Author: David Schwarm

America is a land of masking jokers.

1. Art is not the sublime descent of the infinite into the finite abjection of the body and sexuality. It is the production of an infinite subjective series through the finite means of a material subtraction.

2. Art cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone.

3. Art is the process of a truth, and this truth is always the truth of the sensible or sensual, the sensible as sensible. This means: the transformation of the sensible into a happening of the Idea.

4. There is necessarily a plurality of arts, and however we may imagine the ways in which the arts might intersect there is no imaginable way of totalizing this plurality.

5. Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion.

6. The subject of an artistic truth is the set of the works which compose it.

7. This composition is an infinite configuration, which, in our own contemporary artistic context, is a generic totality.

8. The real of art is ideal impurity conceived through the immanent process of its purification. In other words, the raw material of art is determined by the contingent inception of a form. Art is the secondary formalization of the advent of a hitherto formless form.

9. The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.

10. Non-imperial art is necessarily abstract art, in this sense: it abstracts itself from all particularity, and formalizes this gesture of abstraction.

11. The abstraction of non-imperial art is not concerned with any particular public or audience. Non-imperial art is related to a kind of aristocratic-proletarian ethic: Alone, it does what it says, without distinguishing between kinds of people.

12. Non-imperial art must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.

13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art : the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn’t exist.

14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

You know there is something extremely fun about telling the future. And it is not just fun to try to guess the future, it is even better if you tell someone else what your prediction is – you let them on to your guess.

Even if you are not correct, the anticipation created by telling the future is simply amazing.

there is a humbling aspect to it because one is almost always wrong & even when one is right there are usually regrets associated with the act of prediction.

But the point is not to be right – the point is to get the ego out of the way and convincingly try to predict the future through art.

Why is modern art not trying to recreate Nostradamus? Why the cut ups & other post modern conventions which have struggled so much with the progress of the other modern arts are not abandoned for the way more fun and readable lost art of prophecy I will never know.

But I predict that we will see a return to prophecy. And not the prophecy of the old testament, which speaks in cryptic tones, but a more concert fortune telling based on the progress of the palm reader and tarot card shufflers. A literature of prognostication which tells it like it will be without any fear of being wrong. And the value of being right will be removed.

As time moves into the arbitrary digital universe in which time starts on Jan 1, 1970 for no other reason then the fact that it was early then unix was invented – a time vexed by leap seconds – and truth will become a flexible commodity that will be malible by everyone – courtrooms will need to change the way in which evidence is presented, the way in which evidence is gathered, the way in which evidence is classified – the legal systems inability to deal with the fluctuating nature of digital time will cause significant problems in 2005.

Predictions like that should be made constantly by everyone everyday. They should be quoted like shakespeare. and they should be given over to the future generation as our greatest literary acheivement.

I saw this at a matinee on January 19th @ 13:30. it was horrible – I actually think that it may have been worse then Catwoman. I have no idea why it is so hard for Hollywood to make a female superhero film.

Ghost World is clearly the best chick comic film ever made – I need to read more of his stuff.

I like the utter sympliciyt of these drawings & the greek mythological themes.

http://www.derekeller.com/Chrishammerlein.html

very nice online exhibit as well.

1. There is no other way to get the information.

2. No one is put at risk, including the risk of social scorn.

3. The knowledge sought is important enough to justify deception.

I am not sure that there is any case where deception will not undermine the research framework to such an extent that it will ever be useful. If I know that someone has lied in the past, then I can only assume that they will lie again. And I am not applying universal lays to specific cases, the belief that deceptive systems will continue to deceive is the only logical conclusion.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

Frazer’s presentation of the magical and religious views of men is unsatisfactory…it makes these views appear as errors

I venture to think, on the contrary, that men first acknowledged a single god, and that human weakness later adopted several.

A science of the “human” is not possible, Foucault argues, not because man is qualitatively different from everything else in the cosmos, but because he is precisely the same as everything else.