Category: Theory

Discourses on Art

Posted on Posted in art school, coursenotes, meaning, studio table, Theory

Book by age, or by contents. How do you choose the text for your table? Mine is filled and emptied by whim; by wandering among the stacks. Like a sleepwalker without slippers. Old books are kept not maintained. They become overlaid with marks upon readings. Reynolds is an old text without many current readers. I never spend more than a frew minutes with it, although it draws me in enough times over the years to remain on in the main stacks.

Joshua Reynolds. [1723- 1792]

Further:

Additional ballast from the “other”:

  • The ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH is that there are NO ABSOLUTE TRUTHS (Feyerabend) 
  • I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives … (Jean-François Lyotard)
  • Finally, if nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion. (Aristotle)
  • If anyone thinks nothing is to be known, he does not even know whether that can be known, as he says he knows nothing. (Lucretius)
  • And isn’t it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are. (Plato)

Studio Table: Jul 30 ’25

Posted on Posted in as written, studio table, Theory

Book links… quicknotes of the incoming stack. Keeping myself moving in more than one direction.

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” thomas Mann.

[Mike Csikszentmihalyi called the flow state. In flow, you realize your fullest creative potential. You lose track of time. You’re not distracted by little things around you. Flow is like a drug. Once you’ve experienced it, you want it again. ]

Shelf side

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525206/the-bodhisattvas-brain/? [ In The Bodhisattva’s Brain, Flanagan argues that it is possible to discover in Buddhism a rich, empirically responsible philosophy that could point us to one path of human flourishing.]

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552141/planetary-eating/? [Starting from rather basic (but not quite first) principles, Planetary Eating offers impartial, fact-based analysis with firm foundations in earth and planetary sciences on how to make the right dietary choices.]

[Arendt describes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the “masses” whom totalitarians funneled into a movement were made ready for such mobilization by a “desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture and fake life. . . . Unlike the nihilism of Nietzsche and other radicalisms (Sorel, Bakunin) for them it was about destruction for its own sake: destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.”] in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549042/the-emperors-new-nudity/? [Technology, Kremnitzer writes, leads us toward an impersonal and hyperrational world to such an extent that it renders human subjectivity outmoded. Authority, on the other hand, anchors our subjective identifications to certain figures and seems to be hopelessly primitive and irrational. What is required, then, is a dialectics of the primal]