“Mythologies” is often an angry book, and what angered Barthes more than anything was “common sense,” which he identified as the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, a mode of thought that systematically pretends that complex things are simple, that puzzling things are obvious, that local things are universal — in short, that cultural fantasies shaped by all the dirty contingencies of power and money and history are in fact just the natural order of the universe. The critic’s job, in Barthes’s view, was not to revel in these common-sensical myths but to expose them as fraudulent. The critic had to side with history, not with culture. And history, Barthes insisted, “is not a good bourgeois.”

Die Bundeskanzlerin hätte die Energiewende von Anfang an zur Chefsache erklären sollen - das sagt Baden-Württembergs Ministerpräsident Kretschmann in der F.A.S. Merkel gestand in ihrer Videobotschaft ein, dass die Zeit dränge.
Der baden-württembergische Ministerpräsident Winfried Kretschmann (Grüne) hat die Bundesregierung für ihr Verhalten in der Energiewende kritisiert. „Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat dieses Projekt von nationaler Bedeutung viel zu sehr laufen gelassen, das hätte von Anfang an von ihr zur Chefsache erklärt werden müssen“, sagte Kretschmann der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung (F.A.S.).

Was die letzte Woche erst einmal gezeigt hat, und dafür liebe ich diese Welt, dafür liebe ich sie in ihren Widersprüchen, war auf so spektakuläre und fast schon aufreizende Art, wie vielleicht überhaupt noch nie, das Scheitern von gleich drei Riesen im Spiel des symbolischen Kapitalismus, falls es überhaupt einen anderen gibt:
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Der Algorithmus herrscht über uns

Ich sah plötzlich zu viele Echtfremde und nicht die Halbfremden, die als Freunde gut funktionierten, weil man irgendwelche Anknüpfungspunkte hatte, die aber sehr schwebend blieben. Irgendwie zäh wurde das, woran ich mich da herunterlas - natürlich ist im Grunde jede Aussage über Facebook fragwürdig, weil es so viele Facebooks geben wird, wie es Benutzer gibt, aber in meinem Fall war die Verklumpung und Verschiebung schon spürbar, bevor ich das von Eli Pariser in seinem Buch "Filter Bubble. Wie wir im Internet entmündigt werden" erklärt bekam: Wie der Algorithmus auch auf Facebook über uns herrscht und das für uns sucht, was nach politischen, sozialen, ethnischen, konsumistischen Kriterien "das Beste" ist.

Dieter Roelstraete editor

"…Once they have identified what we should be looking at & talking about, my eye is inevitably drawn to the ‘not art’ side of the room, which often seems more alive to me, more fun. Is it possible to make things, do things, before they are categorized? Is it possible to build a life’s work as a free-range human, freely meandering and trespassing without regard for the borders?…

Children naturally operate this way, but it’s the opposite of how most formal education works. We are introduced to borders, decide which ones we want to surround ourselves with, learn what happened within them before we got there, and are then expected to perform within their narrow perimeters until we die… If I am interested in gardening, I don’t want to make work about gardens, I become a gardener…

Maybe identifying myself as one limits my freedom by implying that everything I do aspires to be art. I’m not aiming for art, I’m aiming for life, and if art gets in the way, that’s fine."

[via: http://randallszott.org/2012/05/21/border-control-fritz-haeg/ ]

Another passage from earlier on:

"In her 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ Rosalind Krauss analyzes the slippery, evolving nature of what was being referred to at the time as sculpture by artists including Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. Krauss talks about sculpture, and its relationship to ‘not architecture’ and ‘not landscape’. Recently the term ‘expanded field’ has been revived to help make sense of the work of a new generation of artists (including myself), whose legacy can ironically be traced directly back to artists from the 1970s whom Krauss does not mention in her essay. These include: Ant Farm, Buckminster Fuller, Anna Halprin, Joan Jonas, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Yayoi Kusama, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer, to name just a few personal favourites. They were working at the borders of what was known as sculpture, and some were outside what was even considered art. With our generation growing out of theirs, I would argue that the field has not expanded at all, but rather the ossified borders that previously separated it and other fields from each other are becoming more porous."

"Smart people can take something complex and express it faithfully in different, especially simper, terms. They can interpret and reinterpret. If you want to make something smart, it’s tempting to do smartness to your topic until you’ve condensed it into some admirably lucid interpretation, then hand that to the audience and wait for the applause. Sometimes this is what’s needed. But it isn’t how to make smart things. A smart thing is something for a smart person. However many interpretations you put in it, however fertile they are, you leave room for more.

You do this because you respect what you are interpreting and you do it because you respect your audience. It’s a lot like being considerate. And that’s how you make smart things."

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of vitriol spit at a director who is so well regarded in so many circles. We seem to be in a more or less bland era of mainstream American filmmaking where some of the most celebrated and decorated directors are ones that are almost invisible from a visual standpoint. You have someone like Sam Mendes whose films do not appear to possess one single discernible characteristic. Even worse is Ron Howard, whose films’ only linking attribute is constant and egregious manipulation. And then there’s James Cameron who could easily be described as spectacle over substance, though has no signature traits to hang his hat on. Yet these are the directors that win Oscars, make huge profits at the box office, and while they receive their share of criticism, it doesn’t compare to the amount that’s heaped on Wes Anderson who has the courage to stick by his visual world even when a movie flops financially.

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