Intellectualism sees institutions as trash islands damming up the river of life where cesspools fester, and wonders why humans don't instead amplify or store the energy of the river for the greater expanse of life. The academic is content to sniff the trash. Trash humping is an academic exercise.

The spasmodic beauty of abstraction reflects the social reality of capitalist production — a kind of rationality that is not yet rational enough.

“Kant was not a philosopher of art, but of freedom. Of what we could know, but do not yet know — and how even our instincts push us towards developing our faculties beyond them.” —Florian Walch

While many artists today position themselves as critical outsiders vis à vis capitalism, Hirst embraces the fact that he — and everyone else — lives smack dab in the middle of it. Far from being capitalism’s uncritical playboy, Hirst delivers an immanent critique.

What these three modes of aesthetic artifice/art/artistry have in common is an ugly obsession with purity. This makes Schneider’s analogy about religion and art especially worth investigation.

I wanted to approach the paintings and be absorbed in their depth, but they refused me, turning away from my senses. This was a new force, an ascetic ideal that fixed my place in an obdurate world.

The careless irony gives away the suffering narration involves in a world where it is no longer possible to tell stories.

Adnan has begun to worry the surface; she abolishes the impenetrability of her color. She is dealing with fresh problems that she has created for herself. This is one definition of freedom.

Let's not be chaste! Critics should strive for immanent dialectical critique, which has itself become desecrated. I can only imagine how many status quo readers will comment here that it’s not ‘relevant’ anymore; as in relevant to the status quo and conformed taste. And that is exactly the point.

The return of “art” to film even if such gestures are mere semblance, may indicate, however obliquely, a renewed desire to reconsider the medium.

And what do we make of the issue that our frustration is with realizing the futility of any radical gesture? That’s the problem of postmodernism in a nutshell.

For its entire modern history art was bound up in the possibility of freedom. So what happens when freedom no longer seems possible?

Thus the Garden fades in darkness in the memory of mankind and yet lies behind every subsequent action as the enigmatic source of its power.

The ethos of artistic representation undergoes revision as it intermingles with a new enlightenment spirit in what is broadly perceived as the age of AI.

The question is whether these works are self-critical in their own rebellion against established forms and their limitations, or whether they dogmatically adhered to Schoenbeg’s categories in their quest for the obliteration of the subject in service of musical free will.

There are periodic flares of interest in sound art, from top ten lists to comprehensive sound art exhibitions, and yet no one is really certain what this term means, and what the whole thing is about.

The fact is that the revolutionary impulse in art does not hew so cleanly to revolutionary politics.

Man must care about art because it is a practice in which he can both critique his ambivalence and envision a world without it.

The art world fails to see the election of Trump as anything more than terrifying repetition (albeit on steroids) of the Culture Wars. This points to an exhaustion of ideas.

If there's a reintroduction of politics (and not pseudo-political culture) in 2016 — something many of us have not seen in our lifetime — there will be a dramatic change in the way art is made in the coming years.