Re: <documenta X><blast> rhythms
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Mon, 21 Jul 1997 13:31:36 -0400
At 02:02 PM 7/19/97 +0100, you wrote:
>At 4:20 PM +0100 7/19/97, Keller Ann Easterling wrote:
>>This dumbness and desire for repetition fascinates me too. When
>>we were putting together the publication for documenta we talked a bit
>>about this desire
>>
>Edmund Burke called repetition "artificial infinity". It sets up the
>expectation of more, like the net. Someone pointed out on another list that
>this is also what television does and why the so-called technological
>"have-nots" may be better off without the artificially induced craving that
>can never be satisfied. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said cigarettes were
>sublime and left you unsatisfied, what more could you want?
>
>Fashion is the same thing over and over again, only different (Versace vs.
>Armani, this year vs. last year) because humans are all the same, only
>different. Too much difference and they'd be another species. Which is why
>the Versace murder is both horrifying and fascinating. Murder is a tear in
>the fabric that can't be repaired or incorporated like the occasional
>heroin overdose. There's already rumors that it was really a mafia rubout,
>which would at least give the murder in a familiar context. It is the
>suspect, Cunnanan, who has the rhythm going, who is always changing and
>impossible to pin down. We await breathlessly his next manifestation on the
>nightly news.
>
>
Did Versace represent an intolerable freedom of imagination, thus had to be
eliminated in the name of *manifest uniformity destiny*(tm), otherwise
known as M.U.D. ? How striking that as the story unfolds, it is more like a
screenplay than reality... the killer was a preppy hustler who has gone mad
and is hiding out in the identity of a woman... the victim had a billion
dollar empire, an excessive imagination, a ruthless business instinct...
everything, he was rumored to have said, was business; art, love, sex, etc.
had to be seen as business; how ironic that his death experience came close
to performance art, yet if it were a rub-out, which it very well could have
been (if some of the business practices that are considered standard in
Russia are inspiring a global emulation) then it may be seen as business
masquerading as art masquerading as business... would anyone care for a
preztel?