retro-quotes # 556121211101111

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time 


"The art world presents a curious aspect. It is as though art and artistic inspiration had entered a kind of stasis - as though everything which had developed magnificently over several centuries had suddenly been immobilized, paralysed by its own image and its own riches. Behind the whole
convulsive movement of modern art lies a kind of inertia, something that can no longer transcend itself and has therefore turned in upon itself, merely repeating itself at a faster and faster rate. On the one hand, then, a stasis of the living form of art, and at the same time a proliferative tendency, wild hyperbole, and endless variations on all earlier forms (the life, moving of itself, of that which is dead). All this is logical enough: where there is stasis, there is metastasis. When a living form becomes disordered, when (as in cancer) a genetically determined set of rules ceases to function, the cells begin to proliferate chaotically. Just as some biological disorders indicate a break in the genetic code, so the present disorder in art may be interpreted as a fundamental break in the secret code of aesthetics"

 - Jean Baudrillard, talking about hyperstasis and glutted-clotted back in 1990, in the "Transaesthetics" chapter of The Transparency of Evil


"life, moving of itself, of what which is dead"  c.f. my phrase "necrotic vitality" from this 1999 survey I did of the Rock Book Overload"

"Imagine rock music as a beached whale's carcass. What seems like intense activity (all those bands!) is really necrotic vitality--a seething maggot horde living off the rotting flesh of a moribund culture. In their teeming tediousness, rock books exist on an even lower plane--microbial parasites who live off the maggots."


I thriftily recycled / adapted the metaphor for the distempered preamble to Unfaves of 1999

"Rock is like a fallen tree-- dead and rotting, it will surely sustain whole micro-ecosystems of bugs, toads, fungi, mosses, for years to come--teeming populations of miniscule critters  living off its moribund tissues (rock's archive of gesture and feeling and expression). Sure, you can focus on specific micro-scenes of rock (e.g. thrash/death/black metal, emo-core, whatever), and perceive bustling vitality -- but that doesn't mean that the tree, the overarching macro-myth, isn't dead."