Things pseuds say

>Adult events and political -isms are "deep themes"
No, your shitty YA dystopian book is not deep. Not even if it's got sex, suicide, and a one-tonne metaphor for racism.

the use-value of a particular commodity is not a limiting factor to its potential use as an object of aesthetic pleasure. see Duchamp, and Sontag.

I'm glad you liked it :^)
Tell me it's completely wrong though. What is there to write about our time? There can neither be a Draußen vor der Tür nor a Zeit der Schuldlosen nor a Das Spinnennetz nor anything similar. It is the same in other forms of art.

A pseud is someone who wants to look like they know stuff more than they want to actually know stuff. It's not someone who thinks they know stuff, but is completely wrong. That's just being an idiot.

you can write about the coming AI/brain-interface Eschaton

It's already begun with the internet, it will be obvious to everyone what's hapenning in 20 years, and within 50 years, it will have arrived.

Last great artist was Osama Bin Laden.

There's something to be said for that.

I'm sure there's plenty of similar performance artists. Unfortunately, their lack of relevance to the West leaves them undiscovered. If only we weren't so Anglo/Eurocentric.

Maybe if you call graffiti tagging art as well, because that's what he's the equivalent of tbqh.

9/11 was only one small part of his piece. You're just one of those plebs who watches Hamlet for "To be or not to be".

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake. What purports to be art begins to look like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher and communal idea.

The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of our human calling.

When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art, which grows from a yearning for that ideal, I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the 'dirt' of the world. On the contrary! The artistic image is always a metonym, where one thing is substituted for another, the smaller for the greater. To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. Substitution ... the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.

>piece
Spraying your shit all over town doesn't give it any more depth.
Yes, Osama changed the way security worked. Yes, Osama gave us the USA PATRIOT act. But "muh government taking freedom away for security" has already been done. Der Totale Krieg and holocaust so on was at least something somewhat new for our society.

Oh, and don't even start with le alternative political rock about oil wars (Serj Tankian, Rage Against The Machine and so on), that's incredibly weak.

I would never want to see either of those people.

That jug looks ridiculously hard to fill.

His work was profoundly aesthetic. Reading politics into it is largely missing the point, although he undoubtedly had some political messages (ex. Great Man theory, means justifying ends, first world vs. third world). His attacks, and their result and their causes and their motivations, all display an incredible judgement for contrast and juxtaposition. This itself is one of the key ways an artist can appeal to the intuitive side of human nature; of course, the raw terror and turmoil experienced at the time cannot be left out, but people have a tendency to overemphasise its importance.

The Holocaust was particularly great too, I admit, although in a radically different way. It was so good that it's actually become a cliché, affecting nearly every artistic work -- whatever medium -- after it. The methodicality, the mechnicality, the detachment of raw, emotional motivation from execution, the contrast of religious and ethnic and even individual fervour with the cold faced guards (bearing in mind their own motivations) -- it is a very depressing work, but that is what makes it so good. Of course critics at the time were unable to move past its superficial "amorality", much like Finnegans Wake.

>Writing isn't some magical thing that blesses some of us. Like any art, it's a talent that needs to be fostered
Come on m8 Salafism is aesthetic as fuck, and OBL really popularised it as a movement.

Maybe it was just for decoration.

Honestly the only thing worse than a "pseud" here is you.

It seems we're talking about something entirely different. You're talking about the act as art itself, whereas I meant Hitler more as something like a patron of art.
I maintain that Osama did nothing new and did too little (slightly greater scale, etc.) to make it truly interesting, but I haven't read much into it either to be fair, so maybe my understanding is just too lacking.

Yes Kamares ware was probably expensive vanity items for the rich rather than everyday practical items.

Originality is not inherently desirable*. Nevertheless, in a few key areas he was an innovator. What he did, which was truly new, was orchestrate a grand work from and for a destitute region to a prospering one. Gaddafi (a good artist in his own right, though unfortunately underrated by the community) had made some small steps towards this kind of art, but he did not live in the right conditions nor did he have the same ambition as Bin Laden. Bin Laden did not shy away from manipulating a wholly different animal to his own background, giving his work the contrasts that make it so great.

However, we should keep his materials in mind. The societies which he worked on, and the history they had developed by then, were also important factors.

*unless you are using originality as a device, in which case it is what you are using originality for which is desirable more than originality itself.