Thought provoking

But we have to acknowledge that when we remove friction from one domain, we're not eliminating it, we're just moving it somewhere new.

This got me thinking that, ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one's own unique perspective. It doesn't matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are... See more

When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.

But even in this era, patronage was conditional. Artists served the ideological aims of those who paid. The church demanded piety. The state demanded civic glory. The Medici demanded immortality. As a model, patronship has always involved a tension between creative expression and institutional ambition. The artist received funding but also... See more

“But museums also choose what to display, what to let rest in the dark, and what to reveal again under new light.

They’re not mausoleums — they are spaces of loss and rebirth. Alive, even in silence.

We are like that too.

Full of rooms. Piled-up memories. Crookedly hung frames.

Ideas that need to come out of storage.”

Think of it this way. We all agree that a cool person with panache can wear a garment we’d previously dismissed and show it to us in a new, positive light — freaking & redeeming a previously benighted garment. Ipso facto we must also concede that a person whose style, energy and gestalt we find repellent can wear a garment we’d previously... See more

Challenge is to capture the mood while it’s happening. To be able to get something to resonate with the the vibe of the moment, we should look at contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences in our culture, economy, and society.

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

And it starts with a simple truth: To invent the future, you have to subvert the present. And the present is shaped by an invisible force few are trained to see: the monoculture.