reflections about the art of reflecting…
What was the 10s’ as a decade? My pat answer: a seismic shift in American culture. What used to be nerd culture went mainstream, or more accurately, became gentrified. The Internet Lost Its Joy. Smartphones and social media fed off each other, stuck in one gigantic circle-jerking feedback loop. We are all online all the time. No such thing as AFK.
Continue reading Best Films of the 2010s: A Retrospective
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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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 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.
Continue reading Nothing Original
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 Fashioned
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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By the second half of the 19th century, scientific progress was adding to a persistent pessimism, and it was becoming more and more difficult to affirm life. The theories of Charles Darwin, for example, played an important role in discrediting more of the myths that human beings relied on. The insulting description of Homo Sapiens proposed in Origin of the Species destroyed once and for all the belief that man occupied a dignified position in the order of things and ruined the hope of cosmic purpose.
Continue reading …and Nothing besides!*
God does not insulate his believers from the Void, for he often exposes them to it.
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Max Stirner‘s The Unique and its Property is the creation of an conceptual insurgent.
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The absolute brilliant philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was a cranky loner whose ingenious acumen have had a profound effect on modern man’s dignity. He argued that severe pessimism is the only perspective from which the world can be viewed soberly.
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