artintelligence

With regard to Damien Hirst’s recent auction success, a quote from Jean-François Lyotard: “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you eat McDonald’s at midday and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows … Together, artist, gallery owner, critic, and public indulge one another in the Anything Goes — it is time to relax. But this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realise.” (Lyotard 1992) (more…)

The romantic literary theorist Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) was, as Michael Weston explains, inspired by Kantian philosophy to the extent that he exclaimed “poetry and philosophy should be made one” (Schlegel 1971: 115; in Weston 2001: 8). And the basis of this modern philosophical poetry lies the fundamental unknowableness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, unknowable because according to Kant’s philosophy the synthesising genius of imagination effectively creates reality. (more…)