Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Sade Olutola
#extradirty
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titsay
Not today Justin
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
todays bird
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
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EXPECTATIONS
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tannertan36
art blog(derogatory)
NASA
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hello vonnie
Product Placement
★
PR's Tumblrdome
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@privateagonies
It is worth observing, too, that when men can no longer love women they also cease to love or respect or trust each other, which makes their isolation complete. Nothing is more dangerous than this isolation, for men will commit any crimes whatever rather than endure it.
— James Baldwin, "The Male Prison" from Nobody Knows My Name
Let me point out to you that freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn't got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it's simpler to be asleep, when it's simpler to be apathetic, when it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important. And I'm not using freedom now so much in a political sense as I'm using it in a personal sense.
— James Baldwin, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel" from Nobody Knows My Name
I mean that in order to have a conversation with someone you have to reveal yourself. In order to have a real relationship with somebody you have got to take the risk of being thought, God forbid, "an oddball."
— James Baldwin, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel" from Nobody Knows My Name
The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
— James Baldwin, "In Search of a Majority" from Nobody Knows My Name
Anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor; and if one is a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.
— James Baldwin, "Fifth Avenue, Uptown" from Nobody Knows My Name
Let me tell you what really happened, the voice said. All those years you waited torpidly, like a sleepwalker, pulled and pushed about by others opinions, by external pressure, by your illusions, by the official rules you internalized. You were misled by your own frustration and passivity, believing that what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace.
— Ha Jin, Waiting
But now she was so different and rather boring. He realized how suffering had changed her. Once in a while he was bewildered by a strange emotion that would shoot a tingling pain to his temples. It made him wonder whether he cared for this married life, which was so tedious, so chaotic, and so exhausting.
— Ha Jin, Waiting
And hadn't you also heard or read that the world tilts on its axis ever so slightly every year so that the angle made the earth like a piece of metal when the sun hits it just right and it becomes just as bright as the sun itself? Hadn't you heard that it was getting hotter because of this tilt, this ever increasing tilt of the earth, which was inevitable and not humanity's fault, not our cars or emissions or Aqua Net but plain and simple entropy, or was it atrophy, or was it apathy?
— Tommy Orange, There There
Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we've been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.
— Tommy Orange, There There
Who am I to defy nothingness? who am I? who am I?
— Mahmoud Darwish, "The Dice Player" from Mural
I don't say: far away life is real with its imaginary places I say: life here is possible
— Mahmoud Darwish, "The Dice Player" from Mural
Today, of course, it is all an art market, the whole of American commerce. We can’t make a toaster anymore, a VCR, or even a decent faucet, but we can create desire. We can make fetching footwear, beautiful games, exquisite motorcycles, hot TV, great rock-and-roll records, and dazzling movies. Such artifacts constitute our principle contributions to global commerce. The alternative discourse of embodied dissent, however, has all but disappeared. Those customized and hopped-up objects and images we might expect, that demonstrate against the standards of the republic and advocate their own refined vision of power and loveliness, are nowhere to be seen — since power and loveliness themselves are presumed to be at issue — as if they might be talked away, along with the image, the object, and commerce itself, as evidence of human vanity, so that art might more closely approach the paper body of bureaucracy.
— Dave Hickey, "The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
If we do this, then we can stop regarding the art world as a “world” or a “community” or a “market” and begin thinking of it as a semi-public, semi-mercantile, semi-institutional agora — an intermediate institution of civil society, like that of professional sports, within which issues of private desire and public virtue are negotiated and occasionally resolved. Because the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things — or it would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out.
— Dave Hickey, "Frivolity and Unction" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
So here’s my suggestion: At this moment, with public patronage receding like the spring tide anyway and democracy supposedly proliferating throughout the art world, why don’t all of us art-types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue — that it has its moments and it has its functions, but otherwise, all things considered, in its ordinary state, unredeemed by courage and talent, it is a bad, silly, frivolous thing to do. We could do this, you know. And those moments and those functions would not be diminished in the least. Because the presumption of art’s essential “goodness” is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers’ money for public art education, and for the public housing of works of art that we love so well their existence is inseparable from the texture of the world in which we live.
— Dave Hickey, "Frivolity and Unction" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy
The harsh realities of violence, rape, sexual trafficking, child pornography, and hate crimes require that we keep a tight rein on the abuses of power that pervade the politics of sex. The poetics of sex, however, are often politically incorrect, thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties.
— Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity
After surviving that hell, would he still have been the kind of person who made choices we could understand?
— Han Kang, We Do Not Part
Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.
— Dave Hickey, "A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz" from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy