Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideos

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Oscar Wilde • The Picture of Dorian Gray

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

Paul Auster • The Invention of Solitude

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935

Design Literacy

“A picture lives only through the one who looks at it. And what they see is the legend surrounding the picture.”

less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and, perhaps most important, save.

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

The conditions of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantasmatic construction of the present.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.”

Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information

In Benjamin’s view, this opens up art to the masses in a way that has never been possible before, enabling them to escape from the clutches of tradition – a highly desirable outcome for the revolutionary-minded Marxist.

Stuart Sim • Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides Book 0)

Just watch people hurrying busily through the streets. They seem preoccupied, look neither left nor right, but have their eyes fixed on the ground like dogs. They rush straight ahead, but always without looking where they are going, for they are mechanically covering a well-known route, mapped out in advance. It is exactly the same in all the great