Selections from E.M. Cioran (1911-1995)

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy. What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music ,in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again. When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligble shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia. A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so over taxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust. Only unfinished - because unfinishable - works prompt us to speculate about the essence of art. One does not write because one has something to say but because one "wants" to say something. What we call the creative instinct is merely a deviation, merely a perversion of our nature: we have not been brought into the world in order to innovate, to revolutionize, but to enjoy our semblance of being, in order to liquidate it quietly and to vanish afterward without a fuss. What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts. There is value only in that which bursts forth from inspiration, which springs up from the irrational depths of our being, from the secret center of subjectivity. The fruit of labor, effort, and endeavor has no value, and the offspring of intelligence is sterile and uninteresting. I delight in the barbaric and spontaneous elan of inspiration, effervescent spiritual states, essential lyricism, and inner tension - these things make inspiration the only reality of creation. I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas.Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.

Francis Picabia: Aphorisms

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing,the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom. * Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god. * Those who draw their ideal from the ideal tend to have regrets later: ideals all belong to an era other than honesty. * Our thoughts are the shadows of our actions. * Reason is a light which makes me see things as they are not. * The problem of conscience only presents itself to us when we begin tounderstand the extent to which we can do without it. * All men are in effect a single man because multiplicity is only an illusion. * The most convincing eloquence is silence. * Beauty is relative to the amount of interest it arouses. * Paralysis is the first stage of wisdom. * Men have more imagination for killing than for saving. * The unknown is the exception, the know a deception. * Sleep, death; frontiers. Great beauty always hesitates between life and death.

Giovanni Gentile - Selections

But we cannot think, we cannot open our eyes without sinking into a flood of sorrow from which we must struggle to the shore. And it cannot be otherwise, for thought is not intuition or immediate self-revelation. It is a process; this implies that we are always journeying and always arriving, yet never arriving. We "are" only insofar as we "are not"; and we suffer. The world fills itself with hostile and frightening phantoms; at every step we come to impassable barriers. Such is life even for the least tragic-minded. If we turn to comedy, what do we get? A superficial laugh. This is the inherent pain of thought, from which there would be no rest without the soothing effect of art. When a circle of thought is concluded and closed with the seal of feeling, the thinking subject erects itself aloft in its infinity and liberty. Then man feels the joy of life and the pride of power. In this return of the subject to itself lies the catharsis of all poetry and of all art. Life is a tragedy, in which man is subject to Fate. But this universal tragedy has its own catharsis, which is art, the eternal source of youth from which constantly springs and sparkles the magic water that makes life flow again in the dry reeds burned by the fires of thought.

from: The Philosophy of Art (Cornell University Press 1972 )

Die Form - Reflections

Music: a spirit which appears extraneous to the world of appearances, which reaches out for another truer reality the essence of which searches beyond the transitory facade of this "world" to a realm free from the mannerisms and boastings of the mundane and prosaic world of deception and self-aggrandizement. Music invokes the tragic winds of fate and the pure beauty born from the primordial encounter of self and senselessness; whispering the temptation of the ineffable to our wounded souls across infinity. Music: a spirit of dissatisfaction, an apparition lost amidst posthumous reflections . . .

photo: Philippe Fichot

http://www.dieform.net/

Eduardo Recife

"Vintage images are just beautiful, there's something about them that impresses me. I love old stuff, vintage magazine, old photos, old books... Everything looks more uninteresting these days... Its hard to describe a style... The style is what you see, the category or name is not really important..."

http://www.misprintedtype.com/v4/

 Virtual reality no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world. One should therefore turn around one of the commonplaces of conservative cultural criticism: In contrast to the notion that new media turn us into passive consumers who just stare numbly at the screen, the real threat of new media is that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for mindless frenetic activity - FOR ENDLESS WORK.
http://www.autopsia.net/