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art painting artist japan mushroom motif theme repetition controversy contemporary modern modernity

✖ Via Frank Coehn Colletion: “Army of Mushrooms” by Takashi Murakami, acrylic on canvas on wood, 182.3cm x 182.3cm x 9.5cm (inc plexibox), 2003

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1962. He’s a contemporary Japanese artist. About the Mushrooms:

For me they seem both erotic and cute while evoking – especially for the Western imagination – the fantastic world of fairy tale. I thought that, by uniting the eroticism and the magic side of mushrooms, I could use them as motifs in my work. (read more)

Some of Murakami’s work is being exhibited in the palace of Versailles and it’s creating something of a controversy: see “Takashi Murakami takes on critics with provocative Versailles exhibition” (by Lizzy Davies, The Guardian, September 10th, 2010) and “Murakami’s Creations Invade Versailles” (by Rooksana Hossenally, The New York Times, September 13th, 2010. Visit the Chateau de Versailles official website for more info on the exhibition.

• Sep 17, 2010 link notes tagged: art painting artist Japan mushroom motif theme repetition controversy contemporary modern modernity

art design poster repetition sameness technology network social internet content medium message culture meme mainstream conformism

✖ Via 9 0 0 0 photostream on Flickr: “Same Shit”

Previously on Skandalon

• Aug 04, 2010 link notes tagged: art design poster repetition sameness technology network social Internet content medium message culture meme mainstream conformism

Un jeune collègue, bon spécialiste de Kant, étudiant la philosophie kantienne dans ses rapports avec la biologie et la médecine du 18e siècle, m’avait signalé un texte, de l’espèce de ceux qui engendre à la fois la satisfaction d’une belle rencontre et la confusion d’une ignorance à l’abri de laquelle on croyait pouvoir s’attribuer un brin d’originalité

✖ Via Le normal et le pathologique by Georges Canguilhem, PUF, coll. Quadrige, Paris, [1966] 2003, p. 171

You’ll find a review of the English translation for The normal and the pathological here. And here’s Canguilhem’s obituary by David Macey.

• Aug 01, 2010 link notes tagged: philosophy originality author book repetition confusion ignorance wisdom

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

✖ Via The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant, 1926, Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness [Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, p. 76]

The quote is MISATTRIBUTED to Aristotle:

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: ‘the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life… for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’”.

The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7. The misattribution is from taking Durant’s summation of Aristotle’s ideas as being the words of Aristotle himself. (Wikiquote)

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant on Google Books (no preview available) and on Amazon.

Spotted in Tumblr’s Radar. It was reblogged from Tomorrow Museum.

• May 26, 2010 link notes tagged: philosophy self identity action repetition Aristotle book author

The problem with people saying that others have deceptive goals (such as manipulation, hidden strategies and conspiracies, which can fit into what Habermas calls “systematic distortion” in The theory of communicative action, volume 1, 1984, Boston: Beacon press at page 332) while communicating is that if no other ground of justification is provided aside from an alternative view of the deceptive party’s real intentions, that hidden-but-revealed ground means not much more than the accuser’s own preconceptions of the world and the motives of those who participate in it (example: “corporations control our desires” is an assertion which is hardly grounded in any alternative view. As corporations reach into deeper layers of our psyche, as they permeate every aspect of our daily lives, and mostly, as they predate our own generation, who is to know what a genuine desire feels like or how it is autonomously produced ?). The latent character of deception provides a specular avowal of its discoverer’s self-interest (like the weird idea of genuine desire). His accusation cannot be extracted from its context to mean something more “real” or “true”, only another attempt at control or deception.

✖ Via Leftovers

• Feb 06, 2010 link notes reblogged from leftoverfest [via] tagged: communication control power origin genuine real truth impression repetition iteration philosophy