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Elegies to Failed Revolutions - Part I

This story was first published on Ten Fifteen, a semi-regular blog/newsletter about art, philosophy and cultural theory. Sign up here .    Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better, Fail a Lot, Fail Up On the morning of November 17, 1989, Ludvik Zifcak got up and made himself breakfast and tea. He did not rush, because the work he was about to do would not have to be done until evening. He turned on his Soviet-era color television, with its two channels, blurry images and sepia undertones, dressed while he sipped tea and read the minutes of a meeting he attended the day before. He was a special undercover agent of the Czechoslovak secret police (StB) and that evening he was to lead a group of students protesting against the communist government into a trap. Just weeks prior the East Germans have breached the Berlin Wall and toppled its government. In just a couple of weeks, the standing Czechoslovak government will transfer its power to the new coalition of artists, actors, economists
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Vampire Castle Missive #1 - Anish Kapoor Bites the Hand That Feeds

                It seem that with the death of Michael Brooks that the uphill battle against the denizens of the mythic VampireCastle , a general term for what constitutes the various negative aspects of the modern liberal left from call out and cancel culture to HR ID politics and Karening, coined by the late Mark Fisher, has suffered another setback. Brooks had a lot to say about the modern leftist obsession with “pseudo-wokeness” and was generally seen arguing against it on his and other podcasts. While I intend to wrestle and engage with Michael Brooks’ ideas later, it felt necessary to bring his position into what I will argue next.                 In a very general sense, it seems as though the art world is yet again late to the game as to what is actually happening on the left and engaged in a fight against itself and using faulty pop theory and misplaced logic to propagate its insane moralizing tactics. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the artworld and its institutions ha
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Why the Facts Don't Matter Anymore!

"That’s just, like, your opinion, man!                                                 -The Dude                   ‘Fuck the Facts,’ the slogan of the young and passionate, has been around for at least as long as I can remember. It was at least so when I was an angsty teenager. Today though, we are truly living in a post-fact world, where facts do not so much not matter, as much as what matters is who gets to use them and how. So in effect the facts indeed do not matter. This is obviously a contradictory statement.   But contradictions are logical fallacies and so is the statement ‘this statement is false.’ You get the point.                 The world in which we live is now entirely hypernormal. We have other words for this state of affairs, fake, unreal, obscurantist, post-truth, but hypernormal fits so well with our current way of life. Strange and terrible things are happening all the time. Events are seemingly coming and going and are entirely out of our control. There
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