ANYTHING YOU WANT

beetleinabox:

Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1992 (The Gugenheim Museum Bilbao).
Jay Bernstein writes:
Do we have reason to believe that there are now valid aesthetic judgments of natural beauties? Does bracketing our cognitive interests and attending our attending only to forms put us in touch with nature? Has any of us ever seen, “seen” in Kant’s demanding sense, a rose that is not utterly and completely saturated with the mythic roses of romantic love of with sacrificial religion or botanical idealization or, indeed, with some clichéd idea of beauty? Is not every rose, vista, birdsong we encounter already packaged as, potentially, a “beauty,” something to be swooned over and gaped at? Does not the very idea of a vista, for example, insinuate a landscape, thus the process through which subjects have extricated themselves from their natural environment and packaged it as an item for aesthetic perception? If ever occasion of natural beauty strikes us, with some embarrassment, as a cliché, as a bit of social engineering, as if Walt Disney had already been there and set the whole thing up, how can we say anything about nature’s role in the generation of human meaning?

Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1992 (The Gugenheim Museum Bilbao).

Jay Bernstein writes:

Do we have reason to believe that there are now valid aesthetic judgments of natural beauties? Does bracketing our cognitive interests and attending our attending only to forms put us in touch with nature? Has any of us ever seen, “seen” in Kant’s demanding sense, a rose that is not utterly and completely saturated with the mythic roses of romantic love of with sacrificial religion or botanical idealization or, indeed, with some clichéd idea of beauty? Is not every rose, vista, birdsong we encounter already packaged as, potentially, a “beauty,” something to be swooned over and gaped at? Does not the very idea of a vista, for example, insinuate a landscape, thus the process through which subjects have extricated themselves from their natural environment and packaged it as an item for aesthetic perception? If ever occasion of natural beauty strikes us, with some embarrassment, as a cliché, as a bit of social engineering, as if Walt Disney had already been there and set the whole thing up, how can we say anything about nature’s role in the generation of human meaning?

In my mind, i’m still 16.

life & limb @ ritual books and music

beetleinabox:

Footage from today’s eviction of Occupy Melbourne demonstrators.

Giorgio Agamben writes:

The point is that the police - contrary to public opinion - are not merely an administrative function of law enforcement; rather, the police are perhaps the place where the proximity and the almost constitutive exchange between violence and right is shown more nakedly and clearly than anywhere else. According to the ancient Roman custom, nobody could for any reason come between the consul, who was endowed with imperium, and the lictor closest to him, who carried the sacrificial ax (which was used to perform capital punishment). This contiguity is not coincidental. If the sovereign, in fact, is the one who marks the point of indistinction between violence and right by proclaiming the state of exception and suspending the validity of the law, the police are always operating within a similar state of exception. The rationales of “public order” and “security” on which the police have to decide on a case-by-case basis define an area of indistinction between violence and right that is exactly symmetrical to that of sovereignty.