Utopia Lyrics Quotes

As far off as an icy glare is from summer laughter – as 'Once upon a time' is from 'Happy ever after' As far off as the brutal truth is from prose gone purple, as far away as death from birth unless life is a circle –

On the table is a pot of tea Jasper doesn’t recall making, the core of an apple he doesn’t recall eating, and a page of staves, notes, and lyrics he knows he wrote.

This fetishistic transmutation separates Warhol from Duchamp and all his predecessors. For Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists and all who worked to deconstruct representation and smash the work of art are still part of an avant-garde, and belong, in one way or another, to the critical utopia. For us moderns, at any rate, art has ceased to be an illusion; it has become an idea. It is no longer idolatric now, but critical and utopian, even when -- particularly when -- it demystifies its object or when, with Duchamp, it aestheticizes at a stroke, with its bottle-rack, the whole field of daily reality. This is still true of a whole segment of Pop Art, with its lyrical vision of popcorn or comic strips. Banality here becomes the criterion of aesthetic salvation, the means of exalting the creative subjectivity of the artist. Obliterating the object the better to mark out the ideal space of art and the ideal position of the subject. But Warhol belongs to no avant-garde and to no utopia. And if he settles utopia's hash, he does so because, instead of projecting it elsewhere, he takes up residence directly at its heart, that is, at the heart of nowhere. He is himself this no place: this is how he traverses the space of the avant-garde and, at a stroke, completes the cycle of the aesthetic. This is how he at last liberates us from art and its critical utopia.

Only the prerevolutionary condition is truly revolutionary, the one in which men’s minds subscribe to the double cult, of the future and of destruction. So long as a revolution is only a possibility, it transcends history’s givens and constants; it exceeds, so to speak, its context. But once it has occurred, it conforms to that context and, prolonging the past, follows its ruts — all the more successfully if it utilizes the techniques of the reaction it had previously condemned. Every anarchist conceals, in the depth of his rebellions, a reactionary who is awaiting his hour, the hour of taking power, when the metamorphosis of chaos into . . . authority raises problems no utopia dares solve or even contemplate without falling into lyricism or absurdity.