Writing about art

art: n; 12. All art is politically in-formed and all art is powerless to keep from disclosing this in-formation. 
20. Eventually, in the creative process you reach a point where resistance is not an option. 
22. I want to “create a complex space in which that which is happening requires a response that stimulates ongoing interpretation”. (from Gilmour; Fire on Earth). 
23. Art is the (communicated) ongoing battle with human anguish and with those who further the cause of human anguish. 
25. Art is the measure of the distance living (both in a public and in the artist) must travel to arrive at the fully human. 
26. Art erects tenuous dwellings in the margin between criticism and exploitation. 
29. A detour of decay. 
30. Rousseau argued that civilization, and art specifically, corrupts mankind. His conclusion is not exactly correct. Art has the ability to corrupt and often it will corrupt those who are not ready (intellectually, emotionally, etc.) to bear the responsibilities of art. Art corrupts because it is disruptive. Disruptive does not imply a force of negative value. For instance, a disruptive force is exactly what is required to free a ship that has run aground. 
31. Sometimes we create things which run far ahead of our understanding. In such cases, we must create things to overtake what has already been accomplished. 
32. Art will always fall in love with a deluge. 
33. You must find the Eden you wish to be banished from. 
34. The cake decorator must understand that sometimes there is nothing wrong with the cake, sometimes it is the decorator's fingers that must be broken. 
35. Every paradise has its subtle gate which opens onto devastation. 
36. I make my art on my knees, like a penitent, or like one who is digging with their hands for buried treasure. 
37. Art makes inauthenticity unbearable. And so, there are few artists, and even fewer people, who are willing to make room in their lives for art. 
38. An experience of art (especially when it is an experience of making art) is, at its most profound, a feeling of returning to a house that I recognize as my own, a house that was terribly damaged but has been miraculously repaired. 
39. Art is not a capitalist venture. The artist does not make objects for consumption. Art, as the adventure of a liberated humanity (Tzara), is a lifelong personal engagement with living. An artist can only be a dwelling into which all of life is admitted and the experience of such a being manifests itself unmistakably in a passionate, critical, resilient, and dedicated creativity. 
40. “Worth more than truth” – Nietzsche. 
41. Art attempts to achieve autonomy while at the same time exercising influence. Such an activity may be viewed as impossible. It may also be viewed as miraculous. 
42. Art presupposes the existence of a common ground, a public space where individual understanding, education, provocation, disturbance, etc. are possible. This common ground may be, in some cases, difficult to reach, but not impossible. (from Gasché in The Tain of the Mirror). 
43. We have art because we have walls. 
44. When I see an object of art I see an instance of creative activity. More specifically, I see a person creating something as opposed to using that time to do something, anything else. Most questions of aesthetics and most encounters with art seem to ignore this central, obvious fact. 
45. A work of art is evidence of a struggle to overcome, to resist, a disease… a radical threat. Eventually, after triumphs, advances and retreats, stalemates, the battle will be decisively lost. 
46. Happy people do not make art, they destroy art. 
47. Children can play house effectively because they are physically incapable of being husband and wife, of producing a child, etc. the same is true for those who play art— those child-curators and child-performers, and child-painters…incapability ensures their success. 
48. Most of our time is spent attempting to support and preserve what is least supportable in our living, and the least worth preserving. Fortunately, art exists to relieve us of this burden. 
49. “Art is the highest expression of an interior and unconscious arithmetic” – Leibniz. 
50. Art achieves a truth-value— all else is aesthetics.
53. Art gives lies something to wear, something to talk about, and something to care about— in other words, art makes lies, those inescapable lies, bearable. 
54. If science comes into being when the gods are not thought of as good (Nietzsche), then art comes into being when the good can no longer be thought. 
55. When encountering art the aesthetic judgment of one who has never created is often: “I could do that”. While this may be true their judgment is incomplete; what remains unspoken is: “… but I will never do it”. When encountering art the aesthetic judgment of one who is a creator is often: “I could never do that”; unspoken yet understood, the conclusion of their judgment is always: “… yet, I have tried”. 
56. To glimpse the difference between the creative act and art is a rare epiphany. To have worked to the point where one’s proper place resides in the creative act, as opposed to art, can only be compared to a visitation of grace— and in so doing one takes leave of the world. Consequently, the problem of how to communicate such creative achievements, or efforts, or failures, assumes its proper stature, accompanying one everywhere, a faithful and indefatigable companion. 
57. Art that is in the service of the world is a failed art. The allegiance of an artist, and therefore his art, is always elsewhere… that is, everywhere the world is not. 
59. Art is the protection and remedy required in order to endure a tragic insight (Nietzsche). 
60. “Les juste vacances d’irréalité” – Bachelard. 
61. Art, as Greenberg says, expands our possibility for experience. In this sense art is against all that diminishes our possibility for experience, which is, almost everything. 
62. Art is how we forget what we have never lived in order to live with what we should never have forgotten.
63. An artist is an endless interrogation of normality and of the normative. If society must always solve problems without solutions (Canguilhem), the artist, through creative activity, exposes such problems. It should be noted, and is not surprising, that such activity is rarely remunerative, and moreover, is often internalized as a punishable moral offense against society. 
65. «Un main tendu dans l’obscurité » – Kafka. 
66. «L’art est toujours l’affaire de la personnalité tout entière. C’est pourquoi il est, au fond, tragique » – Kafka. 
68. « La distance que le temps donne à la souffrance » – Camus. 
69. My interventions began by seeking to surmount the institutionalized voyeurism that accompanies the reception of a work of art. Instead of insisting and accepting the separation of a so-called public from the significant space of artistic creation I desired to provoke the implication of this public within such a space— we do not observe art, we are co-substantial with it. 
70. Art can massacrer les faits without any risk; science can do the same only by destroying its own foundations. 
71. Art is not an activity of constant progress, of avant-gardes pitted against reactionary impulses, but moments of lucidity and beauty that emerge, seemingly impossibly from the suffocating mass of academic peurility that embodies an ideology  whose aim is to negate every authentic creative effort.
72. Art, notably so-called contemporary art, is the savoir-faire de polluer l’air du temps. 
73. When I speak of bad art, I am not referring to aesthetics. 
74. “Une des fonctions de l’art est la relecture permanente de la réalité” – Giuseppe Pennone. 
75. If art is a question that seeks no answer  (R.G. Collingwood) then science is the comprehension of how a question and its answer are linked. Art then never abandons the question. 
76. L’art ephémère est un art en dehors de la logique de la consommation. 
77. I desire that my misstatements of truth are eloquent and coherent and possibly even beautiful. 
79. It is only by submitting to a constraint that one can explore the possibilities of free expression. 
80. Excepting those problems concerning art itself, art has never solved a problem and never will solve a problem. What art has done, and always will do, is to offer us the capacity to respond, in a truly human manner, to the problems that confront us. 
81. “In art it is difficult to say anything which is as good as saying nothing at all”. – Wittgenstein. 
83. For any visual art one must ask to what kind of space is it committed ? (Rothko) and then decide whether such a space is habitable or not.

art history: n; No artist has ever waited upon the pronouncements of a historian of art. Historians of art have always been, and will always be, exterior to artistic creation. However, the writings of artists are always possibly decisive for the creative activities of other artists for the reason that they are intimate witnesses to individual creative activity and any authority they may exert is earned, as opposed to the fictive posturing that supports the abstract judgments of the art historian.

art market: n; 2. An overlooked aspect of the parasitic phenomenon known as the art market is that, apart from the fact that everyone who profits from it is not the artist, if there is an artist who shares the profits the value of their work exists only because of the mass of work that has relatively low, or even no value— which represents the work of almost all artists.

art school: n; The proliferation of art schools is an example of the industrialization of knowledge, in the sense described by Proust: « une fois qu’une industrie les a vulgarisées l’art antérieur perd rétrospectivement un peu de son originalité ».

artist: n; 4. It is the artist's task to create arenas of ambiguity, that is, places where meaning must be negotiated. 
10. “No group of people lacks freedom more.” – A. Tarkovsky. 
11. The artist, not the functionary, has the responsibility not only of creating a new world, but of creating a world that can compete with contemporary worlds. This world must be inhabitable, in fact, that is its purpose — to be lived in. To achieve this the artist must get beyond the disparate production of objects and attempt to communicate a world. This communication of a world may be unavoidable; even the functionary who spends its time producing objects for consumption is communicating a world, the world of its owners, its masters. And that world, this world is barely inhabitable. 
12. The artist that claims  my art does not change the world is focused on something which yawns beyond their personal horizon. This distant attention necessarily implies that what is close-at-hand, intimate, is unnoticed, denied presence. 
13. To be a marginal artist is analogous to being a receptor on a cell. Such a being exists is two worlds. It communicates with the external world, it spans the border, and it transmits its interactions with the world to the inside of the cell. For such a marginal existence to function there must be a functioning cell, that is, there must be sufficient processes occurring in order that the cell remains viable. If the cell is dead, or dying, the receptor still exists but it does not function. And with loss of function eventually comes the loss of being. 
14. It is impossible for me to view my relation to life, to the conditions of existence, as anything other than adversarial. Life offers its surface, its appearance. But it is withholding everything that is interesting, everything that is desirable. Life must be forced to whisper its secrets, to relinquish its treasures. Sometimes the only way to force life to do such things is by refusing to accept what it would rather offer you. In other words, you must persist. 
15. The artist understands its task is to paint every home in its city with an eyelash for a brush. 
16. An artist differs from a scientist in the adherence to the dictum (in Nietzsche's words) where one can guess, one hates to calculate. 
17. An artist can progress, can be productive by subverting or rejecting its entire technical and paradigmatic foundations (regardless of whether these foundations themselves are productive). Conversely, the scientist's rejection of such foundations is unproductive and can only become productive after consistent failure makes such a rejection a necessity. 
18. The creative act occurs spontaneously, naturally, almost in spite of oneself. In other words, for a life to be devoid of creative acts such acts must be actively suppressed. If one can claim that they have truly not been suppressing such things then it can be said for certain that they have offered little or no resistance to those forces. For those people who have been conveniently suppressing such forces it is overwhelming for me to consider all the exertion and all the entanglements and elaborate constructions that a life must dedicate itself to in order to escape creativity. It seems it would be simpler to just make something. 
19. (Supposing an artist lives to the age of fifty) the difference between an artist and a non-artist with respect to dedication and sacrifice (to art) is at least six orders of magnitude. The artist could be thought of as megapublic, or the non-artist as microcreative. 
20. Something took hold of me, turned my head and forced me to look towards a horizon that was not initially apparent. A failing voice then whispered it is your turn. Walk and continue walking until you can walk no further. Someone will be waiting for you. You will instruct them as I have instructed you. 
21. Build a city and fill every room. Then build a stable, and a manger... a miracle might happen. 
22. Considering the enormity and intransigence of the world what can an artist do, what can an artist hope to achieve? Nietzsche has an answer— make the scales more delicate and hope for the assistance of favorable accidents. 
23. The artist is always a beginner… that is, beginning is the act which realizes art, which is art’s disclosure. 
24. “Something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage”. – E.M. Cioran. 
25. The artist, in its sublimity, tames the horrible (Nietzsche) and horrifies the tamed. 
26. If an artist is, as T.S Eliot says, “a continual extinction of personality”, then wherever one sees personality (ego) persisting it will be in the place of, and at the expense of, art. 
27. If I make nets out of broken glass what do I wish to catch? 
28. An artist makes a comment on nothing— the artist is the thing. 
29. People always wonder what an artist is searching for and rarely inquire as to what the artist has found. For an artist, the time spent searching is insignificant when compared with the time that is spent trying to figure out what to do with, or even how to bear, what has been discovered. 
30. “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but how it has managed to survive”. – Louise Bourgeois. 
31. It is not enough to struggle against something. One must struggle in spite of it. 
32. There comes a moment in the life of every artist when he understands that everything he has been involved with no longer has any relation to his life as an artist. It is difficult to proceed from such an insight, and almost impossible not to retreat into the morbid security of craft and technique. Nevertheless, for the artist, to proceed is the only course of action that leads to life. 
33. Failed art is a kind of private gossip (Kierkegaard) and a failed artist is one who has no respect for his essential silence. 
34. There are those who create the protections and remedies for the tragic insights of others, and those who create such things for their own tragic insights. 
35. To be an artist one has already succeeded. Therefore, there can be no such thing as a bad artist. Evidently so-called bad artists profit from being identified as an artist; however, since they are not artists they should be properly be referred to as not-yet-artists, or pre-artists. 
36. The artist uses everything that falls to the floor after Ockham’s razor has been used. 
37. Though we regularly pose problems that cannot be resolved, we cannot resolve problems that we cannot pose. Only the artist can resolve problems we cannot pose. 
38. The subjects on which science must remain silent are a part of an artist’s materials. 
39. “Une situation pénible pour un amoureux devient stimulante pour un artiste”- Odile Richard-Pauchet. 
40. Those who profess to love art will never love an artist. 
41. « L’artiste créera son propre monde intellectuel, son développement connaîtra des crises propres et spécifiques, sur lesquelles les crises sociales n’auront qu’une influence mineure sinon inexistante et la trajectoire de son évolution sera brusquement brisée et pleine de bouleversements fortuits. » - Karel Teige. 
42. You can never paint yourself into a corner if you paint with a sledgehammer. 
43. An artist sublimates a fraud. 
44. « Aujourd’hui des artistes véritables, d’une immense talent, vivent dans le quasi-anonymat, loin des salles de vente, des grandes collections d’avant-garde, des commandes publiques, parce l’art qu’ils pratiquent ne coche pas les cases de l’idéologie de l’art contemporain et de sa fausse histoire de l’art. » - Benjamin Oilvennes.
45. « L’artiste qui renonce à une heure de travail pour une heure de causerie avec un ami sait qu’il sacrifie une réalité pour quelque chose qui n’existe pas ». - M.Proust. 
46. For an artist the world is not a domain to be mastered but the experience of limitless possibilities for personal implication. 
47. If I have to be taught how to look at a work of art, either the artist has failed in its task, or the self-appointed guide does not want the artist to succeed. 
48. For an artist, if it is more difficult to destroy a work of art than it is to create one, there is a problem of priority. 
49. Being an artist is the moral, intellectual, and practical sketchbook that may lead to a certain mastery called being human. Unfortunately, many are content with technical mastery, which always fails to attain the level of human.
50. Never confuse the momentary appeasement of my hunger for latent gluttony. 
51. Art, being inherently free, is always menaced by its dependence on artists for its expression. Artists who, suspicious of freedom and, in order to obscure their fear of assuming its responsibilities, are always willing to submit to a patron, an authority, a master, and hence, betray the promise of freedom that art generously offers.
52. The artist knows that the tip of a finger is the most tenuous archive.

banality: n; 3. Art that is sublime leaves us speechless; art that is utterly empty renders us indifferent… and therefore, speechless. This failure to find words for empty art functions in its favour, since it resembles the speechlessness induced by sublimity. Consequently, and perversely, we try to speak about what is most profound, we stammer conscious incoherencies, if only to clarify that our experience is not to be confused with the banality, and moreover, that we prefer to profane our experience rather than let it be misregarded as a spectacle whose provocations can effect nothing more than indifference. 
5. Well-exectued banalities demand prizes, believing that an accolade is protection from oblivion, while forgetting that oblivion is the prima materia of banality.

baroque: n; The moment a curator determines the format for which art, as well as the expression of what art is possible, that is, the moment when the format exists a priori to art is the moment when art is defeated and where bureaucratic elaborations and baroque embellishments will emerge triumphant.

beauty: n; 2. The footsteps, the whispers, of a covert union of fact and value. 
3. Beauty asks me to leave what I should never have entered with the intention of remaining. 
4. “A gentle weariness of evening” –Nietzsche. 
6. When a person comes face to face with the beautiful they will state the obvious; when they come face to face with the hideous, the revolting, they will lie… or they will call it beautiful. 
10. If you wish to see beauty take the minutiae of your everyday life and hurl it into the fire. 
12. Is beauty realizable within a work of art, or is beauty something that must forever transcend art? This is the question to be asked of every artist. To refuse the imminence of beauty in art is the ultimate challenge and sacrifice demanded of an artist. Those who have, in their living and in their art, manifested such a refusal, understand that it is in the autonomy of beauty that our only hope resides. 
14. Any proposed formula for beauty is never beautiful. 
15. The embarrassing question of beauty in contemporary art is one that can be easily avoided when it is considered to be embarrassing, when it is accepted only as an alarm which signals the presence of naiveté or poor etiquette. However, when we remember, and when we have the honesty to admit that beauty possesses a moral dimension, then the avoidance of the question beauty imposes loses its innocence. 
16. The wounds that beauty suffers heal us. 
18. The fact that artists have always been poorly paid, and if well paid, often in spite of themselves, is a convincing argument for the incapacity of most people to not only sense beauty but to understand its relevance. 
19. “Une prommesse de bonheur” – Stendhal. 
20. Only when the appellation beauty is perceived as a provocation can one be certain to be in the  presence of authentic beauty. 
21. « Celui qui conserve la faculté de voir la beauté ne vieillit pas » - Kafka. 
22. Banal imitation, even kitsch, are not the fault of beauty, but of those who are unwilling to assume the exigencies that beauty imposes. 
23. To recognize something as beautiful, to assert that there is such a thing as beauty is to posit a moral order in the world itself, and moreover to accede to its authority. 
25. I have no response for one who puts into question the possibility, or even the validity, of beauty. Our words will never encounter one another, even if they occupy the same moment. And anything I do, or intend, will never disturb their stupor. 
26. A statue of the human figure is conventionally regarded as an ideal of beauty for the reason that no living being contains all aspects of form as perfect as that of a statue. This is a curious conception of beauty in that it eliminates a critical aspect from aesthetic consideration. When comparing a statue with a human being, even a child will acknowledge, without any effort, that the difference between the two is that one is alive and one is not. The conventional ideal of beauty considers life to be a detriment to beauty: beauty is form and form only. That life is inimical to the perfection required by beauty implies that being alive necessitates obligatory concessions to the timeless perfection of an ideal form. Why the specificity of such concessions, which are different for each living being, are not considered as possible instances of beauty is mysterious, and even troubling. 
27. To take the measure of aesthetic experience, to describe beauty, is to use concepts as one would use a net or a trap. Beauty is then something to be hunted and apprehended. But there is no net that can ever be fabricated, no matter how elegant the materials, for the reason that beauty lives untroubled in the space between all that is. 
29. What we refer to as beautiful is a phenomenon that makes evident the possibility of perceiving beauty as well as indicating a passage that leads towards it. The work of art in itself is not beautiful, but rather instrumental in that it opens a way towards beauty. This is analogous to how a poem is not poetry but rather a means of suggesting its possibility and indicating a decidedely human approach towards it. 
30. Beauty is a perception made possible by an arrangement of things and not the thing itself. The human capacity for such synthetic perception is what allows our existence to have an aesthetic dimension. 
31. “The beautiful is merely the beginning of the terrible” – Rilke. 
32. Beauty is always profoundly subversive if you dare to follow it home.

blind: adj; 3. A blind man can be prodigious with his descriptions of blue. One may even marvel at the poetic richness of his evocations. Nevertheless, none of them have anything to do with blue, only the idea of blue.

blue: adj; 2. Blue is the colour of absence. A bruise is a form of remembrance. 
3. When it is written that someone’s eyes are blue like the sea, I ask myself what sea is being referred to, and moreover, whether the author has ever truly seen the sea. The sea is not blue, but blues— an ever-changing chromatic play within and around the register of blue. And so, an author who compares eyes to the sea evidently disregards eyes in the same way as the sea. This is to say that the incessant transformation of the eye’s colour, which is but a sign of the dynamism and complexity of the human life that animates it, is equally disregarded. Knowing this I ask myself why proceed one word further after reading that eyes are blue like the sea, what could I expect to gain from one who has never seen the sea or an eye in any meaningful way? 
4. “The unreachable is always blue” – Clarice Lispector. 
5. “It is the blue that lasts” – V. Woolf.

cataclysm: n; Sometimes even the earth gets the urge to make a collage.

celebration: n; The genius is celebrated after his death because then no one has to speak to him, or, more specifically, answer him.

censure: n; “Censure of a picture lies psychologically much nearer praise of the picture than any other thought”- Eugen Bleuler.

chalk: n; When you are a child chalk circumscribes everything you need to know. As you get older all chalk does is delimit the playing field of some game or else, outlines a body that has lost its ability to live.

collage: n; 1. The primary tool of collage is also a favorite tool for suicide. 
5. The joy of collage is the same as that experienced when making art with your father's golf clubs. 
6. You cannot be tidy when you are doing collage. That is, collage must do more than blow in through an open door or window, rustling curtains and scattering things which are casually lying about. What is required is the type of wind that can pick locks, open cupboards, overturn bookshelves, and unfasten clothing... 
7. Collage is an apology for tearism.

colonization: n; 3. When I read, or hear someone mention contemporary art or art market, I hear the tractors and shovels of those who come to colonize crreativity.

constraint: n; 2. All forms of expression have formal constraints. The challenge in so-called free expression is to understand that the critical constraints are self-imposed and then to recognize what these constraints are.
6. Creative possibilities are immense, but not limitless. It is the specific constraints which characterize one creative effort from another. 
8. The liberating force of art resides within its productive constraints which are able to manifest, in all possible forms, that fact all is not possible and that there are limitations to human activity and ambition.

contemporary art: n; The term contemporary art conceals its violence and bad conscience within a seemingly innocent and inclusive adjective. Everyone who happens to be alive at the present moment and who is creating art is necessarily contemporary and in this way contemporary art purports universality. There is no other option. There is no possibility of non-contemporary art. And much as the attribution well-being is a marketing term for well-consuming, so contemporary art should be understood to be an aggressive euphemism for merchant art. This would relieve all those who are contemporary and yet are against the mercantilism that can infect artistic creation; as well, such creators will no longer be impelled to find excuses for recusing themselves from the vulgar excesses, adolescent indignations, embarrassing absurdities, and limitless banalities that comprise the uninhabitable empire of merchant art.

creation: n; 4. Purity is infertile. - G.Kunnert.
7. Creativity is only possible when one subjects oneself to a tyranny of arbitrary laws (Nietzsche). 
8. When I create I agree to carry this burden of beauty… further. 
9. « L’homme crée parce qu’il sait que sa création est mortelle. » - Clément Rosset. 
10. « On ne trouve pas la solitude, on la fait. » - Marguerite Duras. 
11. Those who do not experience the potential apocalyptic nature inherent in each moment live amongst ruins. Within such a context a creative life is then not an effort to repair the world, but rather to create it, and not once and for all, but every moment of one’s life, with futility as the only blueprint and desire and curiosity as the only necessary tools.

creativity: n; 1. Those who build on the flood plain often have to re-build. but that is a cost readily paid for fertility. 
2. Creativity always mocks one's training. 
3. “In the world one cannot create by obedience alone” – N. Berdyaev. 
5. The wells of superabundance can be plumbed only by patience. 
6. Creativity resides in the immediacy of irreconcilable levels of energy (Roger Sessions). 
7. The average is repulsive. 
8. Contemporary life is characterized by the uncontrollable proliferation of forces that are ignorant of their creative capabilities. 
9. “Ce pouvoir de defaire n’implique aucin pouvoir de faire.” – Diderot. 
11. The creative life is often viewed as a luxury, as something done only if one has the means, or the time, and certainly only if one is not burdened by more pressing matters. What is lost in this conception is that the creative life, as embodied by an artist, is the exemplary manifestation of what is precisely required in order to lead a truly human life. Such a life, which is the birthright of everyone, is not a luxury, requires no excessive means, is precisely what time is for, and encompasses all that is pressing, all that can not be avoided, or denied. Not everyone can be an artist, and not every artist is a model human being, but the dedication and perseverance that being an artist demands, at every moment, and the inspiration that can accompany such pursuits, is a possibility open to all, and always in a manner that is in accord with the realities of their condition. 
12. We never need to unleash our creativity because creativity is nothing to capture, or tame. Our creativity is not even ours. What we call our creativity is something we must encounter, respecting its otherness and refusing any urge to cage or domesticate it. 
13. Creativity is the opposite of dying. It is important not to confuse creating with producing, which is a form of resistance to the creative impulse, an active point of suspension between creativity and death.

curator: n; A curator is not a mirror, or a window, or a door, or a gate. Reflection and negotiation, admittance and refusal— these are not its concerns. A curator is a carpet rolled out from the art and into the public. As such it shows the way to art and offers itself as something to be walked on in order to reach art.

détournement: n; For Schopenhauer, art, when it expresses its full power, is able to détourne the world, to force the world to look at itself in a mirror and, coincidently, produce a representation, a record, of this détournement.

endurance: n; 3. A creative artist (and not simply a technically proficient artist) is an attempt to endure truth. It is also the only such attempt that has any chance of success.

engage: v; “I held my peace, and I will reproach myself for the rest of my life for my silence and my patience” - Diderot. This statement by an artist is a warning to everyone who wishes to create. Silence and patience are precisely what keep the amateur from becoming the engaged artist.

enlightenment: n; 3. The artist, the writer, understands at certain auspicious moments that a person is not born to die but to begin, again, and again, and again...

entertainment: n; 2. At the various banquets of life entertainers sit at the lowest table, with the animals, eating, grovelling, and quarrelling. 
3. I refuse to aid in the erection of the mystical scaffolds of acceptable social derangement.

ephemeral: adj; 1. Achievements which resist time’s effacements often have failed to achieve what is most important. 
2. It is a curious and possibly abysmal thought that all we consider solid, permanent, is composed of unstable, ephemeral elements. 
3. An encounter with ephemeral art leads us to consider what in our lives could be considered enduring. 
4. Ephemeral art is homage to spontaneity, which is a necessity for any free act.

exhibition: n; The all too common experience of a contemporary exhibition, one that has more to do with exhibitionism than with art. Apart from thinking about all that has been lost, ignored, rejected, in the singular pursuit for personal prestige I also cannot ignore the industry required to promote such hermeticism. Voluminous obscurities facilitated by pseudo-intellectualizations. The honest yet disavowed desire to communicate nothing more than coherent self-promotion. When publicity is mirrored with publicity creativity will always be excluded from such a funhouse.

failure: n; 13. If all art can be said to be a particular aesthetic reconciliation with the tragedy of existence, then all art must ultimately be failure. As an artist one is responsible only for the magnitude of one’s inevitable failure.
14. Failure is a necessary element of all experimentation. And without experimentation there is no progress, either scientific, artistic, or intellectual. Failure is intimate with creativity and their union is fecund.

fool: n; The crowd (in French).

generosity: n; 1. The creative act is an act of generosity. Art that fails does so not because of aesthetic reasons, which are secondary, but because of a lack of generosity. This is not to say that art cannot be demanding, but that its demands must be welcomed as gifts. 
2. An artist creates something that he will never be able to experience in the same way as those to which he has offered his work— it is for this reason that there is no art without generosity. 
5. An advantage of being an artist, that is, being one who necessarily frequents précarité in all of its possible manifestations, is that one is susceptible to encounters with generosity. This is something which is commonly forgotten by artists, and which is entirely foreign to those who are not artists.

genius: n; 3. People are always far more eager to proclaim genius than they are to encounter it. 
4. Those artists in the past and are called genius, or innovators, are always attributed with accomplishing something which was ahead of its time. In other words, their achievement was beyond that which was possible for the rest of their contemporaries. The truth is something different. To those credited with genius there is a clear sense of the obvious, of something that must be done but which is not being done— and so the genius does it. Quite the opposite to being ahead of their time they are instead filling an absence in their time, completing their time— a courageous act and one which is often unrecognizable. 
6. What we call genius seemingly creates an answer to a question which no one ever asked. It would not be incorrect to say that this question is created at the same as its answer; yet, it is the answer that is regarded as the creative legacy. Over time this answer may become inadequate, so inadequate that it expires, leaving only its corresponding question behind. This question then proclaims itself; from where there was once an infinite silence a call now issues— and this is the true legacy. An original answer is only ever a provisional creation whose function is to coax its question out of hiding. 
8. If solitary genius is not content to manifest as personal tragedy it will do so as a collective nightmare. 
9. True genius is entirely conscious of the limits of any preferred hypotheses, and thus will refrain from exaggerating the general applicability of such hypotheses.

graffiti: n; 1. Graffiti, at its best, says, someone was here. This is the most it can express, and, in some contexts, this is a significant achievement. Unfortunately, most of the time, graffiti says, a fourteen year-old boy was here. 
2. In graffiti that fails to rise above vandalism, as in all forms of cultural expression that, in order to profit from their particular manifestations of so-called creative autism, offer themselves as vassals, or whores, to the dictature of pragmatism, one can hear the neurotic stammer, I have given up once and for all any striving to understand (P. Sloterdijk). 
3. The graffiti artist does not see the wall as a wall… he either does not accept, or is unable to experience, its materiality. He conceives only its function and socio-economic value.

hollywood: n; 1. “In the absolutist state, the producers of mimetic worlds are overseers of symbolic power; their essential concern is to produce the portrait of the king.” - Gunther Gebauer / Christoph Wulf from Mimesis. 
2. When all other forms of takeover have failed or have proven to be too costly, when something or someone resists appropriation ... just film it — the subject is then immediately emptied of consequence. 
3. Shooting a film must be like shooting a turkey because after consuming one you have an overwhelming urge to sleep. 
6. Those that make art do not have test screenings. 
7. “So the exhausted aristocracy laughs at its own ideal. Having dressed and painted their passionate dream of a beautiful life with all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and molded it into a plastic form, they then pondered and realized that life was really not so beautiful— and then laughed.” - J. Huizinga from Autumn of the Middle Ages. 
8. A limited male fantasy. 
9. Preparations for a blind obedience to force. 
12. Hollywood is a technicolour curtain which effectively isolates an individual from reality, ensuring that they remain in the gruesome quiet of an imaginary world. (H. Arendt). 
13. There is no way to redeem those who are willing to stand in line for the chance to pay for their own torture. 
14. A machine designed to instantaneously transport a person as far from the avant-garde as possible. 
17. “A catastrophic lack of imagination” – M. Horkheimer.

image: n; 6. « Quelle vanité que la peinture, qui attire l’admiration par la ressemblance des choses dont on n’admire point les originaux. » - Pascal.

imagination: n; 6. “The imagination often completes its work by disguising its own activity” - Elaine Scarry.
9. “The exact science of possible solutions”. – Raoul Vaneigem. 
10. « L’imagination n’est pas l’effet d’une déteinte du corps sur l’esprit, mais l’effet d’une provocation du corps de la part de l’esprit » - Clément Rosset. 
11. The imagination can never be a solid foundation for happiness. In fact, excessive dependence upon our imagination is a guarantee for not only personal suffering, but that of others.

impermanence: n; Impermanence should be invigorating. It is invigorating— for those who are alive. For the dead these invigorations settle upon them as mockeries, not out of resentment or ill-will, but because that is how the miraculous expresses its indifference.

incompletion: n; All great artists leave their greatest work unfinished (e.g. Dostoyevsky and The Brothers Karamazov). Death calls them away on urgent business. And this is how it should be. Somehow the phenomenon of necessary incompletion alleviates some of the unbearability of existence. Without such a phenomenon I would be skeptical as to the reality of existence— it would all seem too perfect, and therefore, a charade. This inability to complete the most important task of one’s creative life also serves the purpose of ensuring that no one is going to achieve it for you, that it is a task you must embark upon yourself. And who knows, your progress, if such a thing can be claimed for he infinitesimal steps humans make along the ultimate paths, may be critical steps for another who is struggling, or has struggled, or will be struggling along one of these paths.

indifference: n; 1. “Great art is incompatible with indifference, incoherence, or outright neglect” – Emita Hill.

isolation: n; 1. I am never so far away from others as when I am in their company. 
5. Nothing of any value has ever issued from a forest, or a mountain top, or a desert. An isolated life is mind that has lost its way… everything it expresses is an attempt to ask directions. 
6. “The object of isolation should be communion and reunion” – A. Herzen.

laxative: n; Art can be nourishment, entertainment cannot. After being entertained you must always wipe your ass.

link: v; 1. If it is true, as A. Kiefer insists, that an artist is one who makes links between as many things as possible, it is also true that an artist must try to link what is incompatible, since it is only by failing to establish such a link that one can recognize what is truly incompatible. It is in this manner that an artist’s so-called failure may be a success.

malevolence: n; To envision one’s life as a rampart against a malevolent divinity is the necessary basis for every profound creative achievement.

manifesto: n 3. I do not wish to raise the applauded monument but rather to divine devastating futilities. 
4. It is easier to destroy what I have made than it is to be completely ignored.

margin: n; 2. Marginality is a critical station for an artist. It is ambiguous; it is where living stops and it is where living is stabilized. Nothing is in itself marginal, the margin is a moorage. Failure often regresses into an identification with marginality. In such a case the anchor must be lifted and the expanse of living must once again be tested, explored. 
4. An artist who has the privilege of issuing from the periphery of canonized culture, and who does not assume this privilege, will be condemned to the production of marginal works.

market: n; 1. A life worth living must be purchased. It costs exactly one life. 2. “The computation of dust” – Nelly Sachs.

marvel: n; « Parfois les heures les plus obscures deviennent les merveilles suspendues de toute une vie ». – J. White.

material: n; By concerning myself with the material of everyday life, by touching and even holding it, I annul the anecdotic and I help ensure that time will not lose itself in the abyss that lurks within every moment.

melancholy: n; 3. Melancholy is where pleasure reclines, closes its eyes and imagines a better life. 
4. The problem with melancholy is the unmanageability of its elation. 
5. 
6. Melancholy is incurable because it is not an illness. In fact, melancholy is, if not a cure, a temporary palliative for the fatal insult of existence. 
7. Melancholy is the purest expression of individual resistance and the possibility of revolution. 
9. Perhaps the melancholy that is at the root of our existence is a consequence of the fact that our soul was made to love (Plutarch) yet all that exists was not made to be loved. 
10. Melancholy establishes itself in la fragilité du tout (Jaccottet). 
11. Melancholy is the poetry of happiness. 
12. Every true melancholic is an optimist because every optimist is fundamentally melancholic.

modern: adj; 3. The assumption that modern art is alienating, that the general public has no attachment with modern art seems to presume that this general public is inviolable, perfect— if there is any problem it is due somehow to modern art. Of course it is this presumption which is the problem. The general public is in fact completely guilty of refusing to encounter the experiences and the (often unanswerable) questions that modern art presents in all their complexity and ambiguity. Artists have always been working; their half of the social contract has always been honored. The public at large (and the powers which represent it and speak for it) cannot say the same thing. 
4. A good way to integrate modern art with modern life is to make art yourself.

negation: n; 4. Presuming we have the ability to see, darkness is the only thing that makes it possible for us to see the stars. 
5. As we all know, once you have said no twice in succession, you have said yes. 
9. No is the only positive response to a negative proposition. 
10. “Every critical examination involves negation” - H. Arendt. 

negligence: n; Every creative act is also an act of radical negligence.

nobility: n; 1. Art does not ennoble us. Those moments when we feel we have been made better by art are those moments we have discovered a latent nobility in ourselves. Art may provide the occasion for this discovery but it effects nothing of itself. Perhaps it is making art which is decisive. Certainly, making art is an entirely different matter than being a spectator. Then again, it is not the making of art which ennobles us, but how we proceed in our making. And this is also true for the making or doing of many things.

noise: n; 1. When Jaccottet left Paris and its incredible concentration of literary activity he said it was because there was trop de bruit. By this he meant, apart from expressing a poignant tribute to Mandelstam, was that the possibility of living in the presence of poetry, which was what he desired, was impossible amidst the deafening seething of literary striving which aimed only to establish and consolidate careers. Though the voice of poetry can live in any environment, there are few in which it can be heard. And to be a poet means one must seek out such places, inhabit them, call them home. 
2. Commentators have always had their role, which is primarily to amplify certain voices (often at the expense of others), and in so doing eventually achieve nothing more than adding to the bruit du temps. Opposed to such cacophonists I have always sided with the quietists, that is, those who, through creating, secure their escape from the insufferable bruit du temps and in so doing reveal to others a path to follow. 
3. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of coure, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be particularly painful.” - Schopenhauer.

obscurity: n; 7. “Literate humanity is solicited daily by milIions of words, printed, broadcast, screened, about books which it will never open, music it will not hear, works of art it will never set eyes on.” – George Steiner.

opus: n; 1. The great work creates its own relevance and its own irrelevance. In other words, its cultural station is ambiguous. A work which is unique, that is, one which has no frames of reference in its own culture has no value in that culture. Only by inspiring works in response and critical works can value be achieved (in an apparently self-instigating manner). It is important to understand that the forces which were mobilized to respond creatively and critically and therefore establish value are culture. If these forces do not mobilize then the native irrelevance of the work will be maintained (apparently effortlessly).
2. Any human who uses the word opus seriously when speaking of something they have achieved cannot be taken seriously.

painting: n; 2. “A bachelor machine” - R. Krauss. 
3. “The nail is the undoer of painting” – Picasso.

pastoralism: n; I am nature and nature will have nothing to do with me.

performance: n; 2. The performer (and the performance) is hyperbolic. It is a purposely exaggerated expression of the so-called normal lives that everyone else exhibits day after night after day. 
3. A performance is a thorn-covered husk which surrounds a delicious, intoxicating, magical, and somewhat dangerous fruit. The husk functions to irritate and repel those who do not know that there is a fruit within. It is these people, always the majority of an audience (sometimes the entire audience) who would never recognize this fruit even if it where placed on their tongue; yet, they believe emphatically that they know the nature of this fruit, that they have tasted it and learned some of its mystery. They are mistaken of course. All they know is its name: poetry. 
4. A performance is an attempt to evoke sympathy with the creative act. 
5. Beauty depends on words— not for its existence, but for comfort and support after its performance.

permission: n; 1. An artist must always exist separated from permission. 
3. An encounter with beauty is as close as one can come to receiving permission to be.

photography: n; 1. “The trophy of reality”- R. Krauss. 
4. There will come a day when the world will look back with incomprehension at an era in which so many photographs were produced. They will wonder not only at the enormous quantity of photographs, but why people would even want to take them. This day has already come for some people; however, their incomprehension, in all its forms, will never be photographed. 
5. The so-called objectivity of photography, with its convincing moral arguments, constrains the photographer from becoming an artist— that is, from daring to be unapologetically subjective, to produce a photograph that may not respect the subject of the photograph, nor admit the validity of  community standards. If photography is to exist beyond its moment of childhood glory, it must cease asking permission… it must cease being a child. 
6. That photography makes it easier to say nothing is the strongest argument for avoiding photography at all costs.

pillow: n; I don't necessarily want to take away the pillow that others may use for comfort. I just don't want to be that pillow.

play: n; 4. “In the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible” – J.Huizinga. 
5. Art is not a means of ascertaining what is true; it is rather how we play with truth.

posthumous: n; The dissatisfaction, or sadness we feel when we read a posthumous, or unfinished work is misplaced. We assume that all that precedes a posthumous work is complete. But this is never truly the case. Every work, even the most perfect is an approximation, is inachevé.

prize: n; 1. Prizes are for those who give them, and they are accepted and cherished by those who forget precisely this. 
2. Prizes are for those unable to assess value and as such is a recognition not of value, but merely its absence.

prodigy: n; A child prodigy should be forced to perform (whatever it is it excels at) in a home for the aged until it either stops of its own accord (because it has come to understand how obscene its actions are), or until it is killed.

production: n; 1. “Whether we like it or not the artist, simply by producing art objects, is both accepting the commercial aesthetic and reinforcing the power structure.” - Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory.

proficiency: n; When one considers the enormous number of people making music, making art, and writing books, it is curious that there is so little great music, or art, that is created, or so few great books that are written. Apart from indicating the difficulty of realizing such works, it also exposes a general incapacity of human beings for achieving great creative work. Proficiency, as the greatest expectation, is a weak apology for this fatal shortcoming.

promotion: n; It is always easier to promote nothing.

provocation: n; 4. “Truth must be provoked”. – Papini.
5. Poetry is disaster is a provocation for all artists to at least considering opening the door to their creativity and welcoming a possible encounter with the public, at any moment. The artist that refuses such a thing more than likely has less sincere respect for their own work than is creatively healthy, as well has lacking all confidence in its relevance for the world that is, or will be.

public: n; 1. The public is, fortunately or unfortunately, the only place where subjective claims can be validated. 
4. Without a secured public space in which the creations of an artist can appear, every artist will eventually be crushed and suffocated by the private accumulations of his labour. To destroy an artist it is enough to allow him to work and to create, thereby appearing liberal and supportive, while at the same time denying him the effective public space in which his work must realize itself. 
5. “More and more individuals, owing to there bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all— in order to become the public. (Kierkegaard). 
6. A component of the strategy for the atomization of society is to create confusion as to what constitutes public space in order to ensure that people never participate in such spaces.

public art: n; 1. Public art is not about filling space with objects. It is not even about filling space with ideas. Public art is the process of opening, revealing, the (boundless) space which exists between people, a space which can exist anywhere there are people and a space which most people do not inhabit— not because they are not interested but because they are unaware of its existence. 
2. Often the worst thing about public art is not the art. 
3. Public art and the entailed negotiation of public space are not inseparable from the fact that problems are not private property (Mary Midgley).
4. Often the best thing about public art is not the art.

rare: adj; « Rien est plus rare à trouver qu’une artiste » - Jean Clair.

realism: n; 1. The work of any realist expression is nothing more than piling sandbags one after another in hopes that the flooding of the river-of-how-things-actually-are does not affect them. In other words, they do not want to experience the sur-reality of this river. 
3. To insist that is how things truly are is tautological. Things are always how they truly are and cannot be any other way. Realism, in this sense, is an admission of a definitive lack of artistic talent. 
4. “Realism is based on the grandest foundation a philosophy can have, namely human stupidity.” – R.G. Collingwood.

rejection: n; 1. Rejection does not mean censorship, it means rejection. 
2. Any form of acceptance which requires payment, or some form of demonstration of worth or commensurability, or any obsequious display before a traditional or presumed authority, is in fact a rejection.

resentment: n; 1. An artist who claims that beauty, or the search for beauty, is evidence of bad taste, is an artist who has no access to beauty, and who would probably not be able to shoulder the encounter.

resistance: n; 4. There comes a moment in the decline of a culture when a creative individual must decide whether to participate in the decline, or resist. Resistance is more complicated than is often thought. Every moment of one’s life, replete with its seductive degradations, offers paths of false resistance and pseudo-rebellions that serve only to subvert authentic resistance. For example, during a period when the primary capabilities of literacy and reflection have been thoroughly degraded, a creative being must maintain such capabilities with humility… even though he may be the only person who possesses such abilities. In such a case it is tempting to adopt a sense of superiority. However, whereas humility professes confidence in civic bonds, the assumption of superiority denies and dissolves such relations and thus is in the service of degradation. 
10. The artist’s most difficult challenge is to resist the temptations offered by the imagination to imprison reality; such resistance demands the courage to respect what is and to create in the fullness, be it hostile or welcoming, of its presence.
12. I have always considered the dedicated activity of an artist to be, not an escape, or a form of therapy, but a form of resistance. In this sense resistance is precisely contrary to escape or therapy; however, if one considers human alienation as something to escape from, and its nefarious effects something that require therapeutic efforts to resolve, then by personally engaging with the world in the form of resistance would be a means of escaping alienation, as well as possibly being therapeutic. Of course, my claim may simply be a self-serving justification which I can never definitively prove to be true All I can do, within this creative life, is to persist, to resist.

respect: n; 1. That which resists representation, that which refuses to submit to the expressible— it is this that must be sought, that must be fought for, because it is only that which has the strength to resist such temptations to exist that is deserving of our respect and fidelity. 
2. The poet, or the artist, who is not prepared to exist in the shadow of his work, apart from not respecting his own work, is unwilling to allow it to speak, most likely for fear of embarrassment.

rest: n; 1. “Where rest is forbidden, so is beauty”.- J. Ruskin.

romanticism: n; 2. My departure from romanticism began with the understanding that any belief that one can recede from the world into some interiority is delusional. Such a retreat always leaves behind a residue which wordlessly assents to (and at the very least offering no resistance to) the reality which was wrongly believed to have been abandoned. 
4. The strengths of romanticism are its failures— its inability to solve or to heal the abysmal situation of the subject.

Rousseau: n; 5. “I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit because I made you strong enough not to fall in”. 
6. “La cœur sait parler au cœur”.

street art: n; The infantilisation of culture as a moral imperative.

studio: n; 1. The studio is a retreat in the military sense of the term. In this sense there is also the possibility that the battle is not over, that a position of strength (a stronghold) is being returned to perhaps to consolidate resources, to rest, to strategize and then to attack once more. 
2. If active, profound, and consistent resistance is not evident in an artist’s studio, then such a studio is a space that enables collaboration— that is, a space that cannot be trusted when critical matters are in question. 
3. A studio is not only the externalization and manifestation of internal contradictions, but also of internal  coherence.

submission: n; 1. A creative life is a rejection of every form of submission to the dictature of incomprehension. 
2 Every artist will eventually reach the point in their development where they will have to choose, definitively, between hunger and submission.

surrealism: n; 6. When Dadaism is drained of its moral intensity and coherent radicalism and then combined with a Romanticism voided of its menacing utopian ambivalence, and poetry of desperation, we arrive at the adolescent amusements called Surrealism. 
7. The recipe for surrealism is as follows: Add one part Dada to one hundred parts Freud. As an emetic this mixture works best if one can speak French. As a soporific the mixture works best in adolescence. 
8. Dada took a moral and aesthetic vacation in France which became permanent.

talent: n; 2. It is not the lack of talent that is blameworthy, but rather the dedicated pursuit and exploitation of one’s lack of talent— in the name of a career— that is damnable. 
3. Talent is not a pardon from hard work, but its guarantee. 

taste: n; When a so-called epicurean offers a compliment he is only complimenting his own good taste.

tearist: n; Collage is an act of tearism.

technique: n; Never let technique get in the way of art. Sometimes the work of a technical master which has attained the realm of art beguiles us into believing that art is attainable only through technical virtuosity. The truth is that for one who has reached a technical pinnacle the only place left to go besides an exquisitely rendered banality is art.

tend: v; The artist can stably maintain a relationship to things that the general population cannot. For the artist creativity and its expression is a part of this ability and is, in fact, normal. For the general population their inability is abnormal and can only express itself in neuroses, psychoses, and all forms of aberrant and asocial behaviors. What could be the value of this ability of the artist? The artist can exist on the margins and of course, the margin is where art is. At the margins all sorts of things grow: horrific and beautiful, intoxicating and poisonous. The artist tends all these plants ensuring that they remain in their natural habitat on the margins. The characteristic of these marginal plants is that they are extremely potent. The mass of humanity has no defense against their effects regardless of whether they are beneficial or harmful. Keeping the plants at the margins will result in people having to make an effort to encounter them and in so doing will recognize the special status of such plants, regarding them with caution, respect, perhaps even reverence. Also, people will understand that when they have encountered such a plant it means they have come to their margin, to that place where they end and all else begins.

time: n; 12. A painting, as a work of art, has its own time. However, in relation to our personal time, it is eternal. That is, in the presence of a painting we are confronted with a time-scale that radically surpasses our own, one that that is truly inhuman. Even the most generous of paintings, in admitting us into its reality, nevertheless seems always to withhold something. It is present in a way we can never be. It partakes of the eternal directly— something which is for us impossible. And so, in the presence of a painting we can never relinquish our sense of insufficiency in regards to the eternal. No matter how long we remain in contemplation before a painting, we must always leave. A painting is never moved by our fleeting encounter. Video or film, that is, a work which is to be regarded as a sequence of images also has its own time. However, its scale is not eternal, but rather in a range that approaches that of our own. At the extreme end of the continuum, television and conventional cinema, the time-frame corresponds exactly to our own. We can enter such worlds freely and rarely notice our passage back and forth. And it is precisely because our admittance to such televised and cinematic worlds is trivial one can say that such creations cannot justifiably claim to be art. For this claim to be valid the time of the work in question must be sufficiently different from our own. We must depart from our personal time, either willingly or unwillingly, and must adapt to the scale which the work in question offers. The time could be radically condensed (think of an entire film viewed in one minute), or radically extended (The Quintet of the Astonished, by Bill Viola). The aesthetic and moral force of the work depends not only on our taking leave of ourselves, of our time, of our moment,  but also on our eventual return.
15. An artist, a writer, does not speak about his time, or in response to his time, but in spite of it. And this becomes all the more evident when the time that must be endured is unbearable. 
16. « La fuite du temps est aussi sa lumière ». – P. Jaccottet.

touch: v; A creative life is lived through the hands. In fact, it is not a person’s face which most completely reveals their character, but their hands. In compiling an inventory of all that a person has touched, all they have fabricated, all they have caressed, or slapped, all they have carried or dropped… we would surely render their character with the greatest precision. We are what we have touched, and what we may become depends not only on what we have touched, but on all that we might touch, but will not… on all that we desire to touch, but never will.

utopia: n; 4. You cannot build heaven when you are doing commerce with hell. On the other hand, hell can be erected anytime, anywhere. 5. Every utopia is serviced by delusional plumbing. 
9. In a coherent culture an artist would be able to work and its work would be able to find something pre-existent which would receive it and enable it to live. Ignoring the fact that utopias are impossibilities, their value resides in their ability to clarify the conditions of living as they truly exist. And so, the situation for an artist remains such that not only must work be created but a place must be prepared for the reception of this work— context, critical space, precedents, etc. in short, an artist must first create the world in which its work can exist. The absurdity of such a situation should be obvious, as should its pointlessness. 
14. “Art anticipates utopia”. – Raymond Tallis.

value: n; 1. “What is of value to us alone has no value”- Valéry.
16. « Toute valeur profonde n’est grande que par sa précarité. » - Jean Starobinski.

vanguard: n; An artist is never ahead of their time— it is only that most people take very small steps, and almost always to the side.

yellow: n; Looking at a painting by Tal Coat that is entirely yellow I did not experiencethe intense physical aversion that I normally feel when I encounter yellow in a work. In fact I found the painting engaging and enjoyable to look at. What this taught me is that my aversion for yellow is only active when yellow is in combination with other colours (in Van Gogh for example).

zzzzz...: ?; 3. No is the only frontier. 
4. The last words of the Notebooks of Paul Valéry: “After all, I did what I could”.

I was interrogated about the price of certain of my works. In particular, it was Venellations which was provocative. Venellations are shadow boxes in which a strand of cymbalaria, which grows on the walls of the venelles in Morlaix, is hung on a series of arranged entomology pins and allowed to dry, and age, naturally in its frame. The artist who confronted me confided that she also framed dried flowers but considered my prices outrageous. Such a response is indicative of one who confuses an object with a creative work. The essential difference resides in the continuity and coherence of an artistic engagement which informs the work and which is included in its value; conversely, an object, no matter how expensive the materials or how well fabricated it is, has a value that rarely exceeds that of the materials required for its realization. Venellations is one of numerous categories of creative possibilities that comprise my artistic work and has developed as a direct response to my daily experiences in Morlaix. It has a necessary relation to previous successful and failed creative efforts, as well as a possible relation to future efforts. Embedded as it therefore in decades of creative activity, its value, crudely translated into a price, will acknowledge this. I then responded to the artist that I also sell them at that price, which is its own justification.

On m’a interrogé sur le prix de certaines de mes œuvres. C’est notamment « Venellations » qui a suscité la polémique. Les « Venellations » sont des boîtes-cadres dans lesquelles une branche de cymbalaria, qui pousse sur les murs des venelles de Morlaix, est suspendue à une série d’épingles d’entomologie disposées de manière ordonnée, puis laissée à sécher et à vieillir naturellement dans son cadre. L’artiste qui m’a interpellée m’a confié qu’elle encadrait elle aussi des fleurs séchées, mais qu’elle trouvait mes prix exorbitants. Une telle réaction est révélatrice d’une personne qui confond un objet et une œuvre créative. La différence essentielle réside dans la continuité et la cohérence d’un engagement artistique qui imprègne l’œuvre et qui fait partie intégrante de sa valeur ; à l’inverse, un objet, aussi coûteux que soient ses matériaux ou aussi bien fabriqué soit-il, a une valeur qui dépasse rarement celle des matériaux nécessaires à sa réalisation. Les « Venellations » constituent l’une des nombreuses catégories de possibilités créatives qui composent mon travail artistique et se sont développées en réponse directe à mes expériences quotidiennes à Morlaix. Elles entretiennent un lien indissociable avec mes efforts créatifs passés, qu’ils aient été couronnés de succès ou qu’ils aient échoué, ainsi qu’un lien potentiel avec mes efforts futurs. Ancrée ainsi dans des décennies d’activité créative, sa valeur, grossièrement traduite en prix, en tiendra compte. J'ai alors répondu à l'artiste que je les vendais moi aussi à ce prix-là, ce qui justifie en soi cette pratique.

I have chosen the following two citations from this article only because it is clearly written and is representative of a flourishing tendency of presumed critical thinking that is a prisoner within its own academic and corporate world-view. 
It should be remembered that so-called criticism which is only permissible criticism is always a form of applause, even if it always also requires a permanent readiness for genuflection.

"To evaluate an artist properly, one must understand their institutional standing, critical reception, peer assessment, collectors’ network, secondary market, future commitments, and, of course, the quality of the oeuvre itself." - M.Gnyp

Interestingly, the most important aspect of evaluation is the last one the list (quality of the work), and nowhere is the moral aspect of the artist and its work addressed. Importantly, all the criteria for the evaluation of an artist, except for the quality of the work, are contingent upon the artist participating in these categories. In such an evaluative fantasy only those who can be evaluated according to the criteria exist as artists. The cultural effacement exercised in this way is not innocent, nor accidental. The contemporary academic (and hence corporate) interests which produce a global crop of curators, theorists, and cultural studies and critical thinking scholars, not to mention artists, belong to the same world as the so-called market and none of them desire to leave it, nor have their domain of comfort or influence proscribed. Their domain is a gated community where, just as anything that cannot be inserted into an accounting ledger has no monetary value (e.g. obligations of child-rearing), anything that cannot be evaluated by their criteria has no cultural or aesthetic value. As anyone who has tried to live a human life immediately understands, an accounting ledger cannot encompass the value of human experience; in the same way, the imposed evaluative criteria in no way approach either the immensity, or the intimacy, of human creative achievements.

People circle the wagons when the battle has already been lost. The decisive moment in this battle came in the 1980's with the invention of a diploma for cultural foot soldiers that could be used in the defense of neo-liberal advances into art. These soldiers have been listed above, and include academic artists (a term that has always been pejorative). As such, it should come as no surprise that when the battle has been lost those who remain will defend the indefensible.

“A great deal of exceptional art continues to be made, and the gallery system has, thus far, provided the strongest framework for co-creating and sustaining value.” – M. Gnyp

Is this a qualitative or quantitative conclusion? If it is the latter measurement is required, specifically measurements which can be compared with other means or systems. Because such data does not exist the answer is that the conclusion is qualitative. As such it is a form of circular reasoning since it is precisely the conclusion presumed by the products and defenders of the gallery system. Additionally, the rhetorical slide from arbitrary imposition of value to co-creator of value, besides being insincere, is also insulting and dismissive to anyone who creates, as it equates market manipulations and the values obtained with values that emerge from dedicated human creativity.

As I mentioned above, I have chosen the following two citations from this article only because it is clearly written and is representative of a flourishing tendency of presumed critical thinking that is a prisoner within its own academic and corporate world-view. Apparently it has been forgotten that because the walls have been freshly painted and priceless art hangs from them does not mean they do constitute a prison.

It is often proposed that a non-figurative artist renounces the tangible and descends into himself, preferring his inner fantasies to so-called external reality. However, it is a strict fidelity to the so-called real, to life as it is lived, that enables such an artist to dispose of models, of subjects demanding representation. Instead, the life that has been lived, touched, tasted, heard, remembered… passes through the artist and appears, on the other side, as art.

“In the dark ambiguities of time we need finesse, not geometry, to find some stumbling way”.
William Desmond (Murdering Sleep, in The Tragic Discourse ed. R. Fotiade).

Un tableau conduit harmoniquement consiste en une série de tableaux superposés, chaque nouvelle couche donnant au rêve plus de réalitié et le faisant monter d'un degré vers la perfection. 
Baudelaire (Salon de 1859).

Beuys: n; The pinnacle of art is life.

Bellmer: n; 1. The body is like a sentence which invites dissection in order that its true meaning be reconstituted in an endless series of anagrams. 
2. Roses au coeur violet (roses with violet hearts); o, rire sous le couteau (o, laughter under the knife). 
3. By following the order of living, that simple and precise line, one can very quickly and without any crisis find oneself in chaos. 
4. Bellmer's dolls and drawings are embodiments of an experience of doubleness. This doubleness is ambiguity as a lived event, as an in/de-forming reality. What we call ambiguity is only what we remember of such moments of doubleness.

Borduas: n; “I plunge into obscurity with a quiet heart”.

Fini: n; “In order to have children, a humility nearly inconceivable in the modern world, a brutalized passivity or a mad pretension...”.

Fondane: n ; 1. “Il n’ y a pas assez de réel pour ma soif”. 
2. “Absurdity precedes evidence, caprice precedes the principal of contradiction, and freedom is born before necessity”.

Goethe: n; 1. “You must do some degree of violence to your self in order to get out of the idea.” 
2. « Le plus beau bonheur de l’homme qui pense, c’est d’avoir exploré l’explorable et de venérér calmement l’inexplorable ».

Haacke: n; The term culture camouflages the social and political consequences resulting from the industrial distribution of consciousness.

Kierkegaard: n; 2. “His lips smile at a world that misunderstands him”. 
3. “You can approach the essential only by doing it”.

Leopardi: n; 1. “The surest means of concealing the limits of our knowledge is to never surpass them.” – 
Leopardi.

Mandelstam: n; “It is easier to save a manuscript than a man”.

Nietzsche: n; 3. Hell is a place where you can find the materials needed to build your heaven; in fact, it is the only place where these things can be found. 

Porchia: n; 1. He who has made a thousand things and he who has made none, both feel the same desire: to make something. 
2. My truths do not last long in me. Not as long as those that are not mine.

Tinguely: n; “The artists still making art in the future will either be fantastic artists or they will be decorators.”

Twombly: n; The ambiguous phenomenon of words becoming figures, or figures becoming words… in either case it is not evident whether such a transformation is generative, reductive, or conservative.

“Art veut la discours de la science comme compensation pour sa perte de puissance sociale.” – Lévy-Blond.

An artist makes more discoveries than it thinks, and a scientist makes far less discoveries than it is credited for.

In science the exception is exorcised, in art the exception is cultivated.

Because a fact does not please me, because it complicates my life, even to the point of ruin, because it may render my conception of the world more grotesque and unbearable, does not mean it is not true.  

Art can massacrer les faits without any risk; science can do the same only by destroying its own foundations.  

The validation of an a prioi idea requires the rigorous exclusion of troubling facts and is not the result of the search for truth. That such an idea may be true, or accepted as true, is entirely fortuitous.  

In our search for truth, in our adherence to what is true, we encounter ourselves. And most will remain there, confident that veracity is coincident with personal sentiments. But subjectivity is only a door. If truth is the goal one must traverse oneself, take leave of oneself.

Is the fact that we discover fundamental laws that describe natural phenomenon an artifact, a necessary consequence of our rational efforts?

The creative life exploits the confusion between spirit and body. Where science aims to resolve the confusion, art will play with it.

The religious, or more generally, the spiritual impulse, is primary and is also a negation— I am not that. It is the sense that I exist but am separated from all that is external to me. Because such an experience may be our primary experience, or to say it another way, because our first experiences may be determined by this sense, does not mean that it has a value apart from all the experiences that follow, and therefore, it should not be given a privileged position in the construction of our identity and understanding.  There may be societies, even entire civiliasations founded upon such a primary experience. Within such a context, some will experience life to be more profound than the primary experience of a helpless, newborn child and will, hopefully, proceed towards an existence that is more fully human. Such an effort will necessarily demand an examination of the presumed duality of matter and spirit. 

A scientist will search for what is lacking, for completion, for the missing piece; an artist will, if fortunate, experience the moment of having created something which seemingly answers a long-standing question, or responds to a lack— a question, or a lack, which one become’s conscious of only after having created the response which has illuminated it.

The artist is responsible for any beauty in a work of art. Any beauty that exists in scientific activity, and which is the responsibility of the scientist, is aesthetic and irrelevant to the science. An ugly picture that imparts the same information as a beautiful picture are equivalent in a scientific context.