(c) Ronald D Gosses (2009)Andy Warhol is heir to Oscar Wilde, but I've never read anyone noticing this. I don't mean just that their queerness crashed into and shaped modernism and postmodernism respectively (though that's a good one); nor just that they fundamentally share the role of the sparkling dandy riding atop our none-more-wishful culture; nor that they're the most quotable figures in history. I mean that their similar self-constructions - the effeminate, theatrical, aesthetically-fixated, charming, amoral queer - occupy a continuum and what we have become is at the sharp end. Flippant, giggling, wonderful nihilism.
Both reject practicality, but are often intensely unromantic too:
They also share a basic contempt for their audiences. I don't believe that Wilde meant much of what he ever said or wrote. Lord Henry, from Dorian Gray: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."And the opposite, from Personal Reflections of America: "Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." (Although he also thinks "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.")
Mine's not an original thought. The mercenary nature of his intelligence was clear enough at the time, and we loved him anyway:
The idea of a "fake Warhol painting" is ridiculous. There's no such thing, except perhaps for tax purposes. The Economist magazine uses him as the windvane for the art market general - metonymy which Warhol would have adored.
You might have heard the story about a Warhol exhibition in 1971; there were so many attendees (and so much writhing) that he took down the paintings, so that people could get in. Warhol was the point; he was the work. The actual paintings were derided at the time as "hoaxes"; and so they were. And so all art is. The idea of a "Warhol urban legend" is ridiculous... (What on earth has truth got to do with it?)
"But beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of a face."
(So speaks a man who loves men.)
"I know a girl...she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do."
(So speaks a man who loves cats.)
Samuel Beckett might have slotted neatly in between them - another malin provocateur. But he's too stark, so lacking in ornament that he would burst my neat category apart. De Sade fits, and anyway would use a knife if he didn't at first. Lou Reed was groomed by Warhol specifically for the task of being a nasty little man. Damien Hirst is a macho shit who'd headbutt his own way out of the analysis. These people are the cattleprods we grab on to.
Is it Nietzsche they come from, then? Maybe not. (We never accepted Nietzsche in time.)
From Wilde's Canterville Ghost: "Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
: Wilde's too beautiful to ignore, but too dishonest to really respect. Maybe that's the point. (You can rightfully say "maybe that's the point" to any artwork; any ambiguity; any old piece of hollow crap. Maybe that's the point.) He exasperates me, but I am queer.
: Warhol's neither beautiful nor honest, but his "work" is supremely important, because otherwise art will die; art-lovers will kill it. It will become what classical music sadly has; a marginal, elitist, ossified time-capsule. This classist classicism is bad only because it's entirely false, traitorous and suicidal. I hate Warhol, but I am Pop.
Their indifference is horrific. Hopefully that's the point.
"The best thing for everybody now is to forget all about Oscar Wilde, his perpetual posings, his aesthetical teachings and his theatrical productions. Let him go into silence, and be heard no more."
By these questions, women are made to justify their existing by night, to feel responsible - no, actually ashamed at being attacked, at causing their being attacked. This transmutes risk-followed-by-trauma into normative crime. And this is such blatant misogyny.
Fear is advised, mandated, naturalised. "We can't do anything about the bastards, so just stay home, hush down and don't flash any thigh."
The next thing, which applies to all protests (and, in fact, all kinds of sincere action) is that it is very easy to see the funny side of people taking anything slightly abstract this seriously. The cartoon-meme was funny and seemingly useless, and was accordingly subverted or depoliticized by everyone. At Reclaim the Night, we were taking the piss out of ourselves for milling around in -15°C for hours. But I won't stop doing things just because they have a silly side - simply because I cannot stop: this property exhausts the category "possible things that a human can do".
That 2010 research with the unfortunate/great name shows us all kinds of awful things. (That 23% of women and 15% of men have been made to have nonconsensual sex. That the rape conviction rate was higher in the 1970s than it is now.) These are things that need to be known: if the problem is with our ideas (as all things sooner or later are), knowing is enough.
Observation statement #1:
The Shanghai district government is offering postgraduate scholarships to foreigners (even philosophers).
Observation statement #2:
I am relatively poor and want to know Chinese.
Observation statement #3:
The Chinese government publically-but-secretly executes about 6000 people a year, putting to shame the rest of the world, who are only unspeakable 2000 times a year put together.
Observation statement #4:
The Chinese government covertly tortures lots (illegally, even by their own fucking law).
Observation statement #5:
There is in place, in this "Communism", a hereditary class order (rural/urban) reminiscent of apartheid.
Observation statement #6:
China's media is the 171st free. Censorship is omnipresent and often absurd. This only shows you what constitutions are really worth (Chapter II, Article 35).
Observation statement #7:
All the power is in the hands of nine men who choose their next nine men, and all the other men.
Value disclosure @3:
I am opposed to capital punishment.
Value disclosure @4:
I am opposed to torture, absolutely.
Value disclosure @5:
I don't like apartheid very much.
Value disclosure @6:
See that thing where people can speak in public? That's well good.
Value disclosure @7:
Whatever democracy is, it ain't this.
The CCCP is authoritarian in dozens of other unacceptable ways, and when clever people point this out with helpful suggestions, they get fucked.
Clincher:
I hold the tacit approval argument, under which one's economic or indirect support for an immoral process is itself immoral. This degree will be wrongfully obtained. (That someone is going to accept it is beneath relevance.)
Value judgment:
"Oh bugger, not again."
Possible appeal:
To get anywhere with these regimes, the human rights movement needs people able to familiarize and engage, more than partial boycotts and self-righteousness.
Appeal result, from Supreme Court Judge Ethics: "Lisa, maybe if I'm part of that mob, I can help steer it in wise directions. Now where's my giant foam cowboy hat and airhorn?"
: Fuck off.
Arrogance #2 is on Responsibility
Arrogance #3 is on epistemological honesty
- ARISTOTLE: Metaphysics as highest:
“what is being qua being?” (metaphysical priority)
- DESCARTES: Begin with yourself (and then begin with God):
“what is known?” (epistemic priority)
- KANT: Begin with the interface of active subject & world:
“how do we have knowledge?” (apperceptive priority)
- RUSSELL: Begin at the most basic facts:
“what are the real átomos?” (logical priority)
- HUSSERL: Begin with consciousness:
“what does our experience say about the objective?” (phenomenological priority)
- HEIDEGGER: Begin with the meaning of Being:
“why something rather than Nothing?” (“fundamental-ontological” priority)
- LEVINAS: Begin with the Other:
"have I a right to be, given this Other?" (ethical priority)
- BECKETT: Don't begin.
"."
(And yes, it amuses me to say "Russell" and "Husserl" alternately, too.)
