How can you make a new proverb? Aren’t proverbs just old sayings, grounded in common experience, mere nuggets of popular wisdom, without origins, without authors? So when someone claims to make a new proverb, something interesting must be happening. Apuleius of Madauros, writing in the 2nd Century CE, renowned for his novel about a man-donkey, […]
The 2012 exhibition Animal Spirits at the DESTE Slaughterhouse was inspired by the economist John Maynard Keyne’s concept of “animal spirits”: Here is the description of the exhibition on the DESTE website: Animal Spirits references a concept coined by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued in his 1936 book, The General Theory of […]
Since yesterday I brought up memories of my sabbatical in Madrid and how a book I read later intervened in that memory, it seems fitting that today I post about the book Kim Gordon: Noise Name Paintings and Sculptures of Rock Bands That Are Broken Up, published last October by the Deste Foundation For Contemporary […]
– O troubled humanity! O the emptiness of life! – Who wants to read about that? – Are you asking me? No one, by Hercules! – No one? – No one or two. –That’s wretched, pathetic. You know how to serve up warm tripe, Make a shivering client the gift of a second-hand cloak, Then […]
I am writing this Minus Plato post on my phone, while sitting in the car outside MOCA Cleveland, waiting for my son to wake up from a nap. Inside may lie in wait an exhibition, an artist, an artwork, that could be the subject of a future Minus Plato post. But all I can do […]
Artist and publisher Paul Chan was recently interviewed by 032c magazine about his recent book projects with his press Badlands Unlimited that include a series of erotic fiction written exclusively by women (New Lovers) and a radical new edition of a Platonic dialogue (Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning). I know that I have […]
There is no original text, no “right,” perfect, whole object; we only have a broken bit of ceramic, mediated by centuries. This is how Page duBois, in her book Sappho is Burning (complete with a Nancy Spero work on the cover), describes the potsherd that contains what we know of as Sappho fragment 2. Here […]
SOCRATES But at this point I’m suffering an episode of brain fever, so to speak, and those who of their own free will go completely wrong in some way in fact seem to me to be more fitting persons than those who do so unwillingly. The blame for my present suffering I place on the […]
Opening this weekend is Paul Chan’s new exhibition Hippias Minor at the DESTE Foundation project space, the Slaughterhouse on the Greek island of Hydra. I have been honoured to have been a part of this exhibition in the form of the new book Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning, published by DESTE and Chan’s […]
Jump to 1:05:05 in the video & then go click on any of the images below: