There are lots of forces today which aim to deny all distinction between the commercial and the creative. The more this distinction is denied, the more amusing, understanding and well-informed people think they are. In fact, they are only translating capitalism’s demand for rapid rotation. […]
When advertising people explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, this shameless proposition forgets that there is no art which aims to compose or reveal a product which corresponds to public expectations. Advertising can shock or want to shock, it corresponds to a presupposed expectation. An art, on the contrary, necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art; it’s a meaningless phrase. There are popular arts, of course. There are also arts which require more or less financial investment, there is a commerce of arts but no commercial arts.
— Gilles Deleuze, The Brain Is the Screen (1989)
When advertising people explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, this shameless proposition forgets that there is no art which aims to compose or reveal a product which corresponds to public expectations. Advertising can shock or want to shock, it corresponds to a presupposed expectation. An art, on the contrary, necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art; it’s a meaningless phrase. There are popular arts, of course. There are also arts which require more or less financial investment, there is a commerce of arts but no commercial arts.
— Gilles Deleuze, The Brain Is the Screen (1989)
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Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy
Stephanie Ludwig ~ Atelier Veritas / Kätzchen [Kitten], 1901. Photogravure.
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Shomei Tomatsu & Ken Domon, Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document, 1961 (東松 照明, 土門拳)
The market was supposed to be an arena of choice, and 'commercial society' the perfection of freedom. Yet this conception of the market seems to rule out human freedom. It has tended to be associated with a theory of history in which modern capitalism is the outcome of an almost natural and inevitable process, following certain universal, transhistorical, and immutable laws. The operation of these laws can, at least temporarily, be thwarted, but not without great cost. Its end product, the 'free' market, is an impersonal mechanism that can to some extent be controlled and regulated, but that cannot finally be thwarted without all the dangers—and the futility—entailed by any attempt to violate the laws of nature.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
In 1843, Anna Atkins made a book of sea algae. Floating, like a ‘foam of daisies’ washed in from swelling folds of the ocean, the algae are fragments of short stories carried by the sea. The etymology of algae, which is Latin for seaweed, is obscure. Perhaps the word comes from alliga, which means ‘binding and intertwining’, which sounds like letters on a page, only the blue ink is white and the white page is blue.
— Carol Mavor on Anna Atkins cyanotypes, Blue Mythologies
— Carol Mavor on Anna Atkins cyanotypes, Blue Mythologies
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