Why the Art World is a Disaster

Conservative Roger Kimball makes a point:

Duchamp mounted a campaign against art and aesthetic delectation. In one sense, he succeeded brilliantly. Only the campaign backfired. Once the aloof and brittle irony of Duchamp institutionalized itself and became the coin of the realm, it descended from irony to a new form of sentimentality.

Kimball’s view that art should gratify and ennoble the viewer is a bit suspect. Is that all art is? Duchamp and his campaign against delectation disagree.

Postmodernism Pwned

Terry Eagleton explains why Bush is a postmodernist:

“Torture is morally wrong because God’s will has determined it to be so, not because it is wrong in itself. In fact, nothing is right or wrong in itself. God could easily have decided to make failing to torture each other a punishable offence. There can be no reason for his decisions, since reasons would hamper his absolute freedom of action. … He is the source of his own law and reason, which are there to serve his power. Torture could well be permissible if it suited his purposes. It is not difficult to identify the inheritors of these doctrines in our own political world.”

And global warming is still up for debate, evolution is just a theory, etc. The clever part is where Eagleton links postmodernism with Protestantism because things with fixed meanings and “essence” was thought to be incompatible with an omnipotent God. Martin Luther and Nietzsche, together at last! It’s provocative, if nothing else.

I love this part:

the motto “Life is what you make it” may sound banal, but it reeks of a similar hubris. It “reflects an individualist bias common to the modern age” by insisting that we all find our own meaning of life in a personal, private realm. But if meaning has its own roots in language, then claiming this, Eagleton argues, is like claiming that everyone gets to make up their own personal meanings for words.

Safari 3 Beta on Windows XP: Enable Debug Menu

If you just grabbed the Safari 3 Beta for Windows XP, you can enable the Debug menu by editing this file: C:\Documents and Settings\<YourUserName>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist

Add this to the list of keys:

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>