Fragmenti

[Topola]

Ovlastilo ga.

[Filipenko]

Profesori i dekani sprovodili teror OZNe? :o Užasnut sam!P.S. ako ništa drugo, vidi se da su vodili računa o pečatu!

Edited June 9, 2013 by Filipenko

[bergasa19]

[Prospero]

moglo je i na naučni vocap

[Dr Arslanagić]

http://youtu.be/b4aITcsuz4Qhttp://youtu.be/gmC1EezabJA

[eumeswil]

Transaesthetics - Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, 1993

We see Art proliferating wherever we turn; talk about Art is increasing even more rapidly. But the soul of Art -- Art as adventure, Art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting up an 'other scene' in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of rules, a transcendent figure in which beings, like line and colour on a canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d'etre, and, in an urgent process of seduction, to rediscover their ideal form (even though this form may be that of their own destruction) -- in this sense, Art is gone. Art has disappeared as a symbolic pact, as something thus clearly distinct from that pure and simple production of aesthetic values, that proliferation of signs ad infinitum, that recycling of past and present forms, which we call 'culture'. There are no more fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own. Or, to use a different metaphor, there is no gold standard of aesthetic judgement or pleasure. The situation resembles that of a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float, its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth.Art, too, must circulate at top speed, and is impossible to exchange. 'Works' of art are indeed no longer exchanged, whether for each other or against a referential value. They no longer have that secret collusiveness which is the strength of a culture. We no longer read such works -- we merely decode them according to ever more contradictory criteria.Nothing in this sphere conflicts with anything else. Neo-Geometrism, Neo-Expressionism, New Abstraction, New Representationalism -- all coexist with a marvellous facility amid general indifference. It is only because none of these tendencies has any soul of its own that they can all inhabit the same cultural space; only because they arouse nothing but profound indifference in us that we can accept them all simultaneously.The art world presents a curious aspect. It is as though art and artistic inspiration had entered a kind of stasis -- as though everything which had developed magnificently over several centuries had suddenly been immobilized, paralysed by its own image and its own riches. Behind the whole convulsive movement of modern art lies a kind of inertia, something that can no longer transcend itself and has therefore turned in upon itself, merely repeating itself at a faster and faster rate. On the one hand, then, a stasis of the living form of art, and at the same time a proliferative tendency, wild hyperbole, and endless variations on all earlier forms (the life, moving of itself, of that which is dead). All this is logical enough: where there is stasis, there is metastasis. When a living form becomes disordered, when (as in cancer) a genetically determined set of rules ceases to function, the cells begin to proliferate chaotically. Just as some biological disorders indicate a break in the genetic code, so the present disorder in art may be interpreted as a fundamental break in the secret code of aesthetics. By its liberation of form, line, colour, and aesthetic notions -- as by its mixing up of all cultures, all styles -- our society has given rise to a general aestheticization: all forms of culture -- not excluding anti-cultural ones -- are promoted and all models of representation and anti-representation are taken on board. Whereas art was once essentially a utopia -- that is to say, ultimately unrealizable -- today this utopia has been realized: thanks to the media, computer science and video technology, everyone is now potentially a creator. Even anti-art, the most radical of artistic utopias, was realized once Duchamp had mounted his bottle-dryer and Andy Warhol had wished he was a machine. All the industrial machinery in the world has acquired an aesthetic dimension; all the world's insignificance has been transfigured by the aestheticizing process.It is often said that the West's great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity. That great undertaking will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world -- its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization. What we are witnessing, beyond the materialist rule of the commodity, is a semio-urgy of everything by means of advertising, the media, or images. No matter how marginal, or banal, or even obscene it may be, everything is subject to aestheticization, culturalization, museumification. Everything is said, everything is exposed, everything acquires the force, or the manner, of a sign. The system runs less on the surplus-value of the commodity than on the aesthetic surplus-value of the sign.There is much talk of a dematerialization of art, as evidenced, supposedly, by minimalism, conceptual art, ephemeral art, anti-art and a whole aesthetic of transparency, disappearance and disembodiment. In reality, however, what has occurred is a materialization of aesthetics everywhere under an operational form. It is indeed because of this that art has been obliged to minimize itself, to mime its own disappearance. It has been doing this for a century already, duly obeying all the rules. Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising.A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure -- such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practicioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts -- not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images -- be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images -- are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form -- the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of transsexuality is the erasure -- though in the form of spectacle -- of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing -- that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed -- without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.This is indeed the miraculous thing. Our images are like icons: they allow us to go on believing in art while eluding the question of its existence. So perhaps we ought to treat all present-day art as a set of rituals, and for ritual use only; perhaps we ought to consider art solely from an anthropological standpoint, without reference to any aesthetic judgement whatsoever. The implication is that we have returned to the cultural stage of primitive societies. (The speculative fetishism of the art market itself partakes of the ritual of art's transparency.)We find ourselves in the realm either of ultra- or of infra-aesthetics. It is pointless to try to endow our art with an aesthetic consistency or an aesthetic teleology. That would be like looking for the blue of the sky at the level of infrared or ultraviolet rays.In this sense, therefore, inasmuch as we have access to neither the beautiful nor the ugly, and are incapable of judging, we are condemned to indifference. Beyond this indifference, however, another kind of fascination emerges, a fascination which replaces aesthetic pleasure. For, once liberated from their respective constraints, the beautiful and the ugly, in a sense, multiply: they become more beautiful than beautiful, more ugly than ugly. Thus painting currently cultivates, if not ugliness exactly -- which remains an aesthetic value -- then the uglier-than-ugly (the 'bad', the 'worse', kitsch), an ugliness raised to the second power because it is liberated from any relationship with its opposite. Once freed from the 'true' Mondrian, we are at liberty to 'out-Mondrian Mondrian'; freed from the true naifs, we can paint in a way that is 'more naif than naif', and so on. And once freed from reality, we can produce the 'realer than real' -- hyperrealism. It was in fact with hyperrealism and pop art that everything began, that everyday life was raised to the ironic power of photographic realism. Today this escalation has caught up every form of art, every style; and all, without discrimination, have entered the transaesthetic world of simulation.There is a parallel to this escalation in the art market itself. Here too, because an end has been put to any deference to the law of value, to the logic of commodities, everything has become 'more expensive than expensive' -- expensive, as it were, squared. Prices are exorbitant -- the bidding has gone through the roof. Just as the abandonment of all aesthetic ground rules provokes a kind of brush fire of aesthetic values, so the loss of all reference to the laws of exchange means that the market hurtles into unrestrained speculation.The frenzy, the folly, the sheer excess are the same. The promotional ignition of art is directly linked to the impossibility of all aesthetic evaluation. In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.There are two art markets today. One is still regulated by a hierarchy of values, even if these are already of a speculative kind. The other resembles nothing so much as floating and uncontrollable capital in the financial market: it is pure speculation, movement for movement's sake, with no apparent purpose other than to defy the law of value. This second market has much in common with poker or potlatch -- it is a kind of space opera in the hyperspace of value. Should we be scandalized? No. There is nothing immoral here. Just as present-day art is beyond beautiful and ugly, the market, for its part, is beyond good and evil.

Edited June 20, 2013 by miki.bg

[eumeswil]

Jean Baudrillard - Conspiracy of Art, 1996

The illusion of desire has been lost in the ambient pornography and contemporary art has lost the desire of illusion. In porn, nothing is left to desire. After the orgies and the liberation of all desires, we have moved into the transsexual, the transparency of sex, with signs and images erasing all its secrets and ambiguity. Transsexual, in the sense that it now has nothing to do with the illusion of desire, only with the hyperreality of the image.The same is true for art, which has also lost the desire for illusion, and instead raises everything to aesthetic banality, becoming transaesthetic. For art, the orgy of modernity consisted in the heady deconstruction of the object and of representation. During that period, the aesthetic illusion remained very powerful, just as the illusion of desire was for sex. The energy of sexual difference, which moved through all the figures of desire, corresponded, in art, to the energy of dissociation from reality (cubism, abstraction, expressionism). Both, however, corresponded to the will to crack the secret of desire and the secret of the object. Up until the disappearance of these two powerful configurations -- the scene of desire, the scene of illusion -- in favor of the same transsexual, transaesthetic obscenity, the obscenity of visibility, the relentless transparency of all things. In reality, there is no longer any pornography, since it is virtually everywhere. The essence of pornography permeates all visual and televisual techniques.Maybe we are just acting out the comedy of art, just as other societies acted out the comedy of ideology, just as Italian society (though it is not alone) keeps acting out the comedy of power, just as we keep acting out the comedy of porn in the obscene advertising pictures of women's bodies. Perpetual striptease, fantasies of exposed organs, sexual blackmail: if all this were true, it would indeed be unbearable. Fortunately, it is all too obvious to be true. The transparency is too good to be true. As for art, it is too superficial to be truly null and void. There must be some underlying mystery. Like for anamorphosis: there must be an angle from which all of this useless excess of sex and signs becomes meaningful, but, for the time being, we can only experience it with ironic indifference. In this unreality of porn, in this insignificance of art, is there a negative enigma, a mysterious thread, or, who knows, an ironic form of our destiny? If everything becomes too obvious to be true, maybe there still is a chance for illusion. What lies hidden behind this falsely transparent world? Another kind of intelligence or a terminal lobotomy? (Modern) art managed to be a part of the accursed share, a kind of dramatic alternative to reality, by translating the rush of unreality in reality. But what could art possibly mean in a world that has already become hyperrealist, cool, transparent, marketable? What can porn mean in a world made pornographic beforehand? All it can do is make a final, paradoxical wink -- the wink of reality laughing at itself in its most hyperrealist form, of sex laughing at itself in its most exhibitionist form, of art laughing at itself and at its own disappearance in its most artificial form, irony. In any case, the dictatorship of images is an ironic dictatorship. Yet this irony itself is no longer part of the accursed share. It now belongs to insider trading, the shameful and hidden complicity binding the artist who uses his or her aura of derision against the bewildered and doubtful masses. Irony is also part of the conspiracy of art.As long as art was making use of its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object, it still was a major enterprise. But art trying to recycle itself indefinitely by storming reality? The majority of contemporary art has attempted to do precisely that by confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity as values and ideologies. These countless installations and performances are merely compromising with the state of things, and with all the past forms of art history. Raising originality, banality and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure. Of course, all of this mediocrity claims to transcend itself by moving art to a second, ironic level. But it is just as empty and insignificant on the second as on the first level. The passage to the aesthetic level salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null -- "I am null! I am null! -- and it truly is null.Therein lies all the duplicity of contemporary art: asserting nullity, insignificance, meaninglessness, striving for nullity when already null and void. Striving for emptiness when already empty. Claiming superficiality in superficial terms. Nullity, however, is a secret quality that cannot be claimed by just anyone. Insignificance -- real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of disappearance of meaning -- is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it. There is an initiatory form of Nothingness, or an initiatory form of Evil. And then there are the inside traders, the counterfeiters of nullity, the snobs of nullity, of all those who prostitute Nothingness to value, who prostitute Evil for useful ends. The counterfeiters must not be allowed free reign. When Nothing surfaces in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the very heart of the sign system, that is the fundamental event of art. The poetic operation is to make Nothingness rise from the power of signs -- not banality or indifference toward reality but radical illusion. Warhol is thus truly null, in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. He turns nullity and insignificance into an event that he changes into a fatal strategy of the image.Other artists only have a commercial strategy of nullity, one to which they give a marketable form, the sentimental form of commodity, as Baudelaire said. They hide behind their own nullity and behind the metastases of the discourse on art, which generously promotes this nullity as a value (within the art market as well, obviously). In a way, it is worse than nothing, because it means nothing and it nonetheless exists, providing itself with all the right reasons to exist. This paranoia in collusion with art means that there is no longer any possible critical judgment, and only an amiable, necessarily genial sharing of nullity. Therein lies the conspiracy of art and its primal scene, transmitted by all of the openings, hangings, exhibitions, restorations, collections, donations and speculations, and that cannot be undone in any known universe, since it has hidden itself from thought behind the mystification of images.The flip side of this duplicity is, through the bluff on nullity, to force people a contrario to give it all some importance and credit under the pretext that there is no way it could be so null, that it must be hiding something. Contemporary art makes use of this uncertainty, of the impossibility of grounding aesthetic value judgments and speculates on the guilt of those who do not understand it or who have not realized that there is nothing to understand. Another case of insider trading. In the end, one might also think that these people, who are held in respect by art, really got it since their very bewilderment betrays an intuitive intelligence. They realize that they've been made victims of an abuse of power, that they have been denied access to the rules of the game and manipulated behind their backs. In other words, art has become involved (not only from the financial point of view of the art market, but in the very management of aesthetic values) in the general process of insider trading. Art is not alone: politics, economics, the news all benefit from the same complicity and ironic resignation from their "consumers.""Our admiration for painting results from a long process of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is basically a conventional relationship" (Gombrowitz to Dubuffet). The only question is: How can such a machine continue to operate in the midst of critical disillusion and commercial frenzy? And if it does, how long will this conjuring act last? One hundred, two hundred years? Will art have the right to a second, interminable existence, like the secret services that, as we know, haven't had any secrets to steal or exchange for some time but who still continue to flourish in the utter superstition of their usefulness, perpetuating their own myth.

[eumeswil]

Contemporary Art: Art Contemporary with Itself - Jean Baudrillard, 2005

The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself. It no longer knows any transcendence either towards past or future; its only reality is that of its operation in real time and its confusion with that reality. Nothing now distinguishes it from the technical, promotional, media, digital operation. There is no transcendence, no divergence any more, nothing of another scene: merely a specular play with the contemporary world as it takes place. It is in this that contemporary art is worthless: between it and the world, there is a zero-sum equation. Quite apart from that shameful complicity in which creators and consumers commune wordlessly in the examination of strange, inexplicable objects that refer only to themselves and to the idea of art, the true conspiracy lies in this complicity that art forges with itself, its collusion with the real, through which it becomes complicit in that Integral Reality, of which it is now merely the image-feedback. There is no longer any differential of art. There is only the integral calculus of reality. Art is now merely an idea prostituted in its realization.Modernity was the golden age of a deconstruction of reality into its simple elements, of a detailed analytics, first of impressionism, then of abstraction, experimentally open to all the aspects of perception, of sensibility, of the structure of the object and the dismemberment of forms. The paradox of abstraction is that, by "liberating" the object from the constraints of the figural to yield it up to the pure play of form, it shackled it to an idea of a hidden structure, of an objectivity more rigorous and radical than that of resemblance. It sought to set aside the mask of resemblance and of the figure in order to accede to the analytic truth of the object. Under the banner of abstraction, we moved paradoxically towards more reality, towards an unveiling of the "elementary structures" of objectality, that is to say, towards something more real than the real. Conversely, under the banner of a general aestheticization, art invaded the whole field of reality.The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world -- Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange... All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world. This "liberation" has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other -- a chiasmus lethal to both. The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum.What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The "creative" act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation -- the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact.This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries -- the apotheosis of art as a non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works.At the extreme point of a conceptual, minimalist logic, art ought quite simply to fade away. At that point, it would doubtless become what it is: a false problem, and every aesthetic theory would be a false solution. And yet it is the case that there is all the more need to speak about it because there is nothing to say. The movement of the democratization of art has paradoxically merely strengthened the privileged status of the idea of art, culminating in this banal tautology of "art is art", it being possible for everything to find its place in this circular definition. As Marshall McLuhan has it, "We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art".1The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this -- organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the "artwork" is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modern and contemporary art is summed up in the "ready-made": the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art."... that absurd sculpture by Picasso, with its stalks and leaves of metal; neither wings, nor victory, just a testimony, a vestige -- the idea, nothing more, of a work of art. Very similar to the other ideas and vestiges that inspire our existence -- not apples, but the idea, the reconstruction by the pomologist of what apples used to be -- not ice-cream, but the idea, the memory of something delicious, made from substitutes, from starch, glucose and other chemicals -- not sex, but the idea or evocation of sex -- the same with love, belief, thought and the rest..."2Art, in its form, signifies nothing. It is merely a sign pointing towards absence. But what becomes of this perspective of emptiness and absence in a contemporary universe that is already totally emptied of its meaning and reality? Art can now only align itself with the general insignificance and indifference. It no longer has any privileged status. It no longer has any other final destination than this fluid universe of communication, the networks and interaction. Transmitter and receiver merging in the same loop: all transmitters, all receivers. Each subject interacting with itself, doomed to express itself without any longer having time to listen to the other. The Net and the networks clearly increase this possibility of transmitting for oneself in a closed circuit, everyone going at it with their virtual performances and contributing to the general asphyxia.This is why, where art is concerned, the most interesting thing would be to infiltrate the spongiform encephalon of the modern spectator. For this is where the mystery lies today: in the brain of the receiver, at the nerve centre of this servility before "works of art". What is the secret of it? In the complicity between the mortification "creative artists" inflict on objects and themselves, and the mortification consumers inflict on themselves and their mental faculties. Tolerance for the worst of things has clearly increased considerably as a function of this general state of complicity.Interface and performance -- these are the two current leitmotifs. In performance, all the forms of expression merge -- the plastic arts, photography, video, installation, the interactive screen. This vertical and horizontal, aesthetic and commercial diversification is henceforth part of the work, the original core of which cannot be located. A (non-)event like The Matrix illustrates this perfectly: this is the very archetype of the global installation, of the total global fact: not just the film, which is, in a way, the alibi, but the spin-offs, the simultaneous projection at all points of the globe and the millions of spectators themselves who are inextricably part of it. We are all, from a global, interactive point of view, the actors in this global total fact.Photography has the selfsame problem when we undertake to multi-mediatize it by adding to it all the resources of montage, collage, the digital and CGI, etc. This opening-up to the infinite, this deregulation, is, literally, the death of photography by its elevation to the stage of performance. In this universal mix, each register loses its specificity -- just as each individual loses his sovereignty in interaction and the networks -- just as the real and the image, art and reality lose their respective energy by ceasing to be differential poles.Since the nineteenth century, it has been art's claim that it is useless. It has prided itself on this (which was not the case in classical art, where, in a world that was not yet either real or objective, the question of usefulness did not even arise). Extending this principle, it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art. This is precisely what the "ready-made" does, when it simply withdraws an object from its function, without changing it in any way, and thereby turns it into a gallery piece. It is enough to turn the real itself into a useless function to make it an art object, prey to the devouring aesthetic of banality. Similarly, old objects, being obsolete and hence useless, automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. Their being distant from us in time is the equivalent of Duchamp's artistic act; they too become "ready-mades", nostalgic vestiges resuscitated in our museum universe. We might extrapolate this aesthetic transfiguration to the whole of material production. As soon as it reaches a threshold where it is no longer exchanged in terms of social wealth, it becomes something like a giant Surrealist object, in the grip of a devouring aesthetic, and everywhere takes its place in a kind of virtual museum. And so we have the museumification, like a "ready-made", of the whole technical environment in the form of industrial wasteland.The logic of uselessness could not but lead contemporary art to a predilection for waste, which is itself useless by definition. Through waste, the figuration of waste, the obsession with waste, art fiercely proclaims its uselessness. It demonstrates its non-use-value, its non-exchange-value at the same time as selling itself very dear. There is a misconception here. Uselessness has no value in itself. It is a secondary symptom and, by sacrificing its aims to this negative quality, art goes completely off track, into a gratuitousness that is itself useless. It is the same scenario, more or less, as that of nullity, of the claim to non-meaning, insignificance and banality, which attests to a redoubled aesthetic pretension. Anti-art strives, in all its forms, to escape the aesthetic dimension. But since the "ready-made" has annexed banality itself, all that is finished. The innocence of non-meaning, of the non-figurative, of abjection and dissidence, is finished. All these things, which contemporary art would like to be, or return to, merely reinforce the inexorably aesthetic character of this anti-art.Art has always denied itself. But once it did so through excess, thrilling to the play of its disappearance. Today it denies itself by default -- worse, it denies its own death. It immerses itself in reality, instead of being the agent of the symbolic murder of that same reality, instead of being the magical operator of its disappearance. And the paradox is that the closer it gets to this phenomenal confusion, this nullity as art, the greater credit and value it is accorded, to the extent that, to paraphrase Canetti, we have reached a point where nothing is beautiful or ugly any more; we passed that point without realizing it and, since we cannot get back to that blind spot, we can only persevere in the current destruction of art.Lastly, what purpose does this useless function serve? From what, by its very uselessness, does it deliver us? Like politicians, who deliver us from the wearisome responsibility of power, contemporary art, by its incoherent artifice, delivers us from the ascendancy of meaning by providing us with the spectacle of non-sense. This explains its proliferation: independently of any aesthetic value, it is assured of prospering by dint of its very insignificance and emptiness. Just as the politician endures in the absence of any representativeness or credibility.So art and the art market flourish precisely in proportion to their decay: they are the modern charnel-houses of culture and the simulacrum.It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there's no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcizing it as spectacle.If, as some have proposed, the function of art was to make life more interesting than art, then we have to give up that illusion. One gets the impression that a large part of current art participates in an enterprise of deterrence, a work of mourning for the image and the imaginary, a -- mostly failed -- work of aesthetic mourning that leads to a general melancholia of the artistic sphere, which seems to survive its own demise by recycling its history and its relics.But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.

[eumeswil]

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

Summary of contemporary art by a London cab driver, in front of Tate Modern: "When one enters, one understands why it's free."

[Prospero]

svaka sličnost sa 21. vekom je slučajna

King George: 'Mission Accomplished'? Britain's counterinsurgency advisor for the American colonies on Washington, Trenton, and the mendacity of the French. BY MICHAEL PECK | JULY 5, 2013Three years into the continuing rebellion of Great Britain's North American colonies, public and parliamentary criticism of efforts to suppress the insurgency is mounting. FP spoke with General Sir Richard Featherweight, chief counterinsurgency adviser for Britain's North American Security Assistance Force (NOSAF), regarding the state of the conflict:FP: My Lord, critics argue that the British counterinsurgency campaign in America is foundering. Do you concur?General Featherweight: Good Sir, this is an absolute falsehood. With the support of our Hessian coalition partners, we have almost broken the insurgency. The army of General Washington...pardon, the so-called army of the so-called General Washington...has been driven into the mountains of the province of Pennsylvania, far from the cities and farms along the coast. His army is depleted, and we are successfully interdicting his supplies and reinforcements. Insurgent strength is melting like snow in June. Mark my words, Sir. By next year, King George III will be able to proclaim "mission accomplished."FP: But it is now 1779, and hadn't NOSAF assured the British public that the American insurgency would be broken by 1776?Gen. F: My good fellow, counterinsurgency takes time. One must beware of those peddling quick panaceas like some patent medicine merchant in London. It is true that due to totally unforeseeable circumstances, our security and stabilization efforts have taken longer than expected. But I must protest the negative bias of those in Parliament and the press who are ignoring the immense progress we have made. I am sure you have seen the latest PowerPoints. Tarring and feathering of Loyalist Americans is down 37 percent over last year. Attacks on Coalition supply wagons are down 26 percent. And, reports of Americans singing "Yankee Doodle" have decreased 19 percent. If that last fact alone does not convince you, Sir, I fail to see what will.FP: My Lord, you maintain that the American insurgents have no popular support. But doesn't the fact that the insurgency continues suggest otherwise?Gen. F: Rubbish! Our polls show that the vast majority of the American people yearn for the benevolent rule of King George III. They have no desire to live under the oppressive rule of the Continental Congress, or terrorists and criminals like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. It is only due to the pernicious influx of foreign fighters and supplies that the conflict continues.FP: You mean the French?Gen. F: I will not identify those outside powers that are responsible for the instability in North America. However, the British government is well aware of who they are and is taking steps to address the problem. We believe the American people reject these meddlers and agitators, and welcome the sovereignty of Great Britain.FP: There have been reports of a sharp split within the British command over how best to conduct counterinsurgency in America.Gen. F: I would hardly characterize it as a split. It is more an honorable difference of opinion between those who favor winning the hearts and minds of Americans, versus those who believe a more forceful response is needed. I would say that we have successfully used elements of both strategies. The British Army has kept Washington's army away from strategic areas, which can then experience the benefit of imperial rule without fear of coercion and intimidation by the insurgents.FP: However, it would appear that the more forceful approach has won out. General Sir Henry Clinton [Combatant Commander for North American Command, or NOCOM] has requested an additional 50,000 British soldiers for what he terms a "surge." Some members of Parliament worry that this would strain Britain's military and financial resources.Gen. F: I think that we can all agree with King George that Americans have a right to the benefits of monarchical rule. At such a time, it seems unpatriotic to quibble over the expenditure of mere treasure, like some shopkeeper clucking over his accounts. However, as General Clinton has testified, the surge is a temporary measure that will enable us to secure more territory, deprive the insurgents of supplies and sanctuaries, and strengthen colonial authorities until they can assume local security functions.FP: Some have pointed out that America is a vast, rugged wilderness with rudimentary infrastructure and communications outside of the major population centers. With NOSAF numbering some 90,000 British and German troops, plus some 50,000 Loyalist soldiers, is this not an insufficient number to occupy an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles?Gen. F: There is no denying that America presents a challenge for a modern European army. The terrain is harsh, and Washington's fighters require much less logistics than British soldiers. They are accustomed to marching barefoot through deep snow and subsisting on a handful of grain. Nonetheless, let us not forget the enormous advantages that Coalition forces enjoy. The Royal Navy confers strategic mobility that allows us to fight at a time and place of our own choosing. Coalition troops are far better trained, equipped and supplied than the insurgents.FP: And you still maintain that British forces have never lost a battle?Gen. F: The rebels know they cannot defeat British troops on the battlefield. This is why Washington and his ragtag bands must resort to guerrilla warfare. It is ludicrous that some analysts regard this as clever strategy. It is actually a sign of their impotence in the face of British superiority.FP: Yet Washington did manage to cross the Delaware and overrun Forward Operating Base Trenton.Gen. F: As you are aware, our investigation determined that the temporary loss of FOB Trenton was the result of negligence by the local Hessian commander. Of course, this is no way affects our confidence in our Hessian partners.FP: However, there have been reports of multinational tensions within NOSAF, with the Hessian contingent complaining that they have been sacrificed in battles like Trenton. This has led to speculation that they will withdraw. Does this worry you?Gen. F: Not at all. Our Coalition partners fully understand the importance of securing stable and lawful rule in North America, and stemming the spread of democracy. They know that the loss of America would jeopardize Europe's overseas colonies and eventually our monarchial system of government in Europe. We must defeat the American insurgency, or jeopardize our European way of life.

[eumeswil]

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil Or the Lucidity Pact, 2005

What used to be separated is now merged; distance is everywhere abolished: between the sexes, between opposite poles, between the stage and the auditorium, between the protagonists of action, between the subject and the object, between the real and its double. This confusion of terms, this collision of poles means that nowhere is value judgment now possible any longer, neither in art nor in morality nor in politics. With the abolition of distance and of the “pathos” of distance, everything becomes undecidable.

And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom of discovery, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder — you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no “Other” out there and no final destination. It’s any old destination — and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.

The fact that identity is the identity of the network and never that of individuals, the fact that priority is given to the network rather than to the network's protagonists implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intagible space of the virtual, so that you are not detectable anywhere - even by yourself. This resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the atraction of all those virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowlegde as from the desire to dissapear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high', which takes the place of happiness, of obvious happiness, by the very fact that happiness no longer has any raison d'etre here. Virtuality only comes close to happiness only because surreptitiously removes all reference to things. It gives you everything, but at the same time it subtly deprives you of everything. The subject is realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, subject automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.

http://books.google....cidable&f=falsehttp://www.ubishops....baudrillard.htm Edited July 7, 2013 by miki.bg

[Dr Arslanagić]

ne znam gde bih stavio ovo, neka tu bude Portraits of Pain

The image, shot by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, captures in one poignant frame the human cost of the April 24 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment-factory complex in the Dhaka sub­district of Savar. At least 1,129 workers died in what is probably the worst apparel-industry accident ever.

Edited July 11, 2013 by Arbeitmann

[Dr Arslanagić]

Policijski glasnik br. 847, 1941.

[kim_philby]

:D majstor

[Turnbull]