Mary Rose > Recent Status Updates

I just hate it when my Heideggerian U-boat is stuck in the cupcake aisle of the ontological supermarket instead of traveling at a profound ontological depth in the name of philosophy.

Quoting RB Kitaj: “"I've always loved [museums]. They are to me lighthouses of utopianism and social well-being." Why utopianism? Because the museum does nothing if it does not strive toward some ideal of visual literacy. Its mission begins from the belief that learning to see is as important as learning to read, and that seeing is not the property of one class.”

It’s amazing that in a book as otherwise tediously precious about “mental health” and “neurodivergence” as this one that a quoted comparison between adjuncts and addicts (referred to as “drug addled tweakers[s]”) is reproduced without critique.

This is the best art criticism/aesthetic theory book I've read in a hot minute. I'm sorry Maggie Nelson I was not familiar with your game

"Luhmann’s only real help was a housekeeper who cooked for him and his children during the week, not that extraordinary considering he had to raise three children on his own after his wife died early. Five warm meals a week of course do not explain the production of roughly 60 influential books and countless articles." I'm going to start sending male productivity writers to my feminist gulag.

"Knowledge isn’t just wise quotations from long-dead Greek philosophers in white togas." Obviously. Togas are Roman garments.

If I start updating my reading of this book with really uncooth, offensive things, just know that Paglia stared it.

Paglia is kind of a lunatic but by god she’s a lunatic who can write

Do we think McKinney's constant framing of trans people as a "problem" for lesbian archives is purposeful or what

Dorothy Allison getting horny over a particular type of computer for the Lesbian Herstory Archives. You will always be famous

I didn't know it was possible to write prose this stodgy. It's not that anything she's saying is difficult to understand exactly, or that her points are obscure, it just feels like wading through waist-high mud to get to the point I can clearly see her trying to make.

Baby butch calling the lesbian hotline to ask how to lead in a two-step. Bless

Maybe she’ll get to this later but wanted to log my complaint with the artist/consumer dichotomy. What about those who construct a discourse, award honors, teach, or otherwise have meaningful sway over the legacy of immoral artists? Thinking of my position as an art history teacher for eg.

Art ethics research continuesssss

In a world of people trying to popularize the (usually shallowly conceived) "female gaze" as an alternative to Mulvey's male gaze theory, only Laura U. Marks is brave enough to write about watching gay s&m porn and posit the "fag-hag gaze." Love

"Just because you own a weapon doesn’t mean that what follows becomes a formality. Where would the crime take place, then?"

""O Superman" is addressed to the pillars of the American dream. Superman, Mom and Dad, the justice system, and the military. It describes a world where conversations between family members take place through messages left on answering machines, and where attempts to resist the intrusion of technology into everyday life only result in further alienation."

"Tolerance—not assimilation—is the democratic litmus test for social equality."

"It is naive to think that these developers, who make a city space safe for one class of women by actively driving out another class [sex workers], have any concern for women *as a class*. The Times Square developers’ concern for women and women’s safety extends no further than seeing women as replaceable nodes with a certain amount of money to spend in a male-dominated economic system."

"As in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as... at worst, a pernicious glorification of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with un-desirables..."

"Was commercial film pornography sexist? Certainly. Was it anywhere near as sexist as the legit films playing across the nation’s screens in the same years? Not unless you simply took sexist and sexy as synonyms."

"I don't see any reason that a woman... couldn't take any (or every) role I've already described or will go on to describe for any (and every) male theater patron...though it does unmitigated violence to the West’s traditional concept of “women.” But I believe it is only by inflicting such violences on the concept that we can prevent actual violence against women’s bodies and minds in the political, material world."

“Do not whine and be complex-ridden, because it is annoying.” Sorry Mr Eco sir forgive me Mr Eco sir

“But notwithstanding the caloric ecstasy of some of Rubens's personages, we shouldn't discount the extraordinary elegance of some of his painting.” What if I told you it’s the fatness that makes Rubens worth looking at

“It used to be that we studied history, including art history, in order to broaden our horizons, to challenge our preconceptions, to get beyond the narrow confines of our present-day culture. That is, we endeavored as far as possible to put aside our contemporary values and prejudices in order to understand the (often very different) world of the past.” Now Roger certainly you don’t actually believe that?

“It is amusing to contemplate what Courbet would have thought of Professor Fried’s interpretation of his work.” Does Roger Kimball really think academics should be writing poetic odes to good art and laying them at the feet of artists like crowns of laurels? Is that what he thinks scholarship is for?

Quoting perfectly intelligible passages of theory and then saying “Now what do you suppose that means?” makes you look like an idiot, Roger

“I see these reliefs as they have come down to us irretrievably altered in the unforgiving operating room of time; in this case, buried for millennia under tons of rubble. We are now conditioned to like them stone-coloured, and I do. So I don't long for colour any more than I long for the fortepiano in listening to early Beethoven; I like the sound of the modern piano, the instrument of my time.”

“One learns that these reliefs were once brightly coloured… I don't fret about this. I do not live in the first millennium Bc, but today, in my own time. I see these reliefs as they have come down to us irretrievably altered in the unforgiving operating room of time… We are now conditioned to like them stone-coloured, and I do.”

“To deprive a people of their history, or to construct one for them that immortalizes humiliation, is a conscious cultural act of the powerful.”