Context (but behind a paywall): I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am I read today of what appeared to be a technological project and commercial enterprise intent on reducing beauty to an AI-mediated measurement or judgement value system and in the midst of all my horror, some words or observations came […]
Context: Shakespeare’s Moral Compass Is a moral compass always and necessarily retrospectively attributed in art and to artists? I do wonder how often we do assert or interpret such qualitative values in hindsight only to (eventually) discover that all such attributions of ethical relativism are always and already much more a literal and half-mirrored reflection […]
Money is a tool, not an end in itself and the sooner we recognise this, the happier we will all be. We assert intrinsic value to things which possess no ultimate value beyond that which they acquire in the process of asserting it. Beyond this superficially stultifying tautological bootstrap of monetary self-significance, a sufficiently mature […]
There is (perhaps) no greater dream than to for once and for all just extract and abstract ourselves from the source of all our worries, the need to work or to perform any other task which we can as intelligent people quite easily and rapidly identify as being fairly meaningless in the bigger picture of […]
The more I discover about the Universe, the more meaningless this mad parade of anger and human confusion appears to be. This is not to say that this whole chaotic game of charades is without value because anything so rare in all of time and space must have an inestimable worth and far beyond money […]
How to alienate and enrage 99% of the world? Tell them that almost all of their contemporary cultural practices, beliefs, interests, hobbies and pastimes are shallow, superficial assertions of tribal identity that do little more than provide temporary comfort in an ultimately hostile, selfish and uncaring world. It is not that these cultural practices and […]
Beauty has two faces. One is the natural symmetry and resonant eloquence of the parts as they are manifest in and as a whole, of unified pattern and unity. The other is the abstraction and symbolic token of value and meaning that we cultivate (and inherit as culture) through language and tradition. The first is […]
Not all beauty has a cost. It is the things, people and places which do not have any associated, attributed monetary measurement of worth that are the most valuable. This is why we are all, in general, so unhappy – we place value in altogether the wrong things. We spend our lives chasing meaningless token […]
Art requires inauthenticity just like wealth requires poverty. The issue is that wealth and all associated power is of necessity a narrowly-focused exclusive, dissipative system that, like a tornado, maintains coherence and continuity through offsetting its own cost and entropy to an environment composed of poverty and disempowered, disenfranchised multitudes. Wealth foundationally depends upon the […]
To ask how does art acquire value is really no different than asking how art (or anything at all) acquires meaning, as both concepts are significantly more hollow than any of us are commonly willing to admit into consideration. Art itself is the reflexive recombination of (existing, pre-existing) idioms, concepts, images and narrative (cultural) threads. […]
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 […]
Meaning is really just a game we play with words in language and there is no ultimate value or meaning beyond an experience of living and life that always and already transcends the limited clockwork constraints and limits or axioms and grammars of language. Language may be the limit of our worlds but it does […]
