💬 Quotes & Concepts
💬 Have been doing a deep dive into the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s and am more than a little inspired by the anti-retail shop opened by Robert Filliou and George Brecht, which they named “La Cédille qui Sourit,” or “The cedilla that smiles.”
The thoughtfulness and spirit of the work speaks for itself, but I do adore this tidbit about Filliou, as quoted in JSTOR:
Filliou’s text suggests a fully relational model of subjectivity that, while individual, desires to be fulfilled or made able by connecting to others. It was a model lived by the artist himself, who depended for his survival upon the kindness and generosity of friends, who simply reflected the kindness and generosity of their friend Robert back to him. Well aware that this had become his habitual approach to working and living, he once remarked: The real talent I have is for friendship. Ninety-nine percent of my work is not visible."
This is a vital part of creating what they called a “poetic economy;” a concept that is not going to be leaving me anytime soon. They struggled with the same challenge of being purists versus needing money that many artists struggle with today. What is more important, is that they considered the act of non-creation, failure, and mere ideation, a virtue. They worked hard to not be famous.
When the anti-retail shop inevitably closed, since it was hardly ever open and never really had “inventory”, the artist’s sent out a letter to their friends with the following:
“There is always someone making a fortune, someone going…broke (us in particular)
💬 RE: My last post about Kimiyo Mishima. A quote too good and near to the themes of my heart not to publish explicitly. When asked about her artistic process:
“I just keep playing. I never think of how to sell my works. I have never had ideas like “I should make a piece for sale.” I just make what I want to make, do whatever I want to, and keep making trouble for people around. I just keep playing all the time.”
💬 Duchamp’s short essay on The Creative Act (1957) is a good read for people who like to think about art, but also inadvertently gives one of the best arguments for why utilizing AI generation is so detrimental to an artist’s development:
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work. In other words, the personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.
✍️ Back in October, I wrote a dark fiction fable that included a brief rant from an unhinged tech CEO about the connection between war and business. Yesterday morning, Alex Karp of Palantir was on CNBC making the exact same arguments:
On the battlefield, on the commercial battlefield, too, at large companies… our ability to target and take out adversaries and enemies in a way no one else can. I mean, from a not moral perspective, they’re exactly the same; what makes you lethal on the battlefield, and what makes you commercially viable?”
I’m not prescient—this is just how these guys think. They are terribly misguided, even if commercially successful.
💬 From the saintly Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace:
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire—or more exactly, consent. We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us—to desire it truly—simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.
💬 Nice to come across this very optimistic and well-researched essay on the importance playfulness today:
The most successful communities will embrace play-based gatherings in unexpected ways. In a society so desperately craving permission to connect, play is the forgotten art with the potential to lead to transformative experiences.
But, as someone who has been on the PLAY schtick for a long time, it’s vital that it does not get pigeon-holed into a mere trend or movement. Play is as universal a virtue as patience, justice, or even (as I argued in last week’s blog) love.
Play is the way!
💬 African Proverb:
The man who is all eyes sees nothing.
💬 Spoken Poem: We Are The Last Poets
This wind you hear is the birth of memory. When the moment hatches in time’s womb, there will be no art talk. The only poem you will hear will be the spear point pivoted Into the punctured marrow of the villain, And the timeless native son dancing like crazy to retrieved rhythms of desire faded into memory. Therefore, we are The Last Poets of the world. And the question is not whether the world is ready for change, but rather are you n——?
Artists that were on the forefront of the civil rights movements and who some consider the first hip-hop group.
✍️
Love is bringing out the play in others. Play is the mode of one who is loved. When you create conditions for another person to express themselves playfully, you have loved them. When you have been safely carried into a state of playfulness, you have been loved. Play is how we exercise the freedom that love secures for us.
Put a lot of heart into my most recent post about the relationship between play and love. Not sure how intelligible it is, but it is the type of thinking I’d like to believe is somewhat rare. Please read the full thing and let me know your thoughts: bradley-andrews.com.
💸 This article alleges that the avg. stock pay for an OpenAI employee is $1.5 million. My initial reaction is great enthusiasm for those workers—what a windfall!
At the same time, the growing inequalities are hard to ignore. I wrote this dispatch a few weeks ago in part to understand things better.
💬 From my current read, The Conquest of Bread:
We have all been bent on studying the dramatic side of revolutions so much, and the practical work of revolutions so little, that we are apt to see only the stage effects, so to speak, of these great movements: the fight of the first days; the barricades. But this fight, this first skirmish, is soon ended, and it is only after the breakdown of the old system that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.
“Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.”
💬 Omar Little, The Wire
As a child, I had an inexplicable love for the movie Secondhand Lions, starring the recently deceased Robert Duvall. It’s strange to see how it touches on so many themes that I still find myself pondering to this day: storytelling, virtue, masculinity, wonder, etc… While it is a very simple film, avoiding flourish both in special effects and in writing, it’s sincerity and wholesomeness is achingly absent in today’s media. Near the end of the film, Robert Duvall’s character gives a speech which left quite an impression on me as a child. I suspect that it will play a lot during the RIPs for Robert, but I felt like sharing it anyways:
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
🤖 A friend shared Astral Codex Ten’s overview of Moltbook (the AI-only social platform where AI agents are interacting together) and I highly recommend. Whether or not Moltbook is an augury of the future, I don’t know – but it really tickles me to read about.
💬 In Health is Membership by Wendell Berry:
If an ecosystem loses one of its native species, we now know that we cannot speak of it as itself minus one species. An ecosystem minus one species is a different ecosystem. Just so, each of us is made by—or, one might better say, made as—a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things. The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of parts… In the world of love, things separated by efficiency and specialization strive to come back together.
💬 A quote from Soren Kierkegaard for Valentines week:
“What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.”
💬 From Hugh MacLeod:
“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”
🚕 If you use a rideshare app in NYC, the latest NBER study may save you $:
Among consumers who opened either the Uber or the Lyft app on a given day, only 16 percent opened the other. The report found that the average absolute price gap between Uber and Lyft was approximately $3.50, representing roughly 14 percent of the average fare price, with higher gaps for longer rides. Price differences exceeded $1 about 75 percent of the time, and the distribution of price gaps was relatively symmetric, meaning neither platform was consistently cheaper. NYC riders collectively forgo approximately $300 million in potential annual savings by not comparing prices between platforms. Consumers may benefit from comparing prices more regularly. The market could also become more competitive if there were increased access to price aggregators, reducing search frictions.
In sum—check Lyft and Uber before booking a ride.