I’ve put the two dicta above in my category Dicta at http://artandpopularculture.com/Dicta. I currently have 330 dicta. The first 330 of what will become an unranked top 1000.
I spent some time trying to find out why Heraclitus is often depicted with a globe. Unsuccessfully. Anyone?
In a documentary dedicated to the work of this man, “Brain Mechanisms of Pleasure and Addiction”, an unidentified woman who has undergone deep brain stimulation pushes her own pleasure button repeatedly[1].
She even says “I think it’s somewhat of a sexy button.”
If an estimated 10% of the Western world is on anti-depressants (“One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four.”nytimes[2]), why is deep brain stimulation with a “pleasure button” considered unethical?
Maybe one day we will all have an orgasmatron in our brains?
Would it prove to be so addictive that we would die in great numbers from starvation and fatigue just as Olds and Milner’s rats and Korean video game addict Lee Seung Seop, who died in 2006 after playing for more than fifty hours straight.
Or would there be more cases as the one of Kim Sa-rang, a 3-month-old Korean child, who would die in 2009 from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe raising a virtual child in an online game.
I used to believe in the complete sovereignty of one’s own body.
But today I’m not against protecting people against themselves and against the overuse of their “sexy button.”
Here’s a quote of what happened to another woman who was unable to control self-stimulation of her “sexy button”:
“At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments. A chronic ulceration developed at the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude. At times she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, each time demanding its return after a short hiatus” (Portenoy et al., 1986)[2]
And then there’s the tragic story of patient B-19.
Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s work is unclassifiable. Which is a good thing. Yet despite this quality of being genre-defying, their work is defined by playfulness and humor absent from 90% of contemporary art.
I rather enjoy wit and humor in art.
The absence thereof, seriousness, is, in my view, one of the faultlines in 20th century art. Modernism, for example, was reigned by a detrimental “cult of seriousness”.
As I said in the title of this post, The Way Things Go is ‘World Art Classic’ #463. Its alphabetical neighbors are The Unswept Floor, a second century AD mosaic and The Witch by Salvator Rosa.
Near Death Experience is a 2014 French film directed, produced and written by Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern coming to local screens from September onwards.
The film stars French writer Michel Houellebecq as Paul, a burn-out man who escapes to the mountains on his racing bike with the plan to commit suicide.
Some of Houellebecq’s work has already been filmed.
Several years ago I saw the decidedly philosophical film Extension du domaine de la lutte (also known as Whatever) which is now on YouTube in its entirety.
The “our hero” of Whatever reminds me of Paul.
Houellebecq’s debut as protagonist has been acclaimed.
Frédéric Pagès must have been both flattered and amused when in 2010, not realizing that the work was a hoax, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, in his work De la guerre en philosophie, cites very seriously from this work and builds its argumentation around it.
It is incredible that Lévy did not notice the hoax when he read:
“La Chose, c’est le Sexe. C’est évident. Nous ne pouvons pas connaître la Chose en soi, nous avertit Kant : nous n’en sommes pas capables, mais surtout nous n’y sommes pas autorisés.”
“The Thing is the sex (vulva). That speaks for itself. We cannot know the thing in itself Kant warns us: we are incapable of knowing it, but moreover we are not allowed to.”
Years ago, I posted [1] two highlights of see-through erotica.
Both were film stills. The first[3] was from Succubus (1968) directed Jess Franco, the second[4] was from Castle of Blood (1964), directed Antonio Margheriti.
Today, the full movies of these stills are available on YouTube:
From Castle of Blood I was able to find the exact location of the film still in question[4]. The woman who is wearing the translucent crinoline and who bares her perky breasts appears to be Sylvia Sorrente (Elsi in the film).
From Succubus I was unable to track the still. However, I was able to get a wider shot[6]. La Reynaud appears to be stripping for a pianist seen from the rear in the back.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the work and person of Marina Abramović, but yesterday, while leafing through a book titled Love I stumbled upon a photo of Rest Energy, a 1980 performance piece by Marina and Ulay.
I was immediately taken by it.
I’d seen it before, but had forgotten about it.
I do think it works better as a photo than as a film.
It makes little sense to talk about consumerism since consumerism is a pejorative (a third of the -isms are) and implies anti-consumerism.
So all talk of consumerism is talk of anti-consumerism.
Which brings me to the film above, which I suspect to feature strains of anti-consumerism. I speak of a Russian film about the Paris Commune which was titled The New Babylon.
I once[1] posted a lovely still of this film of a woman with a gun and a mannequin.
The New Babylon of the title of this film refers (I just learned) to a shopping mall, with the same title.
The Wikipedia bio of Guy Debord says “Guy attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism.”
I wonder where that came from.
But the Wikipedia article is right, of course, Debord was a vandal, whether he practiced it or not. For example, his movement was the seat of organizations like the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. Moreover, in The Society of the Spectacle, Debord praised “General Ludd”.
I used to be a practicing vandal too when a malcontent teenager.
I started thinking about vandalism when I researched dérive, which revolves around the “improper use” of certain city quarters, using them for something they were not intended for; and détournement, which is just one step away from vandalism.
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![[3]](https://web.archive.org/web/20160713215307/https://www.jahsonic.com/Succubus1968.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](https://web.archive.org/web/20101007154332/https://www.jahsonic.com/DanzaMacabra.jpg){kind=link}
![[6]](http://www.dbcult.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/z242.jpg){kind=link}