“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, March 17, 2016

Why OOO and Cixous' Fur Coat Come in for It

I was just proofreading when I came across this:

A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call “an object.” Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement—the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene. The idea is to create the ultimate anti- product, because, in the words of one sound artist, “I love listening to noise music because I can’t remember any of it.” On this view, good art is a kind of spinach, rather formless and nasty, and good for you. Heavens no, not the sugary pop objects, not the sparkly things made of beauty and sadness—keep them away! Better to make a disgusting thing that turns everyone off instantly, or write a manifesto about how making things always ends with a sellout. You can see why people have trouble with OOO, calling it a version of commodity fetishism, and you can see why people have trouble with Cixous’ fur coat. And with the radical nonutil- ity of Kantian beauty.

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