Obscene.

[jouis_sens]

"We don’t think it’s in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights."

Someone asked me this morning why I haven't remarked this week on Martin Sullivan's act of profound cowardice and incomprehensible dereliction of duty.  I haven't remarked on it, not here, not there, because--

Comments

[angiereedgarner]

Thanks for helping me resist the present.

[jouis_sens]

Thank you for making art that is resistance, and no less so, for being a resistance to that present.

[dulcemia]

We don't think it's in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights.

I can't even begin to cope with this sentence.

[jouis_sens]

I chose it precisely because it is a staggeringly shocking sentence that people should be horrified by. The problem, as you well know, is that most of them aren't. The deed was vile - vile beyond adequate description - but the specific language used to justify it is an indivisible part of that vileness and violence, and, furthermore, opens onto additional important tableaus of ideological occlusion. Breaking open those occlusions has to be part of any process of resisting this increasingly rapid slide into madness. That note from Victoria was exactly what I needed, thanks for sending it. The Transformer's emerging as a voice of actual reason in the grotesque din of the culture wars.

[dulcemia]

They try but the internal politics down there are so much worse than here - NY has more private sector money. Of course I'm with you on the language issue. It's infuriating and it doesn't even make sense: to 'pick a fight' means to go out and look for one, start one unprovoked - enormous difference between that and +defending+ against an attack. I can't believe how immediately he caved, it wasn't even like a struggle or a fight or anything, it was just Catholic wacko calls the national gallery of the entire United States and says take down that piece of art and boom they just take it down. Yet there are still people who deny that America is now owned by the religious right.

[jouis_sens]

Your point is well taken, and I am, strictly speaking, loathe to delineate any single product of hegemony as "the worst" -- as you note, there are very many indeed. While I don't expect it to be legible in this particular milieu, what I'm reaching for in such a discursive moment is the heart of the ontopolitical stakes of the lifeworld (which would, i.e., therefore include or, more accurately, be indivisible from, all particular atrocities - war, rampant environmental destruction, &tc; to say nothing of the atrocity that is simply capitalism itself): the diremption which now more or less completely defines human subjectivity (or, if you prefer, "consciousness"). (There's also a specific sense in which violence against art, because of art's intimacy with our psyche, with the very nature of thought and Being itself, presents a unique danger to our individual and collective health, but that's another discussion

I'm trying to think this in terms of the "Interregnum of Representation" piece.

[zenos_arrow]

If art is among many (MANY) things, a kind of 'symptom' of the cultural unconscious come into the symbolic order, it would be telling a truth or exposing a place where power is trying to cover something up; that's why it freaks the right out so much?

Re: I'm trying to think this in terms of the "Interregnum of Representation" piece.

[jouis_sens]

I know that section reads that way, but 1.) it's just a footnote, and there's only so much work a footnote can do, and 2.) that's mostly Lacan through Kristeva, which is just a way of saying not really Lacan at all. Contextualizing it's complicated -- let's take it to email. Oh this makes me miss "our" table, in that cozy little side nook in the ford dh... /twists futilely in nostalgia's fearsome grip

" 'ere we were queens and kings, of grass but ever green."

[zenos_arrow]

Twelve years out and the conversations in that nook are still the best thing that's ever happened to me.

[signsof]

"For instance, last year a group of artists did a performance that criticised certain right-wing vigilante groups, and for the first time they didn't get the subsidy that they depended on." So it's basically as bad in Europe as it is here. Fantastic. When Robert Putnam says that 'religion, in general, is a positive contribution to civic life' it makes me want to scream.