quotes
“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because she is the only person aware of the nature of the present.” – Wyndham Lewis
“The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on a society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed…
…For in the electric age there is no longer any sense in talking about the artist’s being ahead of his time. Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by the ability to recognize it for what it is…
…The modern metropolis is now sprawling helplessly after the impact of the motorcar. As a response to the challenge of railway speeds the suburb and the garden city arrived too late, or just in time to become a motorcar disaster…
…Nobody wants a motorcar till there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses…
…Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of ‘what the public wants’ played over its own nerves… Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly…
…Archimedes once said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’… We have leased these ‘places to stand’ to private corporations.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
“Pain is sometimes better than fear.” — Brian Hobbs 2011
“The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control.” – Soren Kierkegaard
“A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a Common Enemy”. Lord Halifax
“The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.” Saul Alinsky
“If you’ve got art that’s helping people escape their problems, then you’re dealing with art that serves the interests of those who want to continue to oppress you… Art can be educational, it can show solidarity with others who are struggling. It can have a spirit of resistance or expose oppression and deal with institutions that don’t serve the community’s best interests.” — Emory Douglas
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction….The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.
“Art appears to stand outside this realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture. That it can do so is due to art’s peculiar economy, based on the manufacture of unique or rare artefacts, and its spurning of mechanical reproduction…
Yet there are reasons to wonder whether free trade and free art are as antithetical as they seem. Firstly, the economy of art closely reflects the economy of finance capital…
Art prices and the volume of art sales tend to match the stock markets closely, and it is no accident that the world’s major financial centres are also the principal centres for the sale of art. To raise this parallel is to see art not only as a zone of purposeless free play but as a minor speculative market in which art works are used for a variety of instrumental purposes, including investment, tax avoidance, and money laundering.
Secondly… [contemporary art]… can make a virtue of obscurity or even boredom to the point that these become conventions in themselves.
Thirdly… it is possible to see free trade and free art not as opposing terms but rather as forming respectively a dominant system and its supplement.
Furthermore, the daring novelty of free art… is only a pale rendition of the continual evaporation of certainties produced by capital itself, which tears up all resistance to the unrestricted flow across the globe of funds, data, products, and finally the bodies of millions of migrants.” – Julian Stallabrass, from art Incorporated, 2004.
“I still don’t think rich people see colour.” — Sandy Robertson, 2007.
“Flag for an organization for whom the following is axiomatic:
1 That Western society is based upon envy engendered by publicity
2 That publicity works upon anxiety: the sum of everything is money, to get
money is to overcome anxiety
3 That the anxiety on which publicity plays is the fear that having nothing, you
will be nothing
4 That under capitalism, money is life
5 That under capitalism, money is the token of, and the key to, every human
capacity
6 That under capitalism, the power to spend money is the power to live
7 That publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this
future is endlessly deferred. It is judged, not by the real fulfillment of its
promises, but the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer.
Its essential application is not to reality but to daydreams
8 That glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and
widespread emotion
9 That the industrial society has moved towards democracy and then stopped half
way
10 That the industrial society is an ideal society for generating personal
social envy
11 That the pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a
universal right
12 That existing social conditions make individuals feel powerless
13 That in the existing social conditions, the individual lives in the
contradictions between what he is and what he would like to be
14 That the individual can either (14a) become fully conscious of the
contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be and its causes,
or else (14b) he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with
his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent daydreams
15 That 14a entails joining the political struggle for a full democracy which
itself entails amongst other things the overthrow of capitalism
16 That the process of living within the contradictions of present social
conditions is often reinforced by working conditions
17 That the interminable present of meaningless working hours is ‘balanced’ by a
dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment
18 That only one kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can be envisaged
within the culture of capitalism: the power to acquire is recognized to the
exclusion of everything else
19 That the dream of capitalism is publicity
20 That capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define
their (sic) own interest as narrowly as possible by imposing false standards of
what is and what is not desirable
22 That publicity is the life of this culture insofar as without publicity
capitalism could not survive
23 That it is desirable that people come to consciousness of these false
standards
24 That they should be assisted in doing so (23)”
Flags for Organisations: List of Axioms, 1978
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