Philip Cherny > Recent Status Updates

"Love is an answer to the lack that lies at the heart of aliveness, but it does not compensate for that lack–it transforms it. Love transforms that lack into an excess that produces new contradictions; it is the luminous chasm and the ephemeral mass, freedom in impossibility, the always insufferable answer to the paradox of life."

This structure in which two opposing forms of equivalence can converge in the object—that of exchange and that of “proximity”—is a dialectical condition in which everything in capitalism...is understood as invested with a double valence: negative and positive...In the case of the commodity, [this is what] produces what Benjamin called "the ambivalence between its utopian and its cynical element."

But every material support, including the site itself—whether art magazine, dealer’s fair booth, or museum gallery—will now be leveled, reduced to a system of pure equivalency by the homogenizing principle of commodification, the operation of pure exchange value from which nothing can escape and for which everything is transparent to the underlying market value for which it is a sign.

Craig Owens criticized the East Village scene as a “simulacrum” of bohemia. But it felt real to me. What can be seen in hindsight was that reality and hype were tumbling over each other so quickly that both reactions were possible. The whole concept of marginality was in flux here. The media spotlight pushed cultural change at such a velocity that bohemians barely had a chance to stew in their legendary juices before

Does the drop of metal shine like a syllable in my song? Does a word sometimes slither like a serpent? Didn't a name like an orange creep into your heart? From which river do fish come? From the word silversmithing? When they stow too many vowels don't sailing ships wreck?