Tag Archives: Charles Baudelaire

dada: nothing is by accident

It began with an ironic and anarchic temper with origins in eighteenth century skepticism which was subsequently absorbed into the culture of urban and metropolitan thought processes through Baudelaire and Manet among others and it all came to a scrappy … Continue reading

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it’s not the meat it’s the notion

“The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the … Continue reading

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family affairs

Particular circumstances of individual relationships in all their psychological subtleties fascinated a young Frenchman who painted a family group about 1860 when he was not even thirty years old. But at that age Edgar Degas was already an urbane cosmopolite. … Continue reading

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to the confusion of our enemies

Abraham as a flaneur. Walking, wandering, and catching a fleeting remark, a floating fragment of dialogue that would change his life and that of all history past, present and future. His dialogue with the almighty floating around in the imagination. … Continue reading

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malraux: wanting to believe in the song of history

…The trouble is that Malraux appeared to find himself in that unhappiest position of a man who wants to believe but cannot. However, a substitute faith- in art or anything else- offers no real way for the atheist or the … Continue reading

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the importance of bad art

Bohemia is beyond saving. The lesson being that a basically worthless and mediocre piece of literature can achieve more ill than a good book can ever achieve good. It is a paradox; and there is little power in the art … Continue reading

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saving bohemia from the yuppies

Its too late to save Bohemia.Perhaps a worthless book can achieve more ill than a good book can ever achieve good. At any rate it is upon this seeming paradox that it is worth dwelling on, in the effort to … Continue reading

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everything is broken

Narrative momentum. The very element lacking in our daily life. Are sort seems to be what Walter Benjamin called “messy antics” ; making new out of the scrap heap of discard, an early perception of appropriation and genre bending that … Continue reading

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visceral forms: “what’s inside a girl”

The persistence of the nude. We have had more or less traditional treatment since Marcel Duchamp, followed by Picasso and abstract expressionism rendered her to the scrapheap of history. Lo and behold, she could not be avoided for long. It … Continue reading

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when the noble run free

The Enlightenment. It has become an ordinary and familiar thing; like a Marcel Duchamp sculpture, what was once subversive and novel, the quarrel with Christianity and that people of different religious affiliations could live peacefully together, has now become an … Continue reading

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