Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
We walked through the next several galleries without stopping. If I had been alone, I would have paused to pour over the Mérode Altarpiece and study the Bury St. Edmunds cross.
Patrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World
His vision was instead a world in which individuality is a myth, and where people are units reflecting whatever is happening in the media, their only purpose to consume images and signs; in this new universe, something is real only if it can be reproduced endlessly, and what is singular or unshareable does not exist.
Tom Butler Bowdon • 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)
... See moreCulture has to follow the dominant modes of perception of a given era. While a twentieth-century building might have been designed to be photographed, the twenty-first century work of art is “designed for reproducibility” through algorithmic feeds…They each contribute and conform to a generic, flattened, reproducible aesthetic. Hence the general st
O desmantelamento sucessivo da distância é uma característica da modernidade.
Byung-Chul Han • A crise da narração (Portuguese Edition)
Agnes Callard • Art Is for Seeing Evil
(As early as 1842, that indefatigable improver of French architectural treasures, Viollet-le-Duc, commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of Notre Dame before beginning his restoration of the cathedral.) “To renew the old world,” Benjamin wrote, “that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things.” But the old world cann
... See moreSusan Sontag • On Photography
To Sartre’s celebrated examples of standing in line to board a bus, being stuck in traffic, and shopping at the supermarket could be added the unfathomable amounts of human time expended today in desultory electronic activity and exchanges. Whether in the mid twentieth century or today, seriality is the numbing and ceaseless production of the same.
Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
There is a photograph coming at you every few seconds, and hype is the lingua franca. It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder.
Teju Cole • Known and Strange Things
“To renew the old world,” Benjamin wrote, “that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things.” But the old world cannot be renewed—certainly not by quotations; and this is the rueful, quixotic aspect of the photographic enterprise