Researching for my paper on Immoral Art, I came across “works” from the Wiener Aktionists. On a site with truly horrible short films from the 1960s there is a film showing Otmar Bauer vomiting, eating his own vomit, and so on. Next, there are several films showing Otto Muehl in horrible, and dirty scenes; there…

In follow-up to a previous post that produced the interim conclusion that art is unsurmountably historical: the circularity we get upon trying to understand when someone is an artist is best accommodated (or rephrased) by conceiving of art as a practice. It is a practice in the sense of being co-constituted by peculiar attitudes which…

So I hear Douwe Draaisma say—in an interview on television—that we have many kinds of memory, at least one per sense organ and then a lot more of them. (I like that model). And he defines memory as anything we retain from the past to deal with the present. (I like that definition). And he…

…Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers… Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person…

We perceive a chair as that thing out there, which allows us to sit on it, or to pick it up and move it a bit, etc. It is us who add the practical structuring, but it is the chair which adds the affordances, i.e. the actual or anticipated (or remembered) affordance: things the members…

…Could he be tried for staging a corpse?… What we see on the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin is, for instance, a corpse, beheaded, sitting on a chair, in “Man without a Head”, 1993; a head that is apparently lying on a plate, in “Head of a Dead Man”, Mexico 1990. Several questions are bound to…

Intuitionism in aesthetics is the view that the art work an audience is confronted with is merely a medium for the real work, in the mind of the artist: his intuition. A famous spokesman for this view is Bendetto Croce. The view is also associated with expressivism (Collingwood, Tolstoy), which holds that the work expresses…

A good music video is one where the imagery prompts suitably to aspects of the music, and where the music prompts suitably to aspects of the imagery. As a genre, or art form, the music video’s critical value is in this reciprocal prompting. The music does not have to be the best, the imagery doesn’t…

On the airport nobody knows you. That means that nobody you see there manages whatever part of your self. You are in-between persons, so to speak. Your self is vacuous because you are in a no-network assembly of persons. They, too, are in-between persons. This seems to me the core of this strange feeling of…

Recently, I developed this “argument from reunions”: People, when visiting reunions, say, of a High School class, notice how they fall back in their old roles. That is how we express the experience. But why does this happen? According to my view on how we farm out our perceptions to the things and events perceived…