Ontology Friday: Arts and Society a la Grainetier

"It is the persistent clinging to the object; the insistence on the continued production of artefacts qua fetishes required by bourgeois collectors absorbed in rituals of phallus-worship that implicates Art as a co-conspirator in the exploitive domination of the world by western phallogocentrism. To the extent that artists are successful in magically transforming the limp body-and-mind of the bourgeoisie into an attentive agent whose swollen will-to-power is able to confer feelings of marvellousness and uncanniness upon the horrors of its apparatuses, and the banalities of its worlds, they are guilty of complicity. What is left of creativity would be best utilized in efforts to violently reaffirm the real as real and to smash everything resembling "aesthetic thinking". Within the real there is no Power, there is no Art, there is no recognition of the vanity of seductively dressed abstractions."

Camille Grainetier
Puppets, Mannequins, and Dolls, 1989

(special thanks to Perforations, where you can find yourself a hearty mind-load for any occasion!)

Parmenides, Father of Ontology