on the natural history of destruction/nostalgia for the present

Hajo Holborn, "Achievements and Prospects of German Democracy", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 1955) JSTOR,  cited by Krieger

Everywhere bureaucracy has multiplied but nowhere as much as in Germany. Allied military government liked to work through the civil service rather than through political parties. The Bonn system has extended the scope of the judiciary and of the government service tremendously and in Germany these two professions are staffed by the same type of civil servant. The Bonn constitution like all the new state constitutions contains grandiose catalogues of civil rights which go far beyond anything known in the United States. The experiences of the arbitrariness of Nazi rule have created in Germany a great belief in judicial procedures. But many of these civil rights are mutually incompatible and a settlement of conflicts calls for a political decision rather than a juristic opinion. One says in Germany that the Rechtsstaat has become a Justizstaat, a government by justices rather than a government by law. Meanwhile, the administration is busily occupied in determining the claims which the new legislation has granted to practically every imaginable category of human being, and all these claims are justiciable. The main contacts between the hard-working German and his new state are the pleadings of his private claims before an official behind a desk.

German bureaucracy is organized as before 1933. The university diploma is the entrance ticket to a career in the higher service and admission to the university depends in turn on the graduation from high school. Except for some beginnings in Hamburg, Hessen and West Berlin, class privileges in higher education have not been broken. Allied military government utterly failed to broaden the social base of the civil service and of the "academic class" in general. Some changes have taken place. The idea of Rechtsstaat does not appear any more as a matter of course and as something that can easily be combined with any other political order, including totalitarianism. But while, therefore, totalitarianism and militant nationalism are being rejected, a positive belief in democracy as the only method that can assure the permanent security of the rule of law in our age is extremely rare. Democracy, or, as one would say among these groups in Germany, the "rule of parties" (Parteienstaat), is not a guarantee of freedom. On the contrary, it is argued that the democratic volonte generale can produce the suppression of all law and freedom. In this line of thought national socialism appears more as a consequence of the French Revolution than as a reaction to it, and this explains, too, why academic historical thought centers so largely on Bismarck.

It is true, however, that this has not led to an openly reactionary attitude or to militant nationalism. Both the judiciary and the general civil service have shown a more cooperative spirit toward the Bonn government than they did to the Weimar Republic. But parliament and parties are eyed with suspicion by the great majority. Germany's most eminent philosopher of education, Theodor Litt, wrote recently: "A champion of democracy must be conscious of the odds against which he is struggling and the dubious support which he can expect from the present state of public life and the average thinking of his fellow citizens."' The Rechtstaat ideal has come back and come back in greater strength. In the historical and social setting of Germany it is not likely to lose its authoritarian overtones altogether, but it has become noticeable that the authority of the government is being enforced with a firmer hand than in the days of the Weimar Republic, even against the industrialists.

Ever since I was a kid, and then later, with Richter and Polke, and Kraftwerk, and reading Böll, reading and watching Fassbinder, Herzog, Germany in Autumn... Wings of Desire was released two years after Signal Germany on the Air. Gursky. It's useless even making a list. I'm not sure when I came up with the thought that postwar Germany was autistic, but I made the comment to a woman whose family charts the history of the 20th century in Germany, or at least the high bourgeois, German and Jewish, with all that implies, and she agreed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki said that the only German he ever met who fully understood the significance of the Nazi era to the Jews was Ulrike Meinhof. It made me laugh.

At some point in the 90s I wrote the title for an essay "German Culture and the Banality of Democracy". It makes sense I'm repeating things from 2002

"One says in Germany that the Rechtsstaat has become a Justizstaat, a government by justices rather than a government by law." The need for truth and the hatred of politics

I interrupted a pompous 20something art aficionado/theory-hack who was describing the work to a friend in terms of "the abject", to say that the best way to understand Polke was to think of Herzog or any well educated German man born during the war and now alone in the desert, or in the jungle, or at sea, or on the ice, tripping on acid and screaming lyric poetry into the void. The pompous kid looked over his glasses and said, "I'm not familiar with his films."

updated a few times by now

John Ganz got into a twitter feud with a wise-ass, who turned out to be an asshole, but it started when the asshole made a point that was obvious to Panofsky 90 years ago, though the asshole overstated his case. It wasn't obvious to Ganz so I paid my 5 dollars and subscribed again, just so I could use the quotes I have for years. I riffed a bit on Richter and the art world, told stories and name-dropped. After that I cancelled my account. I don't think Ganz knows it was me. He liked the comment. Or maybe deleting it might have been difficult. Or maybe he'll still do it. If Shadi Hamid can like and delete, why not Ganz? 

Film art is the only art the development of which men now living have witnessed from the very beginnings; and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent. It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

From this we understand two fundamental facts. First, that the primordial basis of the enjoyment of moving pictures was not an objective interest in a specific subject matter, much less an aesthetic interest in the formal presentation of subject matter, but the sheer delight in the fact that things seemed to move, no matter what things they were. Second, that films—first exhibited in “kinetoscopes,” namely, cinematographic peep shows, but projectable to a screen since as early as 1894—are, originally, a product of genuine folk art (whereas, as a rule, folk art derives from what is known as “higher art”). At the very beginning of things we find the simple recording of movements: galloping horses, railroad trains, fire engines, sporting events, street scenes. And when it had come to the making of narrative films these were produced by photographers who were anything but “producers” or “directors,” performed by people who were anything but actors, and enjoyed by people who would have been much offended had anyone called them “art lovers.”

The casts of these archaic films were usually collected in a “café” where unemployed supers or ordinary citizens possessed of a suitable exterior were wont to assemble at a given hour. An enterprising photographer would walk in, hire four or five convenient characters, and make the picture while carefully instructing them what to do: “Now, you pretend to hit this lady over the head”; and (to the lady): “And you pretend to fall down in a heap.” Productions like these were shown, together with those purely factual recordings of “movement for movement’s sake,” in a few small and dingy cinemas mostly frequented by the “lower classes” and a sprinkling of youngsters in quest of adventure (about 1905, I happen to remember, there was only one obscure and faintly disreputable Kino in the whole city of Berlin, bearing, for some unfathomable reason, the English name of “The Meeting Room”). Small wonder that the “better classes,” when they slowly began to venture into these early picture theaters, did so, not by way of seeking normal and possibly serious entertainment, but with that characteristic sensation of self-conscious condescension with which we may plunge, in gay company, into the folkloristic depths of Coney Island or a European kermis; even a few years ago it was the regulation attitude of the socially or intellectually prominent that one could confess to enjoying such austerely educational films as The Sex Life of the Starfish or films with “beautiful scenery,” but never to a serious liking for narratives.

Today there is no denying that narrative films are not only “art”— not often good art, to be sure, but this applies to other media as well—but also, besides architecture, cartooning, and “commercial design,” the only visual art entirely alive. The “movies” have reestablished that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption which, for reasons too complex to be considered here, is sorely attenuated, if not entirely interrupted, in many other fields of artistic endeavor. Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters, and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies the social consequences would be catastrophic.

I also added something because the asshole made a comment about Ganz' connection with Zwirner. Ganz is now writing for Artforum and has a piece on Richter. 

I don't know what this guys fucking problem with me is but this absurd. I don't have any "proximity" to David Zwirner, you can not like my writing but implying that I wrote it on behest of the gallerist or whatever is scurrilous https://t.co/BeAXHnhnDp

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) May 6, 2023

Fine art is a luxury commodity. Galleries are luxury boutiques, not bookstores. And of course you're connected to Zwirner. When you were an "artist" in Bushwick did you have any friends who were born there? Any social connection at all to the working class other than as idea? In 1993 Zwirner told me with a shrug to me that there was no difference between art and fashion anymore. Art is now style, and HBO has more art than Chelsea. Panofsky was right. Fine art and couture are vestiges of the old regime. Art for the rich. The connection to philosophy is tied to that and the lie that philosophy is superior to fiction, as theology concerns "truth" and fiction is lies.

All of the above is obvious in 2023, except to pretentious American liberals who call themselves leftists: Ganz and the Brooklyn Institute. I have friends born in Bushwick and I've known Zwirner for 30 years. Ganz the earnest gentrifier doesn't talk socially to art dealers, art collectors, or the working class. The only union members he knows are grad students, or maybe WGA, probably not even even IATSE.  He stays in his bubble, and that's never good. Now I'm wondering if the Richter show I mentioned is the one where I told Roberta Smith that she had her head up her ass writing about late Picasso. Saltz was there too. About Richter he asked me "Do you really think this is art for the ages?" I said, of course not, but I was sympathetic. I should have asked him if he thought Donald Judd was art for the ages, but that would have started a whole new fight, with his wife.

Everything above is a repeat, except some of the name-dropping.

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...and this development is all the more interesting as it took place under conditions contrary to precedent.  It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.

But Panofsky is wrong.  If we want to be optimistic, the relation of art and and technology is reciprocal. Pessimism—or materialism—says art follows technology: secularization and the printing press, painting on walls or wood panels that can be bought and sold, theater and the novel, the rise of the middle classes, democracy. We're back to free will and determinism, which goes back to Richter and HBO and the Nolan brothers, Westworld, Devs, Tenet, The Dark Knight. But as a teacher of mine said about Gursky, "he used to be a nihilist, but he sold out". Another old story. The same is true for Richter. 

But that's why the asshole was wrong. It's not that the "fine" art is meaningless, only which forms give us the most compelling description of the present.

I can't make a living at any of this—art or criticism—only because I'm always best at pissing people off. Talking to a woman at Christie's a few years ago I said only billionaires could be honest talking about what they liked and why, but that I was raised to behave as if I were a billionaire. She looked back at me and smiled sweetly. "Then you're free." I guess I am. The rich and the poor can be honest. Everyone else lies to themselves first, and then everyone else.

Ganz helped to gentrify a working class neighborhood, admitting he formed no social connections to people who lived there; he writes about romanticism, the sublime, and hope, as manifest in multi-million dollar baubles on display in a luxury boutique, and with earnest moral fervor about the killing of a homeless man on the subway, all without the slightest sense of self-awareness.

Richter's work at best is a notch above kitsch, describing a desperate need for cheap sentiment to be more than it is. Modernism is full of that, and I have a sympathy for it. He's fighting his own numbness. Ganz by comparison is earnest, shallow, callow, self-absorbed, self-serving, and on down the list. From my grandfather's job as a hired killer to my father's essay on Hammett, I have him cold. It doesn't matter.

I remember walking around the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, sitting in on crits, and one student's video, or it might have been a film, which was nothing but him on a beach yelling at the sea, shouting his name at the top of his lungs at the surf, demanding to be recognized: an over-the-top, absurd, derivative but full-throated performance, an expression of humility.

If a character in a novel lights a cigarette, the cigarette is part of a work of art. In a play the cigarette is a prop. In the older definition of art objects the craft supplied a formal logic internal to the piece. The iconography supplied a formal logic external to it. For relics as opposed to artworks the logic was external only: absent its place in a narrative a thighbone is a thighbone, a cigarette is just a cigarette, a madeleine... etc.

Duchamp has a tag. click it.

Watching Devs. No surprises.

Determinism has been ubiquitous for 40 years (that tag's as good as any). Now it's overt, and labeled as such.

No surprises but the details. The details are the art.

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Looking through the actors, people connecting Parks and Recreation and Will and Grace to Martha Clarke, and The Good Wife to Richard Foreman, remembering that the man behind the visual construction of I Love Lucy shot Metropolis. The music used, beautifully, in a transition, written and performed by Mormons from Duluth. I'm loyal to the arts, and to artists. 

Continuing, not in the manuscript yet.
I should have thought of it a long time ago.  I knew about the film

see also  Technocracy and the individual imagination. Atomization and the desperate need for community. etc.

Titles by Saul Bass


The plot description, from Wikipedia, for his only feature film as a director.

Phase IV

Due to an unknown cosmic event, listed in "phases", ants have undergone rapid evolution and developed a hive mind. A scientific team begins investigating strange towers and geometrically perfect designs that ants have built in the desert. Except for one family, the local human population flees the strangely acting ants. Scientists James Lesko and Ernest Hubbs set up a computerized lab in a sealed dome located in an area of significant ant activity in Arizona. The ant colony and the scientific team, along with the holdout family, fight each other, though the ants are the more effective aggressors.

The narrative uses the scientific team as the main protagonists, but there are also ant protagonists going about their duties in the colony. The ants immunize themselves to the humans' chemical weapons and soon infiltrate their lab. Teams of ants penetrate the computers of the lab and short them out. After Lesko decodes an ant message, Kendra Eldrige (a young woman who has taken refuge with the scientists), becomes convinced that her actions have enraged the ants. Seeking to save the two scientists, she abandons the lab and apparently sacrifices herself.

Hubbs and Lesko begin to have different plans for dealing with the ants. While Lesko thinks he can communicate with the ants by means of messages written in mathematics, Hubbs plans to wipe out a hill he believes to be the ants' central hive. Delirious from a venomous ant sting, Hubbs can barely get his boots on but is determined to attack the hive and kill the ant queen. Instead, Hubbs literally falls into a trap – a deep pit that the ants fill with earth. Helpless to save Hubbs and convinced that the ants will soon move into desert areas where their growth will exceed man's ability to control them, Lesko chooses to follow Hubbs's plan. He sets out to the hive with a canister of poison. Descending into the hive, Lesko hunts for the queen, but instead finds Kendra reaching out from under the sand. The two embrace, and Lesko realizes that far from destroying the human race, the ants' plan is to adapt the human race and make them a part of the ants' world. In voice-over, Lesko states that he does not know what plans the ants have, but he is awaiting instruction.

A repeat from 2013, updated
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flickr and Reuters/NSA

Gursky's nihilism, and Alex Rosenberg's determinism; anti-humanism and E.O. Wilson's ants.
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Ahmed Mater. I saw the work awhile ago and didn't get around to it. Today I found someone using an image of one of his pieces, in an article on magnetism, without a reference to the piece itself. The pieces aren't on Mater's website and a lot of references on other sites have been removed. He may have gotten into trouble.

Leiter

2. If philosophy is still a Wissenschaft, then it should be possible for philosophy papers to end up on Retraction Watch. 

Collapsing Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft. I'm waiting for a Retraction Watch for theology. No one argues over the rankings of engineering schools.

Henry Farrell has My Bloody Valentine, so...


"Deeper, deeper, into the corner. We're almost there..."
Technocracy ends in psychosis. It always has.
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responding to comments:
"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."
Specifically, and obviously, Kubrick
For added effect -Full Ultra Doom™ Mode- play both videos simultaneously.

one more
"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

At the end of Modernism, science as romance.
Galison even has a paper: "Objectivity is Romantic"
It's just stunning at this point that this could be taken seriously.

Like the beautiful boy whose perfect grace fades after he sees his own reflection, what began as idealism has become mannerism. At the end of the age of the romance of science, science is defended as romance. There's literally no attempt at contextualizing the myths of science with the record of the failures of scientism.

from Objectivity, Daston and Galison
P39

Yet the tone of exhortation and admonition that permeates the literature of scientific instruction, biography, and autobiography from the seventeenth century to the present is hardly that of a pragmatic how-to manual. The language of these exhortations is often frankly religious, albeit in different registers the humility of the seeker, the wonder of the psalmist who praises creation, the asceticism of the saint. Much of epistemology seems to be parasitic_ upon religious impulses to discipline and sacrifice, just as much of metaphysics seems to be parasitic upon theology. But even if religious overtones are absent or missed as so much window dressing, there remains a core of ethical imperative in the literature on how to do science and become a scientist. The mastery of is inevitably linked to a certain kind of self-mastery, the assiduous cultivation of a certain kind of self. And where the self-is enlisted as both sculptor and sculpture, ethos enters willy-nilly. It is useful for our purposes to distinguish between the ethical and the moral: ethical refers to normative codes of conduct that are bound up with a way of being in the world, an ethos in the sense of the habitual disposition of an individual or group, while moral refers to specific normative rules that may be upheld or transgressed and which one may be held to account.

P 374

This is the reason for the ferociously reflexive character of objectivity, the will pitted against the will, the self against the self. This explains the power of objectivity, an epistemological therapy more radical than any other because the malady it treats is literally, the root of both knowledge and error. The paradoxical aspirations of objectivity explain both its strangeness and its stranglehold on the epistemological imagination. It is epistemology taken to the limit. Objectivity is to epistemology what extreme asceticism is to morality. Other epistemological therapies were rigorous: Plato's rejection of the senses, for example, or Descartes's radical doubt. But objectivity goes beyond rigor. The demands it makes on the knower outstrip even the most strenuous forms of self-cultivation, to the brink of self-destruction. Objectivity is not just one intellectual discipline among many. It is a sacrifice.

P 376

It is a misconception, albeit an entrenched one, that historicism and relativism stride hand in hand, that to reveal that an idea or value has a history is ipso facto to debunk it. But to show that objectivity is neither an inevitable nor an eternal part of science passes no verdict on its validity, desirability, or utility — any more than to document that the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment first emerged at a particular time and place would per se subvert that judicial principle. Conversely, to point out that certain beliefs and practices have enjoyed widespread acceptance in various cultures and epochs is not necessarily an endorsement: no one thinks better of slavery or geocentrism on learning that many people in many places at many times have subscribed to them. 

C.P. Snow, Strangelove, and The Great Gazoo.


This leads back to Kubrick and Gursky, artists who describe the meanings behind Daston and Galison's"aesthetics". 

     

Daston and Galison at the end of the book refer to images by Marie Farge and Eric J. Heller, scientists with hobbies, as models for an art that combines science, romanticism and mechanism: aesthetic images of systems. The image on the left was the cover illustration of the March 8 2001 issue of Nature. You can see more here. 

It's a standard description of both Kubrick and Gursky that they make aesthetic images of systems. Critics who write about the works don't write about aesthetics; they write about the implications.

This is how art, and language, and history work. Gursky uses the language of Daston and Galison, Heller and Farge. He's from the same place and time, but he sees that language for what it is. He has an objectivity they lack. He sees the emptiness and labels it nihilism.

Zhang Yimou, Andreas Gursky, Laibach, Rodgers and Hammerstein

updated a bit. a repeat from September. I have my reasons.


Two versions: iconic/hieratic, and narrative/demotic, with very different implications even if I'm using them to tell the same story. In the first, Christ remains above, fitting the logic of the earliest image. In the second, the notion of Christ above becomes narrativized/historicized, fitting the logic of the most recent. The second becomes also a predella to the first, the predella itself a form that faded away, or grew to supplant static iconography. The whole thing's very tricky; all that's left is to do it as an animation.

Christ Pantocrator, the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (photo: Andrew Shiva)
Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family, by an unknown German painter, 1560s-1580s. Metropolitan Museum, NY. Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Christ appearing to St. Mary Magdalene (Noli me Tangere) 1681, Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

Three images of Christ: Byzantine, 16th century Lutheran, 17th century Catholic; three images of the changing relations of Christ to God and Christ and God to man, and man to language, order and the world. Only the third could be said to represent a humanist sensibility. A basic lecture in art history and the history of culture. I could have gone on to Friedrich and then Turner, or after that to Rothko, by which point it all devolves to kitsch.

Philosophers discussing "difference" are like priests discussing democracy. They always want to drive the car, or they pretend that from their self-described superiority, they are already.
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence [PDF]

In the chapter on ‘Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression’ in his 1968 book on Spinoza, Deleuze fashions a history of the philosophy of immanence, from the Neoplatonists through to Duns Scotus, that culminates in Spinoza. He presents the philosophical concept of immanence as a kind of ‘destination’ inherent in Christian theology. A secret tendency, says Deleuze, courses through the ruminations of theologians, a tendency that runs in the opposite direction to the negative theology of Meister Eckhart, which stresses the radical, unknowable transcendence of God, both in his nature and in his reasons for existence. It appears to originate in the Christian-inflected Neo-Platonism of third -and fourth- century Alexandria (Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite). The Neo-Platonists did not see Platonism as a dualistic, ‘two worlds’ doctrine, but rather followed the lead of the Timaeus, where the pure forms or ‘Ideas’ are manifested or expressed hierarchically in material reality, with each being ‘participating’ more or less in the idea. Deleuze acknowledges the roots of the philosophical concept of immanence in neo-Platonism: “Everything may, it seems, be traced back to the Platonic problem of participation”. The “difficulties” that emerged were always the same: “The principle of participation was always sought by Plato on the side of what participates..., [but] if participation consists in being a part, it is difficult to see how what is participated in suffers no division or separation” (EPS 169; trans. modified). The primary task of the Neoplatonists was to “invert the problem”: “a principle that would make participation possible was sought, but one that would make it possible from the side of the participated itself. Neoplatonists no longer start from the characteristics of what participates (as multiple, sensible, and so on), asking by what violence participation becomes possible. They try rather to discover the internal principle and movement that grounds participation in the participated as such, from the side of the participated as such. Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen participation from its lesser side” (EPS 170). According to Deleuze, Plotinus is already a kind of foreshadowing of the post-Kantian attempt to ground philosophy; he “subordinates ... imitation to a genesis or production” (ibid). His way of doing this, however, is through a theory of emanation. “True activity comes from what is participated in; what participates is only an effect, receiving what is given by its cause” (ibid). The problem is that the theory of emanation, once again as soon as it undergoes philosophical development, brings back the original problem of participation: how to conceive the principle of the self-differentiation of the One, the expression of the One in the material world.

Leiter quoting Raz in 2005

[C]ontemporary life, including philosophical life, is marked by its short span of attention. Within months of a new book by a respected author being published conferences about it are held, and special issues of journals dedicated to it are published, only to be superseded the following year by the new stars of that year. We think that we live in a dynamic and innovative age, whereas we live in a culture devoted to the ephemeral. In this intellectual climate much of our work is to try to stop people from forgetting today what everyone knew yesterday, and to reduce the intoxication with the latest word. A necessary task, but not one conducive to the longevity of the work. Perhaps in our hyperactive world the mode of progress in philosophy has changed. Perhaps it now lies less with the singular achievements of exceptional thinkers like the classics of modern philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others, and more in the cumulative products of hundreds of worker ants. This would suggest that the history of philosophy may assume the relation to philosophy that the history of physics has to physics. It would even make the ephemerality and forgetfulness of the age less regrettable. I doubt, however, that that can be the whole story. It is probably yet another manifestation of the lack of clear horizons in contemporary philosophical thought.

Leiter, and Raz, now. [Leiter's link is dead; the interview is here.]

3:AM: Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher or has it been more a process of deepening and further discovery within a rather settled framework of thought? 

JR: For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question, and perhaps partly as a result, am often surprised when people point out, with actual quotations, what I wrote on some points in years past. One way in which I am sometimes surprised when confronted with previous writings is that I clearly remember that I felt tentative about this issue or that, and meant to express a partial or a tentative view only, and lo and behold: that is not how I wrote. I sound very definite. Have I changed my mind, or am I one of those people who tend to sound confident when they are not? But there are other difficulties with the question. 

Sometimes a deepening of a view may go so deep as to change its character without actually changing its letter. Ever since my student days I was interested in the social character of the law. More recently I have written on the social character of value in general, and on the ways in which the characterization of these two forms of social dependence differ, and the ways in which they are nevertheless interdependent. The result is that once embedded in the wider context my old views on the social character of the law while unchanged may have acquired, in my mind, a different meaning. There is more to say, but it is probably of no interest to anyone but myself. Similar changes probably affected other of my views.

To the pure all things are pure. History is bunk. What an idiot.

Post-humanism, anti-humanism, pre-modern, anti-democratic, authoritarian... I can like or love the art - See Pollock and Kubrick and Gursky- but I can't stand its righteous defenders.

repeats from the NDPR

Overall, Seaford’s book is interesting, insightful, and combines expertise in ancient sources with careful reasoning. It certainly offers an invaluable discussion of the origins and cultural contexts of early Greek philosophy. But Seaford’s concern with the historical explanations of Greek philosophy suggests that his book may not appeal to scholars interested exclusively in the philosophical content and argumentation of Presocratic texts. The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors (219; 253–4; 273). In fact, he insists that comprehending the relevant cultural factors is necessary for understanding Presocratic metaphysics. We must, he maintains, avoid treating ancient philosophy as if it were created in a “historical vacuum” (10), even if this threatens most Presocratic scholars’ “control of their subject and the autonomy of ’doing philosophy’“

"The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors."

Like a theologian the last thing a philosopher wants to imagine is that his beliefs are manifestations of changes in language and culture: results and not causes. The last thing an avant-garde wants to imagine is that its works are what artworks have always been, not discoveries of possible futures but descriptions of the present. Historians understand how philosophers' dreams become dated.

His students called him, "the last humanist":

And finally: besides constituting a natural event in space and time, naturally indicating moods or feelings, besides conveying a conventional greeting the action of my acquaintance can reveal to an experienced observer all that goes to make up his "personality." This personality is conditioned by his being a man of the twentieth century, by his national. social and educational background by the previous history of his life and by his present surroundings but it is also distinguished by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to the world which, if rationalized, would have to be called a philosophy. In the isolated action of a polite greeting all these factors do not manifest themselves comprehensively, but nevertheless symptomatically. We could not construct a mental portrait of the man on the basis of this single action. but only by coordinating a large number of similar observations and by interpreting them in connection with our general information as to his period. nationality, class. intellectual traditions and so forth. Yet all the qualities which this mental portrait would show explicitly are implicitly inherent in every single action; so that. conversely every single action can be interpreted in the light of those qualities. 

Deleuze's interest in folding, the fold and the baroque makes perfect sense. As a philosopher he has no option other than to be a conservative.

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.

update- and now this: Brian Leiter, SSRN, The Case Against Free Speech. Amazing.

3AM-Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher?
Raz -For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question.

more here for now

Technocracy and the individual imagination: atomism and the Bomb; Weber, and Daniel Bell


It started with a glib comment elsewhere about Stella and Murakami, but it makes sense to continue


Spilled Aluminum appliqué.
Zhang Yimou, Gursky, and Kubrick

and Koons

a repeat from January. I'm going to post a few in a row, continuing from the previous post.
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see earlier,  Gursky and Kubrick

I posted the video before. I'd forgotten it was in reference to Koons.

Varieties of mannerism and anti-humanism; a dark parodic and therefore "critical" but in the end reactionary reversal of the fantasies of the Enlightenment, fantasies which using historians' definition of humanism, were not themselves "humanist". Descartes was not the author of In Praise of Folly. etc., etc. The works themselves brilliant but brittle.

Two versions: iconic/hieratic and narrative/demotic, with very different implications even if I'm using them to tell the same story. In the first, Christ remains above, fitting the logic of the earliest image. In the second the notion of Christ above becomes narrativized/historicized, fitting the logic of the most recent. The second becomes also a predella to the first, the predella itself a form that faded away, or grew to supplant static iconography. The whole thing's very tricky; all that's left is to do it as an animation.

Christ Pantocrator, the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (photo: Andrew Shiva)
Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family, by an unknown German painter, 1560s-1580s. Metropolitan Museum, NY. Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Christ appearing to St. Mary Magdalene (Noli me Tangere) 1681, Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

Three images of Christ: Byzantine, 16th century Lutheran, 17th century Catholic; three images of the changing relations of Christ to God and Christ and God to man, and man to language, order and the world. Only the third could be said to represent a humanist sensibility. A basic lecture in art history and the history of culture. I could have gone on to Friedrich and then Turner, or after that to Rothko, by which point it all devolves to kitsch.

Philosophers discussing "difference" are like priests discussing democracy. They always want to drive the car, or they pretend that from their self-described superiority, they are already.
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence [PDF]

In the chapter on ‘Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression’ in his 1968 book on Spinoza, Deleuze fashions a history of the philosophy of immanence, from the Neoplatonists through to Duns Scotus, that culminates in Spinoza. He presents the philosophical concept of immanence as a kind of ‘destination’ inherent in Christian theology. A secret tendency, says Deleuze, courses through the ruminations of theologians, a tendency that runs in the opposite direction to the negative theology of Meister Eckhart, which stresses the radical, unknowable transcendence of God, both in his nature and in his reasons for existence. It appears to originate in the Christian-inflected Neo-Platonism of third -and fourth- century Alexandria (Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite). The Neo-Platonists did not see Platonism as a dualistic, ‘two worlds’ doctrine, but rather followed the lead of the Timaeus, where the pure forms or ‘Ideas’ are manifested or expressed hierarchically in material reality, with each being ‘participating’ more or less in the idea. Deleuze acknowledges the roots of the philosophical concept of immanence in neo-Platonism: “Everything may, it seems, be traced back to the Platonic problem of participation”. The “difficulties” that emerged were always the same: “The principle of participation was always sought by Plato on the side of what participates..., [but] if participation consists in being a part, it is difficult to see how what is participated in suffers no division or separation” (EPS 169; trans. modified). The primary task of the Neoplatonists was to “invert the problem”: “a principle that would make participation possible was sought, but one that would make it possible from the side of the participated itself. Neoplatonists no longer start from the characteristics of what participates (as multiple, sensible, and so on), asking by what violence participation becomes possible. They try rather to discover the internal principle and movement that grounds participation in the participated as such, from the side of the participated as such. Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen participation from its lesser side” (EPS 170). According to Deleuze, Plotinus is already a kind of foreshadowing of the post-Kantian attempt to ground philosophy; he “subordinates ... imitation to a genesis or production” (ibid). His way of doing this, however, is through a theory of emanation. “True activity comes from what is participated in; what participates is only an effect, receiving what is given by its cause” (ibid). The problem is that the theory of emanation, once again as soon as it undergoes philosophical development, brings back the original problem of participation: how to conceive the principle of the self-differentiation of the One, the expression of the One in the material world.

Leiter quoting Raz in 2005

[C]ontemporary life, including philosophical life, is marked by its short span of attention. Within months of a new book by a respected author being published conferences about it are held, and special issues of journals dedicated to it are published, only to be superseded the following year by the new stars of that year. We think that we live in a dynamic and innovative age, whereas we live in a culture devoted to the ephemeral. In this intellectual climate much of our work is to try to stop people from forgetting today what everyone knew yesterday, and to reduce the intoxication with the latest word. A necessary task, but not one conducive to the longevity of the work. Perhaps in our hyperactive world the mode of progress in philosophy has changed. Perhaps it now lies less with the singular achievements of exceptional thinkers like the classics of modern philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others, and more in the cumulative products of hundreds of worker ants. This would suggest that the history of philosophy may assume the relation to philosophy that the history of physics has to physics. It would even make the ephemerality and forgetfulness of the age less regrettable. I doubt, however, that that can be the whole story. It is probably yet another manifestation of the lack of clear horizons in contemporary philosophical thought.

Leiter, and Raz, now. [Leiter's link is dead; the interview is here.]

3:AM: Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher or has it been more a process of deepening and further discovery within a rather settled framework of thought? 

JR: For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question, and perhaps partly as a result, am often surprised when people point out, with actual quotations, what I wrote on some points in years past. One way in which I am sometimes surprised when confronted with previous writings is that I clearly remember that I felt tentative about this issue or that, and meant to express a partial or a tentative view only, and lo and behold: that is not how I wrote. I sound very definite. Have I changed my mind, or am I one of those people who tend to sound confident when they are not? But there are other difficulties with the question. 

Sometimes a deepening of a view may go so deep as to change its character without actually changing its letter. Ever since my student days I was interested in the social character of the law. More recently I have written on the social character of value in general, and on the ways in which the characterization of these two forms of social dependence differ, and the ways in which they are nevertheless interdependent. The result is that once embedded in the wider context my old views on the social character of the law while unchanged may have acquired, in my mind, a different meaning. There is more to say, but it is probably of no interest to anyone but myself. Similar changes probably affected other of my views.

To the pure all things are pure. History is bunk. What an idiot.

Post-humanism, anti-humanism, pre-modern, anti-democratic, authoritarian... I can like or love the art - See Pollock and Kubrick and Gursky- but I can't stand its righteous defenders.

repeats from the NDPR

Overall, Seaford’s book is interesting, insightful, and combines expertise in ancient sources with careful reasoning. It certainly offers an invaluable discussion of the origins and cultural contexts of early Greek philosophy. But Seaford’s concern with the historical explanations of Greek philosophy suggests that his book may not appeal to scholars interested exclusively in the philosophical content and argumentation of Presocratic texts. The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors (219; 253–4; 273). In fact, he insists that comprehending the relevant cultural factors is necessary for understanding Presocratic metaphysics. We must, he maintains, avoid treating ancient philosophy as if it were created in a “historical vacuum” (10), even if this threatens most Presocratic scholars’ “control of their subject and the autonomy of ’doing philosophy’“

"The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors."

Like a theologian the last thing a philosopher wants to imagine is that his beliefs are manifestations of changes in language and culture: results and not causes. The last thing an avant-garde wants to imagine is that its works are what artworks have always been, not discoveries of possible futures but descriptions of the present. Historians understand how philosophers' dreams become dated.

His students called him, "the last humanist":

And finally: besides constituting a natural event in space and time, naturally indicating moods or feelings, besides conveying a conventional greeting the action of my acquaintance can reveal to an experienced observer all that goes to make up his "personality." This personality is conditioned by his being a man of the twentieth century, by his national. social and educational background by the previous history of his life and by his present surroundings but it is also distinguished by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to the world which, if rationalized, would have to be called a philosophy. In the isolated action of a polite greeting all these factors do not manifest themselves comprehensively, but nevertheless symptomatically. We could not construct a mental portrait of the man on the basis of this single action. but only by coordinating a large number of similar observations and by interpreting them in connection with our general information as to his period. nationality, class. intellectual traditions and so forth. Yet all the qualities which this mental portrait would show explicitly are implicitly inherent in every single action; so that. conversely every single action can be interpreted in the light of those qualities. 

Deleuze's interest in folding, the fold and the baroque makes perfect sense. As a philosopher he has no option other than to be a conservative.

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.

update- and now this: Brian Leiter, SSRN, The Case Against Free Speech. Amazing.

3AM-Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher?
Raz -For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question.

more here for now

see previous. Gursky and Kubrick

I posted the video before. I'd forgotten it was in reference to Koons.

Varieties of mannerism and anti-humanism; a dark parodic and therefore "critical" but in the end reactionary reversal of the fantasies of the Enlightenment, fantasies which using historians' definition of humanism, were not themselves "humanist". Descartes was not the author of In Praise of Folly. etc., etc. The works themselves brilliant but brittle.

Andreas Gursky, Düsseldorf, Flughafen, 1984

Early works: Kubrick and Gursky; a clear parallel between where they started and what they became; from the observation of people to the observation of systems. One of the few photographs by Gursky where the people in the photograph share our space as observers. Before nihilism.
Is there another scene in Kubrick where we view an audience with such sympathy?
The singing at the end of Strangelove.
New tag: Gursky

Now one of two

flickr and Reuters/NSA

Gursky's nihilism, and Alex Rosenberg's determinism; anti-humanism and E.O. Wilson's ants.

Here, too, the 'politics' of art paradoxically consists in setting aside all economic and social 'explanations' of the existence and destruction of the shanty town to identify a more specifically political element: the confrontation between the power and the impotence of a body, between a life and its possibilities. This way of addressing the 'truly political', however, does not manage to sidestep the incalculable tension between political dissensuality and aesthetic indifference. It cannot sidestep the fact that a film remains a film and a spectator remains a spectator. Film, video art, photography and installation art rework the frame of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects. As such, they may open up new passages for political subjectivation, but they cannot avoid the aesthetic cut that separates consequences from intentions and prevents their from being any direct passage to an 'other side' of words and images.

His focus on aesthetics as an invention of the last 200 hundred years is absurd. Aesthetics is the reification of poetic form, as modern Politics is the reification of the millennia of political life (as if "political life" were not a redundancy.)  As theories both are products of separation of the perceptual and the intellectual that marks the modern age. The western aesthetic conception of art replaces the moral conception of art: of art as the manifestation of the order or an aspect of the world, according to whatever culture. The original conception lives in in the conception of artists themselves:

And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce “good” works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty.

The fact that we now see the history of art as the history of the manifestations of culture does not mean that its function changes.  The more you make art, or politics, from how you want to be seen, the more it shows you as you are. And your grandchildren will laugh at you for it, if they're not ashamed for your crimes. Ranciere argues from the intended meanings of words, from original authorial intent. He's a philologist and philosopher of the Church, or in its absence of high purpose.  I wouldn't trust him reading the US Constitution any more than I trust Scalia. He argues from ideas as if ideas change the world. Ideas are no more or less than a response to a change in function of words and forms. Once an "idea" appears, you know damn well the forms it represents have been around for awhile. Ideas are codifications not discoveries. Philosophers did not invent democracy any more than they invented monarchy but they do tend idealize one and to deaden the other.

Greenberg

One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest—what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other? Does the fact that a disparity such as this within the frame of a single cultural tradition, which is and has been taken for granted—does this fact indicate that the disparity is a part of the natural order of things? Or is it something entirely new, and particular to our age?

Eliot

It requires some effort of analysis to understand why one person, among many who do a thing with accomplished skill, should be greater than the others; nor is it always easy to distinguish superiority from great popularity, when the two go together. I am thinking of Marie Lloyd, who has died only a short time before the writing of this letter. Although I have always admired her genius I do not think that I always appreciated its uniqueness; I certainly did not realize that her death would strike me as the most important event which I have had to chronicle in these pages. Marie Lloyd was the greatest music-hall artist in England: she was also the most popular. And popularity in her case was not merely evidence of her accomplishment; it was something more than success. It is evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest.

And Ranciere prefers Vertov to Eisenstein; no wonder the art world loves him. But Eisenstein's politics are in his preference for narrative.  He's a better artist in spite of his role as propagandist not because of it.

Democratic responsibility divides self from self. The proper art of democracy is theater. Ranciere takes us back to Plato, when we want Euripides and Aristophanes. Democracy is the culture of language in use, and he's giving us lessons on democracy as grammar.  We'll always need cops but cops need to be citizens first, with a sense of irony about their role, something Ranciere lacks. Being an anti-philosopher isn't enough. He's defined himself as what he opposes, so it will always overshadow him, like daddy. He's a guilt-ridden pied-noir and guilt is never the best driver of rational thought.

Politics is arguing with your roommate about who does the dishes, and expands out from there. Art is your haircut and the color of your shirt, and expands out from there. Art as "Art" is the expansion, the increasing formalization, description and concomitant ironization of preference. It's the documentation, description, analysis, and celebration of drunkenness made for an audience of the sober, for the purpose of making them not seem to witness drunkenness, in its simulation, but feel it.  It's hard to pull off if you're drunk. It's the manifestation of Gursky's nihilism and the manifestation of the calm of the Buddha, formed in stone. It's not an idea and it's not the invention of the fucking 18th century.

That after reading Ten Theses on Politics, and a couple of reviews of his books. I'll read more and amend it or apologize if necessary.  So far even when he's right he's wrong

I'm not going to write a mash note to Russell Brand. It's not worth it, and it's not the point.


Everything we know through the study of history and anthropology shows language and culture moving from the ground up.  Philosophy, as aristocratic prescription, works in the other direction, through  an analogical relation with an imagined authority. The association of language and mathematics, of language as grammar, not writing/speech (use) is authoritarian. [This is all repeats.] Ranciere's focus on philology and the words and ideas of the old masters is an old trope, and his masters are priests not storytellers, or rather they're storytellers with a claim to a higher calling. And the philosophy of irony is no more irony than the philosophy of biology is biology.  Irony like democracy is defined in its practice. An anti-authoritarian is no better at escaping his past than an anti-philosopher. If Brand (and Zizek) are both fools, there's hope that fools will mature.  Pedants almost by definition don't

2004

Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep. "Some things people can afford, some things people can't,"

2013:

Mayor Bloomberg grants Metropolitan Museum of Art right to charge mandatory entrance fee.  New York City's outgoing mayor has entered the museum's legal dispute and granted it the right to impose a mandatory entrance fee of $25 or more.

Art Market Monitor

Shane Ferro has post on Artinfo recapitulating the New York Times’s debate on the art market before migrating to an earlier exchange of views that started here on Art Market Monitor. She quotes Felix Salmon taking me to task for missing that “ prices are quantitatively completely bonkers.”
Ferro adds:

This question — whether paying wild sums for contemporary art signifies a healthy market or not — is where the real debate is.

I can see why the very large sums of money being paid for works of art is startling and unsettling. But I don’t actually think the nominal figure is indicative of whether the market is healthy. A person buying an airplane for their own use at $30 million is no more or less bonkers than buying a work of art for $30m. The plane may seem more substantial but if it costs a lot to maintain, isn’t used often and the same function could be served by . There is no way for economics to measure the value of that purchase to the person.

My comments at Artinfo

Maneker thinks spending 30 million on an artwork is like sending 30 million on a private jet. With a mind like his I wonder if he was working at Bear Stearns. 

A $30 million jet, as a luxury item -Warren Buffett's “indefensible”- fitted (let's just say) for 8 people with private bedrooms, a movie theater and rec. room, can be refitted for commercial use as a non-luxury item. A $30 million bauble that cost $300,000 to make is priced based on the desire of a small number of people, a very limited fan base. The question is: how long can it last? 

Maneker is happy to stipulate that the price has no relation to long term cultural importance. "The art market isn’t a measure of art historical value or worth." But the bet in speculating on art is that other people in the long run will agree. If they don't you end up losing money, or your kids do. Nahmad is given credit for a great sense of timing, in unloading first Marie Laurencin[!!] and now late Picasso. I doubt he paid that much to pick them up. What's the rule? If someone's selling you should ask why. 

Felix Salmon agrees with Gopnik: "The market for art is unlike any other, because it’s built on some notion of true, underlying value."

The market for fine art built on "a notion", and claims of seriousness of purpose. But Gerome, Bouguereau and Winterhalter were vewy, vewy seweous pepew. The stars of the Salon were every bit as serious as the Refusés. I witnessed a somewhat faded art star reminded gently of this fact. He didn't respond. 

I don't care about the money, I'm only interested in art. So for me the question is Hirst or Tarantino? Who's the biggest badass white boy on the block? 

One year Damien Hirst has a show entitled "No Sense of Absolute Corruption" The next year contradicts himself by covering a skull in diamonds guaranteed not to be blood diamonds. They should have been guaranteed blood diamonds, with certificates of authenticity and the names of dead children engraved on each facet. And all Tarantino did was make a movie with a psychotic Nazi as the hero. "Wait for the cream." Das ist die ewige Kunst.

---
I'll add one more comment. I have no argument with anything lcgarllery wrote, but it deserves expansion. He's describing a small, elite market populated by self-interested parties who share also a common enthusiasm for art as such, if specifically the kind of art that can be bought and resold for profit.  The 19th and 20th century avant-gardes saw themselves as separating themselves from the past, and from common opinion, but there was the same sense that the makers and audience for the new work were part of the same group.  That's both a market model and a social model, and it can work.
But it's a problem now that the "avant-garde" and "respectable" art communities have collapsed into one another. There no tension between starving artists and rich patrons when starving artists are happily currying favor. The result of this is not that new art necessarily is banal, though much of it is, but all of it is weaker.

The model for fine art now is high style and haute couture, as fashion or outré anti-fashion. That's less an attack on the art than on claims to importance. Art objects made today have nowhere near the importance of objects made 400 years ago, because objects themselves are less important. Art journals are closer now to Vogue than to the New York Review of Books or LRB, but there's still the pretense.  Jim Hoberman as a film critic is a critic of visual art. The art he reviews has a market model, and one on a much larger scale than the market for fine art, which means that he doesn't hang out much with Hollywood producers. His social world is the world of the audience for art and for some degree also its makers. The funders are elsewhere. Meanwhile art critics who are not openly style critics become parodies. The most important intellectual defender of Gerhard Richter is a Marxist only the art world could produce: who writes catalogue essays for boutiques in 57th St.

Kipling put the problem well. "Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes."

I have no brief against  Koons. If I want to bemoan the state of the world, it's all there. He makes art out of it. But he's not Bernini.  To talk seriously about Koons you have to talk about Warhol, and to talk seriously about Warhol you have to talk about Hitchcock.  To talk seriously about Gursky you have to talk about Zhang Yimou's opening of the Beijing Olympics. To talk about visual art today you have to be able to talk about Cronenberg's Cosmopolis. Will anything by Matthew Barney outlast "Terminator II"?  I doubt it, and I doubt it should.

There's good art in the galleries these days, but most of it isn't made in the US. The Chinese boom reminds me of NY in the 80s, when Larry Gagosian posed for Robert Longo: the dark poetry of capitalism. But Bladerunner came out in 1982, and it will outlast most if not all of the art of that decade. I think recent Chinese work is better too, but I am not going to get my investment advice from Vogue or Elle Decor.  A writer for the Economist cited the failure of a Sherrie Levine to crack a million at auction as a sign of trouble. The fact that she chose Levine's work as a model of anything shows how little she understands either art or markets.  There's more than one bubble operating here.

see previous

Corey Robin quotes a footnote by Brian Leiter on Nietzsche and "Ressentiment".

Bittner (1994: 128) points out that, “The German word [ressentiment]…needs to be distinguished from the French word spelled and pronounced alike, which is also its source. The words need to be distinguished because they differ in sense…[B]oth ‘to resent’ in English and ‘ressentir‘ in French suggest a more straightforward annoyance, less of a grudge than the German word does.” Bittner’s point is confirmed by the fact that in the German, Nietzsche does not italicize “ressentiment” except for occasional emphasis: Nietzsche treats the word like any other German word. This, of course, is lost in the English, where most translators continue to use Nietzsche’s German word, thus italicizing it.

Robin end with "That's All" and embeds this.


Meryl Streep as drag queen.
Notwithstanding Leiter's concern, the Oxford American Dictionary's definition: "a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement." It gives the meaning as originating in Nietzsche.

A few weeks ago Leiter linked to a review in the TLS [paywalled but available at archive.org] "As part of our periodic series of scathing book reviews. From the review of How to be Gay:

Halperin’s teaching promotes “homosexuality as a social rather than an individual condition and as a cultural practice rather than a sexual one”. He scrutinizes artefacts that he believes are indispensable to “gay acculturation” and the development of “gay male subjectivity”: Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals, opera, diva-worship, pop and disco music, camp, and allied phenomena. This is because he believes that “gay sentiment”, the feelings of the “socially disqualified”, can only be expressed in “histrionics, rage, maudlin self-pity, hyperbolic passion, and excess”. To this end he provides prolix, relentless analyses of scenes from Mildred Pierce (a 1945 Hollywood film starring Joan Crawford) and Mommie Dearest (a 1981 film about Joan Crawford’s despotism towards her adopted daughter). His interpretations seem all the more lumbering and verbose for being written in academic jargon overlain with insinuating archness. Halperin, who preens himself for his courage in comparing these films to the Iliad, makes high claims for them in sections that are ulcerated with bombast and self-reference. “The entire history of gay liberation . . . may owe a direct debt to Mildred Pierce . . . or, if not exactly to Mildred Pierce, at least to . . . a definitive mass-cultural . . . drama of enraged female powerlessness suddenly and dazzlingly transformed into momentary, headlong, careless, furious, restless power.” Both films teach “the supreme wisdom” of “living one’s love life knowingly as melodrama – understanding full well . . . that melodrama signifies . . . a despised, feminized, laughable, trivial style of expressing one’s feelings”.

The book and review exhibit forms of self-hatred: one arch, high-minded and self-consciously clean, the other low and self consciously dirty."sexual acts between men can be “undignified, filthy, shameful, and perverse (at least if you’re doing it right)”. Callie Angell, the cataloger and historian of Warhol‘s films told me it was still safe to assume every homosexual was self-hating until proven otherwise.  That's not something I'd put in writing if she were still alive.

Adam Lindemann's eyes lit up when I shrugged and said Jack Goldstein's work was nihilist. Now his wife is showing Bjarne Melgaard.

Beginning November 9, 2012, Luxembourg Dayan will open the door to A New Novel by Bjarne Melgaard, an exhibition that coincides with publication of the artist’s latest novel, his first ever to be published commercially in English. Working closely with a group of leading designers and craftspeople, Melgaard is transforming the gallery’s Upper East Side townhouse into a completely immersive environment that uses his new novel’s story – its protagonist’s tortured infatuation with a doorman and the willing degradations of a surrounding cast of characters – as a point of departure to plumb further the through-line of his entire practice: an exploration of the ways in which sex and violence dovetail with love and loneliness. Melgaard belongs to a long list of artists in different disciplines and across generations, who have explored the animal state of pain and abjection as a sort of certainty, a reliable signpost in the otherwise uncertain search for existence. For such artists, a profound sense of separateness and isolation is negotiated through art and the process of translating ideas from one medium into another.

...For A New Novel by Bjarne Melgaard, each room of the Luxembourg & Dayan townhouse will become a colorful, crammed tableaux occupied by ‘dolls’ acting out the types of violence that figure centrally in Melgaard’s book. More than 150 dolls of different sizes have been made for the show by JoJo Baby, Gabe Bartalos, Colleen Rochette, and Jessica Scott. Occupying a sequence of vignettes that unfold on three floors, these odd figures will wear couture clothing made by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough of Proenza Schouler in collaboration with Melgaard. The rooms where the dolls appear will be furnished by Melgaard with rugs and layers of patterned wallpaper of his own design, along with furniture created in collaboration with Billy Cotton and upholstered in vintage Ozzie Clark dresses; textiles made by Proenza Schouler; and a jacquard fabric based upon the paintings Melgaard has created for the exhibition. Melgaard also has deployed the dolls for a stop-action animation ‘snuff film.’

Lindemann's also a fan. He compares Melgaard to Mel Gibson, attacking Gibson. But Gibson is a Catholic masochist, far from a nihilist, while Melgaard is a both a nihilist and sadist.
From the past:

"With full deliberateness, Morris pushes form, concept, and meaning," as Ratcliff says, "toward an ultimate 'all-overness' -absolute equivalence, the entropic dead end."

No one I know who liked The Passion of the Christ, claimed to agree with the convictions of its maker. In art that's not the issue. For Lindemann and Melgaard, compare El Amrani and Houellebecq. I saw The Passion of the Christ, and Hellboy in the same afternoon; two good films and within the context of their shared interests, Catholicism and filmmaking, two opposed philosophies.  Robert Morris' work, for what it was, was academic. His work was "about" nihilism, more than it was an example of it. Melgaard has turned ressentiment into an affirmative ideology: the definition of fascism.

A fashion shoot for Italian Vogue

History repeats, and so do I.

Preaching to the choir in the cult of high style, and high anti-style. A work of art should tempt us to agree with its philosophy, and as I told Lindemann, when it comes to nihilism in art, I'll take Bronzino, Seurat and Gursky.

Enthusiasm for various forms of passionate intensity: at Miami Basel, Lindemann is showing Betty Tomkins



Dayan's partner in London is showing Rob Pruitt.

The NY Times' Randy Kennedy two years ago, flacking Pruitt's previous show at Gavin Brown.

Rob Pruitt — who last week opened a gargantuan solo exhibition inspired by the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, the period during which some teenagers sow wild oats before they reach the age to join the church — is not the first artist you might think of when you think Anabaptist. You might go way down the list before getting to Mr. Pruitt, 46, a gleefully tricky purveyor of trash culture who is known for making paintings of pandas and of Paris Hilton, who has fashioned an eternal-flame monument from a bar table and a Bic lighter, and who once held an extremely brief gallery show composed solely of a long floor mirror bisected by a line of real cocaine, which was ingested by visitors.

But Mr. Pruitt has been through his own personal version of a wandering-homecoming experience, a kind of reverse Rumspringa that became so well known it has shaped his career and reputation almost as much as his work itself. In 1992 Mr. Pruitt and a collaborator, Jack Early, put together a splashy, irreverent exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery exploring the marketing of African-American culture. A decade later it might have been the subject of battling reviews, but at the time the winds of political correctness quickly turned the show, by two Southern white men, into an incendiary event. They were called cynical, even racist, and were essentially drummed out of the art world for years; Mr. Pruitt ended up selling couture dresses for a while and coming up with craft ideas for Martha Stewart Living.

As a man who earnestly, and convincingly, describes the gallery world as his church, Mr. Pruitt was devastated by his expulsion from it. In a sense he has worked for almost 20 years to earn a place back among the faithful. And with his new show, “Pattern and Degradation” — whose pieces fill more than 13,000 square feet of space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the West Village gallery that represents him, and at a nearby gallery, Maccarone — Mr. Pruitt is making his most ambitious bid yet. He seems to be trying to make a case for himself not just as a congregant but also as a deacon, a major artist.