Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Labyrinths
The precise architectural tradition of labyrinth is what the Renaissance inherited; and later, in turn, was passed down to us through Romantic imagery, into cinema, consumer planning, computer games, psychoanalytical theory. The labyrinth was an interactive journey with subplots, but all of it could be condensed into a single room, on a single sheet of paper, or on less than an acre. Norman M. Klein, in Scripted Spaces and the Illusion of Power, 1550-1780. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p101.
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Suspicious As a Generator of Disquiet May Be Found
Suspicious as a generator of disquiet may be found in certain contemporary paintings when a simple house, seen in an ambiguous light, and isolated against the landscape, becomes haunted and takes on a threatening and malign air […] The Kafka of The Trial was a master of suspicioun, but sometimes (as in Metamorphosis) what is uncanny is not so much the horror that is shown and described 9a man wakes up to find he has been transformed into a disgusting insect), but the fact that his family take the event as embarrassing yet entirely natural, and we suspect that the story is really talking about our acquiescence in the face of the evil that surrounds us. Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p323.
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Can You Explain to Me Why when We Defecate We
‘Can you explain to me why, when we defecate, we often examine our excrement?’ Aesop explained: ‘In olden days there was a king’s son who, because of his life of luxury, spent most of his time sitting and shitting. Once he remained seated thus so long that, having forgotten what he was doing, he shat his own common sense. From that day forward, men shit hunched over, being careful not to crap away their own common sense. But don’t you worry: you can’t shit something you don’t possess!’ Anonymous, The Aesop Romance, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p134.
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And to Thee Nothing Is Whatsoever Evil Yea Not
And to Thee nothing is whatsoever evil: yea, not only to Thee, but also to Thy creation as a whole, because there is nothing without, which may break in, and corrupt that order which Thou hast appointed it. But in the parts thereof some things, because unharmonising with other some, are accounted evil: whereas those ver things harmonise with others, and are good; and in themselves are good. And all these things which harmonise not together, do yet with the inferior part, which we call Earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky harmonising with it. Far be it then that I should say, ‘These things should not be’: for indeed long for the better; but still must even for these alone praise Thee; for that Thou are to be praised , do show from the earth, dragons, and all deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, and stormy wind, which fulfil Thy word […] St. Augustine, The Confessions, VII, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p48.
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The Poets Have Utilized What Are Called Solecisms
The poets have utilized what are called solecisms and barbarisms; they have preferred, by changing the names, to call them figures and transformations, rather than avoid them as evident errors. Well, take them out of poetry, and we would miss the most melodious sweetness. Gather many together in a single composition, and it will vex me because all will be mawkish, pedantic, affected […] The order that governs and moderates such things would not tolerate their being too many, nor too few. A humble and almost disregarded discourse highlights elevated expressions and elegant movements, alternating between one and the other. St. Augustine, On Order, IV. Quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p47.
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We Can Never Exactly Present to Ourselves or to
We can never exactly present to ourselves, or to others. Thus we are not exactly real for one another, nor are we quite real even to ourselves. And this radical alterity is our best chance… Put simply, our chance at life. Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p71.
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Darren Almond’s Geisterbahn
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Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall
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After the Age of Architecture Sculpture We Are Now
After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally, as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie … the city is no longer a theater (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights… Paul Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, quoted in Neumann, “Lumnious Buildings”, p27.
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The City of the Future Is a Vast Lunatic Growth
[The city of the future is] a vast lunatic growth, producing a deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy gentility and silly wastefulness. H.G. Wells, quoted in Wiliams, The Country and the City, p. 273