Aesthetic Materialism

Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism. Thus, romanticism is opposed to science in so far as it sees science as a form of managerialism.  Question: but is science, itself, also a form of romanticism?

 Romanticism can be defined in one word: anti-managerialism.

  Reverse Modernism  At a recent art event - a live video performance by Debora and Jason Bernagozzi of Signal Culture, at Visual Studies Workshop, using the software tools that they developed - renowned video artist Peer Bode (who had been their teacher) stood and spoke about how contemporary artists were not only making art, but also creating instruments for making art.  He also reminisced about a conversation with Nam June Paik in the 90s, in which Paik had said that he felt bad for painters, because painting was no longer the vanguard of art.   But what this leaves out is that nowadays, people are not only making art, and they are not only making instruments for making art - they are making artists.  The production of artificial artists - coupled with the rapid adoption and permeation of the new artificial culture into both the highest strata of commercial society and the broader public - undebatably signals a new moment in the history of art,...

    I don't see myself as in favor of capitalism, or opposed to capitalism.  I have a very realistic view of capitalism. I aspire to have a scientific understanding of capitalism.   My realistic perspective on capitalism leads me to 3 major observations about it: 1. Capitalism has powered the development of institutions that have made human life the most prosperous, healthy, safe, and free it has ever been. 2. Capitalism has issues.  3. Capitalism will not last forever. 

  One of the greatest tactical mistakes of Karl Marx and Marxists generally was the failure to join forces with potential religious allies.  Imagine if the Democratic Party in the United States said that if you're religious, you're not allowed to be a democrat.  They'd be finished in a week.  Likewise, imagine if the Republicans said the same thing.  It would be automatic death for any political movement, but especially for a movement like Marxism, which claimed that "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves," and thus sought to build a mass movement of the industrial proletariat.  Perhaps the prohibition of religion might be a more achievable tactic in a movement composed of highly educated elites - either professionals, aristocrats, or the bourgeoisie themselves.  But a purely secular workers' movement is doomed from the start.

    S: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Euclid, Plato, William Shakespeare, author(s) of Genesis, Franz Kafka A+: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert, Henri Poincare, Joseph Fourier, William Blake, Hafez, Archimedes, Baruch Spinoza, Edith Massey, Zarathustra A: James Clark Maxwell, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Dante Alighieri, Georg Cantor, Gottfried Leibniz, Siddhartha Gautama, author of proto-Isaiah, Rumi, Leonardo Da Vinci, Mileva Marić A-: Erwin Schrödinger, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hendrik Lorentz, Johann Sebastian Bach, John von Neumann, Edward Witten, John Coltrane, Michelangelo, Leonhard Euler, Guy Debord, Aristarchus of Samos, authors of Mahabharata B+: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Milton, Charles Darwin, author of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, author of John, author of Matthew, Galileo Galilei, Pythagoras, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Harry Partch, Philolaus of Croton, Orlando Gibbons B: Homer, authors of the De...