Art

From Pathways to Channels: Art, Culture, and Commodification

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The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan coined the expression “pathways of urban life” to describe the musical practices of a small British town. These pathways are constituted by the web of social acts of those who take part in this musical life, and they remain in force to the extent that those relationships, and the resulting habits, sustain their force and continuity. … Read more →

Exile of Gods, Heroes, and Monsters

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An old maxim teaches that nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. But it is also true that the intellect combines at its whim the materials it gathers from the tumultuous well from which it receives them. That well opens onto an abyss not only of the ignoramus, but also of the gaze that seeks compassion. Stories are built in common — at least their unspoken part, the part made of sharp edges beneath the light that sets some days apart from others. From there the gods have arisen, with no one apparently having summoned them. From there too the heroes and the monsters: enemies and lovers, as courage and panic are, as life and death are. And at their centre of mass, sacrifice.

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The Justifications of Contemporary Art

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The thesis to be set out here is the following: many works of current art present themselves wrapped in the text of their own justification — in the catalogue text in which they are embedded — as though they were necessarily tied to it, when in reality the work itself, in its material-conceptual formality, need not refer to that text … Read more →

Sketch of a Poetics: The Control of Inertias

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Inertia is understood here in a sense close to that proposed by Newtonian physics in its first law, which we take as known. We apply this sense to any process or material state indifferent to the subject’s intentions and prior to their operations. As an example: a block of raw stone confronted by a sculptor is an inertia. The successive … Read more →

To Be an Artist Is to Look Like One: From Fetish to Puppet

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When El Fary appeared on television, my grandmother used to say: “That man is a great artist.” I will not deny this character his talents — who lacks them entirely? — but what interests me here is the heterogeneity of the contexts in which the label artist gets applied. El Fary is one, of course, and so is every imaginable … Read more →

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity

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The advance of artificial intelligence unsettles some people as if some unknown invader were slowly approaching through space. For them, AI is already on the verge of waking up to take control of itself. This haloed horizon conceals the real reality of these technologies, which is their insertion into our structures of production. What I want to talk about here … Read more →