Instagram is – at base – narcissism, self-obsession, insecurity, pathological inadequacy and the normative, technologically-mediated ubiquity of endless self-surveillance as peer-group pressure on steroids. It’s probably offensive for some people to hear these analytical assessments but, really, that’s ok – it is a part of a core psychological narcissism that the confrontation with and of […]
Swimming against the stream and powerful tides of conventional thought and behavioural orthodoxy is the only way to ever do anything of enduring value or significance in life. It is also the hardest life to live. Authenticity and sincerity or conscientious adherence to your own values will cost you more in suffering and hardship than […]
Art is nothing without controversy. You might even suggest that the adversarialism and dissonant entropy of disagreement regarding value or aesthetic merit is precisely the primary transmission medium for a hype and cultural salience by and through which art maintains sustainable continuity in the popular imagination and marketplace of cultural concepts. Is it art? Is […]
Our mental images are the incomplete sketches upon which we build a whole world and in their useful ambiguity and uncertainty we cultivate our freedom to grow.
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
Imagination – that recursively self-inflected and indefinitely extensible system of undirected grammatical, cognitive or structural exploration and visualisation; it is very similar to a logic, mathematics or physics that itself autonomously expands (albeit in abstract, interior spaces and through us as symbolic codes) and endlessly seeks optimally concise self-representations, abstractions, higher-dimensional compression, self-gravitation and algorithmic […]
Context: The Café Beauty, like life, is a transient thing and the experience of it brings as much suffering as it does joy – an equation perhaps weighted to the darkness more than to the light and in the inevitability of the ends we all must face, this seems a certain truth. The sense of […]
Context: The climate change clues hidden in art history The endemic representational ambiguity of art is an inevitable source of doubt in regards to veracity in a context of deriving Climate facts through the artefacts of Art History. A useful comparison of contemporary artistic reflections of environment and climate must always – and perhaps necessarily […]
Context: Coronavirus murals: inside the world of pandemic-inspired street art Interesting to consider the ways in which popular culture embodies a communication medium for an inadvertent yet optimally-concise and autonomously self-propagating information pattern of ourselves, our minds and the hyper-extended cognition of (an ancient, symbolic language of) technological self-representation. The article could have done with a few more […]
Observe: the creative node in a cultural network – the artefact, the object, the concept – is never the terminal boundary of the artist’s endeavour. The contour and flow of living information systems in minds and cultures are dynamic and adaptive; the life and boundless complexity of an artefact is that cascading field of consequence […]
When so much contemporary art – as with politics and ideology – survives and thrives on a pure and insubstantial superficiality that is profoundly hollow, fragile and ultimately meaningless, this art demonstrates a deep stylistic and aesthetic value and enduring emotional, psychological impact. I truly love this work – it is evocative, alluring and conceptually, […]
The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]
