and the critique of it. Sometimes my Daemon speaks as my voice and other times it will speak as that of the ones who you read from my fingertips. Here before you, my raw Daemon seeks your hearts and eyes.

On supprimera la Foi Au nom de la Lumière, Puis on supprimera la lumière. On supprimera l’Âme Au nom de la Raison, Puis on supprimera la raison. On supprimera la Charité Au nom de la Justice, Puis on supprimera la justice. On supprimera l‘Amour Au nom de la Fraternité, Puis on supprimera la fraternité. On supprimera l’Esprit de Vérité Au nom de l’Esprit critique, Puis on supprimera l’esprit critique. On supprimera le Sens du Mot Au nom du Sens des mots, Puis on supprimera le sens des mots. On supprimera le Sublime Au nom de l’Art, Puis on supprimera l’art. On supprimera les Écrits, Au nom des Commentaires, Puis on supprimera les commentaires. On supprimera le Saint Au nom du Génie, Puis on supprimera le génie. On supprimera le Prophète Au nom du Poète, Puis on supprimera le poète. On supprimera l’Esprit Au nom de la Matière, Puis on supprimera la matière. AU NOM DE RIEN ON SUPPRIMERA L’HOMME; ON SUPPRIMERA LE NOM DE L’HOMME; IL N’Y AURA PLUS DE NOM. NOUS Y SOMMES.

These stories are reminisces of a lifelong artist and a successfully recovering addict for over three decades. Included are essays on his life, short stories and a recounting of his time serving in an AODA rehabilitation unit. You will find inspiration, humor and critical observations about life as he has experienced it. This is a MUST read for anyone in the arts and is struggling with addiction! In particular, read the essay "I'm still here." which is an essay the author dedicated to his inner demon, his addiction. In this book you will find social humor, critique and observations on his life as an artist and recovering addict. Included are select drawings from "The Black Book", illustrations that reveal the dark world the author came from. Check it out today!

But I think that as time goes on, you can make positive changes. Everyday as soon as you get up, you can develop a sincere positive motivation, thinking, ‘I will utilize this day in a more positive way. I should not waste this very day.’ And then, at night before bed, check what you’ve done, asking yourself, ‘Did I utilize this day as I planned?’ If it went accordingly, then you should rejoice. If it went wrong, then regret what you did and critique the day. So, through methods such as this, you can gradually strengthen the positive aspects of the mind.

To know how to say no to modern excitement was also the condition for the autonomous construction of one’s own personality. He that ‘does not want to be part of the masses’ and did not want to be ‘factory goods’ was to pay great heed. Certainly, to ‘“give style” to one’s character [is] a great and rare art’, which required an effort of self-discipline from which ‘the weak characters with no power over themselves’ flinched back. And here Nietzsche appealed to the youth: ‘Always continue to become what you are – educator and moulder of yourself’. To achieve this result, it was necessary never to lose sight of the ‘true liberation of life’, and to swim against the stream rather than chase blindly and recklessly after the ruling ideologies and myths of an age ruled not ‘by living human beings, but instead by publicly opining pseudo-human beings’. No doubt this appeal was part of a reactionary critique of modernity, but that in no way detracted from the charm of this lesson in living and this appeal for autonomy of judgement.

We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.

Everything was exactly as it should have been, beyond critique or analysis, as in a vision or a dream.

Ambiguity is your ally: an interpretive dance with universal truths, not an observation post. An artist enlightens; the interpreter chooses to bathe in that light. Or, fearing being 'wrong' or lacking critical thinking, they await spoon-feeding. Being Irving The Explainer is not the artist's job. You don't go to an art gallery to ask a painter what their painting means (they have wisely left the scene of the crime!). You either get it or you don't, and it should wash over you and be appreciated either way. Impose the tyranny of explanation upon it, and you may kill any meaning, if there is any to unearth. Artists may not even know their intentions when putting something out into the cosmos. Ambiguity, then, is the fertile hinterland between The Emperor's New Clothes and the Highlands of Pretentiousness.

It's probably for the best that Van Gogh isn't around to see his work selling for squillions of dollars, as he'd probably start painting for that market. He may have lost an ear, but he'd still have that magic eye and a new nose for a deal. We're denied access to this poor man's genius by having the richest people on earth hanging his life's work in their mansions.

Latin was the language of science, technology, medicine and law, apart from, of course, classical literature. It was also the language in Europe of international communication, scholarship and diplomacy. Since some of those countries which speak languages derived from Latin and value it as an ancient and classical language and the repository of much wisdom, were also ruthless colonisers, does that make Latin only a language of exploitation? Are the Vatican and the Pope only ‘colonisers’, since Latin is still the official language of the Holy See? It is a moot point whether Sheldon Pollock would agree to see Latin only from such a narrow perspective. Why then does he not have the same approach to Sanskrit? Rajiv Malhotra makes a spirited critique of these kinds of double standards, and confuses it with a new Orientalism in some sections of American Indology. He accepts that Sanskrit was more a preserve of the elite and that some sections of its corpus do contain prescriptions for social and gender exclusion. But, it is essential that, as with other classical languages, a narrow dismissal is tempered with the right balance and judicious appraisal. Sanskrit, Rajiv Malhotra strongly argues, was also the ‘repository of philosophy, art, architecture, popular song, classical music, dance, theatre, sculpture, painting, literature, pilgrimage, ritual and religious narratives. It also incorporates all branches of natural science and technology—medicine, botany, mathematics, engineering, dietetics etc.’25 More than anything else, it was the vehicle of the great spiritual, philosophical and creative wisdoms distilled over millennia. Malhotra adds that it was not just a communication tool, but also a vehicle for ‘enduring sacredness, aesthetic powers, metaphysical acuity, and ability to generate knowledge in many domains’.

We can’t control everything. And we sure as hell can’t change people without those people wanting to change and doing the work themselves. All we can do is have the presence of mind to focus on the task at hand. The grit to work through the problem to the best of our ability. The courage to make the best decision we can at the time. The patience to trust the process, and the humility to learn from it.

Looking out over the cliffs of Amalfi, I snapped a photo, dropped it into a WhatsApp chat with the Doughboys, and wrote: “You know guys…I could be anywhere in the world, the most exotic location imaginable, but nothing can replace hanging with my brothers.

Well, I spent two weeks on that island watching couples celebrate and enjoy honeymoons, anniversaries, and romantic vacations together, wondering if I’d ever find love again,” she said. “And on the last day of my trip, having one last drink at the local bar with my friend, after all expectations of finding love in the Virgin Islands had faded, there he was.

It was through bikes that I learned how to be a kid again. How to be comfortable in solitude.

Fast forward to six hours later and the three of us are causing a scene: telling stories in raised voices, cackling, singing, spilling wine on ourselves, spilling wine on each other. Yours truly making runs to the back of the plane for refills in thirty-minute intervals. “Do we have any more red wine left?” one stewardess asked another. Before we knew it, sunlight was peering through the windows, the rest of the passengers were waking up, and the stewardess was rolling the cart down the aisle for morning coffee service. We must have had thirteen rounds of red wine over the eight-hour flight. The three of us stumbled our way off the plane and through Italian customs, completely wrecked.

After a slight diversion around Milan Centrale, I found my way to Como and got my bike down the street to my apartment. I quickly assembled the bike, rolled it down the stairs, and cruised down the street for a leisurely ride to the lake, managing to forget that I’d consumed thirteen glasses of wine and hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Welcome to Italy, I thought to myself. Let’s go!

I looked out over the lake, a vast plane of deep azure and emerald under a clear blue sky, noticing the reflection of the towering Italian Alps visible in the gentle ripples of the water. This, I thought to myself, is amazing. Just as my dopamine levels were peaking, the happiness dial turned to eleven, my attention was drawn to a peculiar object hovering in the air roughly twenty yards in front of me, spiraling my direction like a tiny heat seeking missile locked on to my forehead. Curious, I thought to myself. Before I could react, the object—a giant bee from hell—contacted the front of my helmet.

I had a knack for sniffing out the rowdiest dive bars, the real ones, dark, loud, and rough around the edges, always with the distinct foul smell of old beer and urine. The Est Est Est was no different. The exterior of the building was lined with locals talking amidst a cloud of cigarette smoke. The interior was nearly pitch black, if it weren’t for the rainbow-colored disco ball spinning rays of light across the bar. I recognized a pair of patrons from the previous bar.

Stopping to take in the surroundings and to notice the simple pleasures of life was a habit I’d been working on ever since a friend from grad school recommended the motion picture About Time. The film, centered around a father and son who possess the power of time travel, reveals that no amount of revisiting the past could compare to fully appreciating the present moment. The trip that I’d now found myself on offered the opportunity to practice this act of noticing.

Like any endurance sport, cycling can bring about a psychological battle against the 'quit' that arises in your mind. When your body is tired and sore, when your heart rate is at its max, when your lungs cannot give enough oxygen, cycling is about finding the motivation to push through this pain to reach the summit, because you've learned that the rewards of the future surpass the costs of the present.

I explained my experience after ten years in the Los Angeles music industry. The ruthless competition. The scheming sharks looking for any opportunity to devour the weak. The masks that many wear to conceal a cold, calculated agenda. The transactional conversations disguised as friendly interactions. How the desperation to get a little more recognition, to get a little closer to an artist, to get that Instagram mention or land a spot on Billboard’s 30 under 30 list, drives even the most kind and empathetic people to view others as a mere utility.

In addition to this stigma, many men who suffer from mental illness find significant difficulty in overcoming the cultural barriers and emotional illiteracy best defined as 'toxic masculinity.' In other words, the idea that vulnerability and the open discussion of one’s feelings is considered a sign of weakness, counter to the behaviors of the traditional male role.

Now, sitting in the cafe, I thought of the cyclist as a painter. The planning of a ride as the foundation for a masterpiece—a vision for an artistic endeavor that interweaves man and machine. Each landscape, each environment, providing a canvas. Each GPS route offering an outline, never perfectly followed. Each turn, jump, climb, descent, and successfully navigated feature, a brush stroke on canvas. Like the work of an impressionist painter, no ride, and no riding style, could be replicated. Each rider creates their own unique sense of movement, color, and perspective. Each rider communicates through their riding.

Et le lecteur ? Il a, en apparence, la vie facile : il achète les bons livres et ignore les autres. En fait son rôle est beaucoup plus important. Toute la stratégie que l’écrivain emploie pour écrire son livre, et le censeur pour le contrôler repose sur la complicité du lecteur ; aucun régime, sauf le parfait stalinisme des années « 50, ne peut s’en passer. En deuxième lieu, le lecteur agit directement sur la littérature en tant que critique littéraire. Il faudrait écrire un grand chapitre — je ne peux ici que l’esquisser — sur le rôle très important qu’a joué la critique littéraire en Roumanie en freinant à grands coups de bride par son esthétisme militant — le galop du censeur. La qualité esthétique des livres, réelle ou amplifiée par la complicité, a été tout le temps défendue comme étant constitutive de la littérature, mais en fait la critique traduisait maintes fois en code esthétique ce qu’elle ne pouvait formuler en code politique. L’esthétisme a sauvé la littérature, tout en dépolitisant la culture et la société roumaine, et en « mandarinisant » ses écrivains qui ont obtenu le droit de se retirer pour écrire dans leur ghetto — l’île des bienheureux — où ils traduisent en fiction les luttes qu’ils ne peuvent pas, ou qu’ils n’osent pas, porter, là-bas sur la terre ferme où l’on se meurt du désespoir d’être trahi par les élites et oublié par les dieux. Le lecteur est important, en troisième lieu, comme représentant d’un espace de liberté irréductible : la vie privée. On peut obliger le citoyen à applaudir ses maîtres mais non pas à jouir des livres qui leur déplaisent. La lecture reste un fait privé. D’où l’immense effort du stalinisme dans les années cinquante aussi bien que du néo-stalinisme actuel à réduire l’espace privé de l’individu et même à l’intégrer dans sa vie publique. Les mesures les plus aberrantes des autorités roumaines pendant les années quatre-vingt semblent obéir à une telle logique : le contrôle du nombre des enfants d’une famille : la socialisation du sexe ; la réduction à trois heures par jour du programme de télévision dédié presque intégralement au Grand Maître : la socialisation de l’amusement ; les moyens immenses accordés au festival propagandistique « Le Chant de la Roumanie » aux dépens des tirages d’œuvres littéraires de valeur : la socialisation de la consommation de l’art etc. Face à cette offensive de l’État contre la société, celle-ci peut concevoir deux stratégies de défense : soit elle met sur pied sa propre organisation, en marge et contre les mécanismes étatiques, soit elle privatise la plupart des activités. Face à un immense appareil de répression, la société roumaine s’est trouvée dans l’impossibilité de s’organiser en tant que société civile. Elle a dû choisir, pour son grand malheur, la deuxième stratégie : la privatisation. Pas de solidarité syndicale, mais de l’entraide au sein de la famille et des amis, aucune gaieté dans les rues, mais la fête et l’hospitalité à la maison, pas d’action de protestation, mais le retrait dans l’allusion et l’humour, dans l’érotisme et dans la consommation et la production de culture. La privatisation de la lecture — la chasse aux livres nouveaux, la lecture passionnée des livres empruntés correspond à la mandarinisation de l’écriture qui absorbe rapidement les techniques occidentales, l’érudition et l’étendue des connaissances ; les deux vont dans le sens d’une restriction de la vie sociale. (pp. 144-145, « Une culture de l’interstice : la littérature roumaine d’après-guerre », article publié dans « Les Temps modernes », Paris, n° 522, janvier 1990)

Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know.

The artist is trying to challenge the status quo and provide a critique to traditional art, and demonstrate that even the most ordinary objects can be turned into something that triggers emotions.

And out of this activity there arises immediately an inestimable criterion of critical judgment: only now can the critic ask the basic question of all criticism—namely, whether the work’s shining truth content is due to its subject matter or whether the survival of the subject matter is due to the truth content. For as they come apart in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense the history of works of art prepares their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

For the sons and daughters of the privileged elite, Communism offered both an intellectual critique of the current malaise and an emotional rebellion against their parents’ complacency.

Beauty is the product of the dominant ideology. (Thus when ideology changes, the ideal body follows.) We can see that in the history of art.

Un artiste à la fin du XXe siècle ne peut pas se contenter de produire des œuvres, il doit aussi produire leur explication. Il doit être le premier critique de son travail. Le discours compte plus que l’objet, voire le remplace. Sinon c’est de l’art brut !

Is it even possible to subvert the tools of technological capitalism to create art from the raw material of my life? Is it possible to use them to cast light on the exploitation they facilitate and our complicity in it? Or are these exercises inherently corrupted by their reliance on the tools? I wonder how Audre Lorde would answer. It's true that the title of her famous essay would seem to contain her response. But then, it's also true that she delivered her critique of the rhetorical tools of academics at an academic conferences. What I do know about Lorde is that she had little patience for guilt, on its own, unless it led to action, preferably communal action. Maybe if I could ask her about all this, she would urge me to look beyond the walls of my own limited selfhood for perspective--to look outward, not inward. In contemplating how to end this book, I will consider that. I will dwell on Silicon's Valley's promise to make machines that seem alive, and this will make me think about being alive feels like to me. I will attempt to define it, even as my consciousness doubles and redoubles inside me.

Art doesn’t need to be more complex or more realistic to be valid.

« Un drame est ce que j’appelle un drame », la formule Heiner Müller que j’ai placée en épigraphe de ce livre mérite un commentaire. Tout un chacun peut constater — et cela depuis quelques décennies (en France, la pratique du « théâtre-récit » par Antoine Vitez a fait un grand nombre d’émules ; en Allemagne, la notion de « texte-matériau » supplante souvent celle de pièce de théâtre) — que les metteurs en scène de théâtre choisissent fréquemment de monter des textes dramatiques. Certains même, et non des moindres — par exemple François Tanguy du Théâtre du Radeau — sont présentés par la critique comme des « écrivains de plateau » qui procèdent par montage de citations de provenances diverses : romanesque, philosophique, documentaire… Parallèlement, l’appellation d’auteur dramatique a perdu de son prestige chez les auteurs de pièces, lesquels trouvent plus noble ou plus exact d’être appelés « écrivains de théâtre ». Ce qui était, selon l’expression d’Henri Gouhier, « un art à deux temps » tend à devenir un art à un seul temps, le temps du « plateau ». Bref, la frontière entre drame et non-drame — du moins dans les déclarations — n’a peut-être jamais été aussi brouillée qu’aujourd’hui. Encore qu’elle le fût déjà à bien des moments dans l’histoire du théâtre et notamment, sans même invoquer l’époque médiévale, dans le Faust de Goethe, dans Les Aïeux de Mickiewicz, dans l’Axël inachevé de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam et, plus généralement, dans ces œuvres qu’on désignait, au tournant du vingtième siècle, comme des « poèmes dramatiques ». (p. 15)