The most famous artist of this age, Banksy is a conceptual street artist whose work has ranged from walls to satirical amusement parks.
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Month: November 2019
David Foster Wallace
At 46 years of age, David Foster Wallace hung himself in his basement.
Continue reading David Foster WallaceBaudrillard
The so-called “high priest of postmodernism,” Jean Baudrillard evolved from a Marxist-inflected critical commentator of the affluent society to an ambiguous position that can be described either as a bleakly lucid perception that is resigned to the omnipresence of the society of spectacle, or as a horrified fascination with the shallowness of a postmodern society where the sign has become a simulacrum that signifies nothing.
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In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, kill time on an open, empty road waiting for Godot, who never comes, and who they suspect may not exist. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, and gnaw on some chicken bone. An oppressive air of desperation and panic lingers over all of their activities because nothing actually happens. The play ends where it began – it goes nowhere.
Continue reading BeckettNothing Original
In 1979, the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard explained postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” those predominant illusions by which we make sense of the world, the myths of progress, liberty, and rationality.
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What is man, other than an individual, an isolated being thrown into an alien universe totally devoid of any inherent meaning where contingency and failure seem to be the only organizing principles?
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According to Ernest Hemingway, we are born with a raw optimism, but as we acquire knowledge of life’s inescapable suffering and fundamental emptiness, we are irreversibly damaged. Therefore, we must avoid the pain of thinking too much or feeling too much.
Continue reading HemingwayFranz Kafka
The ridiculous, detached worlds Franz Kafka invented in his writings have disturbed generations of readers in profound and incomprehensible ways.
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Like many artists who were inspired by his work, Paul Cézanne was contaminated with the malady of the modern condition – indeterminacy, which can be seen in his art. He agonized over his paintings, and revised many of his canvasses over a number of years, while others remained incomplete with blank spots. Even with scrupulous observation, Cézanne realized that he could never be certain about the details of what he was seeing and so he was unable to complete a decisive, definitive representation.
Continue reading Nothing Old FashionedNietzsche
The walls of illusion crumble. Truth is but an unhealthy idee fixe, a will-o’-the-wisp we cling to, and the incredible energy invested in its quest only calls attention to the “terrible and questionable character of existence.”
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