July 20, 2010 New Tron
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April 13, 2010 Thierry Guetta Is Not Real
Who is Thierry Guetta? Camera man turned street art superstar.
Who is Thierry Guetta? A spectacle, a construction – the reaction of an artist who has seen his art for the street, and for the people, consumed and captured and sold.
Who is Thierry Guetta? A joke. A punch line. A masterpiece.
What better way to one-up the “art world”, one that took what Banksy produced on our streets and sold it for £25,000/ £50,400/ £57,000/ £102,000/ £37,200/ £31,200/ £96,000/ £72,000/ £33,600, than to create this persona that creates unreal nothings and sells it for prices picked out of the air? Exit through the gift shop.
No doubt the man is real, but who is Thierry Guetta?
Tags: Art, Banksy, Culture Industry
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April 10, 2010 Dispatches
“He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn’t wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old. All those faces, sometimes it was like looking into the faces at a rock concert, locked in, the event had them; or like students who were very heavily advance, serious beyond what you’d call their years if you didn’t know for yourself what the minutes and hours of those years were made up of. Not just like all the ones who looked like they couldn’t drag their asses through another day of it. (How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this kind of shit?) Not like the faces of the dead or wounded either, they could look more released than overtaken. These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they’d be a few feet away but they’d be looking back at you over a distance you knew you’d never really cross.”
Tags: Books, Michael Herr, Quote, Vietnam
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March 31, 2010 Cultural Monopoly
Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attacks on the soul”. The ruler no longer says, “You must think as I do, or die”. He says, “You are free not to think as I do, your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day onward you are a stranger among us”.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer – The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Tags: Adorno, Books, Culture Industry, Horkheimer, Quote
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March 31, 2010 Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
The experience of bewildered disorientation in an environment too complex for the individual to comprehend is a characteristic theme of postmodern culture.
Postmodern media themselves – the TV set, the TV camera, the TV networks, the computer, the internet – involves networks of relationship that are too complex for the ordinary consumer of the cultural products they mediate to understand.
Tags: Culture Industry, Fredric Jameson, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser
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March 17, 2010 THE SCHEMA OF MASS CULTURE – PART 2
“Advertising has absorbed surrealism and the champions of this movement have given their blessing to this commercialization of their own murderous attacks on culture in the name of hostility to the same.”
“The viewer is persuaded of the merit of his own averageness and he may one day receive the supreme prize as ‘Mr Average Customer’.”
Tags: Adorno, Books, Culture Industry, Quote
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March 16, 2010 Now I am become Death…
Foucault on the “atomic scientist” Oppenheimer being the point of transition between the universal and the specific intellectual,
“It’s because he had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions that the atomic scientist could make his intervention; but, since the nuclear threat affected the whole of human race and the fate of the world, his discourse could at the same time be the discourse of the universal.”
Tags: Michel Foucault, Oppenheimer, Quote
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March 15, 2010 The Schema of mass culture – Part 1
“The commercial character of culture causes the difference between culture and the practical life to disappear.”
“Since the beginning of the industrial era an art has been in vogue which is adept at promoting the right attitudes and which has entered into allegiance with reification insofar as it proffers precisely for a disenchanted world, for the realm of the prosaic and even the banausic, a poetry of its own nourished upon the work ethic.”
“Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by it’s faithful duplication.”
“With the liquidation of its opposition to empirical reality art assumes a parasitic character. Inasmuch as it now appears itself as reality, which is supposed to stand in for the reality out there, it tends to relate back to culture as its own object.”
Theodor Adorno
Tags: Adorno, Books, Culture Industry, Quote
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March 10, 2010 Walking in the City
“Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to space. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these “real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.” They are not localised; it is rather they that spatialize.”
- The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau
Tags: Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Quote
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March 9, 2010 Habitus
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at the ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
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