Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Is anybody reading the f*ckin' thing?
Monday, July 30, 2007
Lexicon..pt III
What Does Telos Mean? | |
| For many, life is a journey with no destination. The ancient Greeks described history as an endless cycle of events, perpetually moving but never arriving. Like the Greeks, modern man drifts anchorless through life, experiencing and responding to each circumstance as it appears on the horizon but never really getting anywhere. For the Christian, however, every event—past, present, and future—moves toward a goal. Nothing is aimless; God causes all things to work together to accomplish His purpose (Romans 8:28). To explain this concept, the New Testament uses the Greek telos, meaning “end, goal, result, completion, History moves, not in circles, but straight toward the “end of all things” (I Peter 4:7; Matthew 24:14). It marches toward the climax of time—toward the complete fulfillment of God’s purposes. When mankind finally nears the finish line, it will find that the end is not a place, but a Person. Jesus Christ is the Telos, the End (Revelation 21:6; 22:13). When Jesus entered human history, to the untrained eye His path seemed random, but He traveled toward one destination, one end goal. He knew that His way led directly and purposefully t Main Entry: te·los Etymology: Greek; probably akin to Greek tellein to accomplish, tlEnai to bear -- more at TOLERATE | Golgotha, where He gave up His life to redeem the human race from sin. And nearing the end of His hours on the cross, He cried, “Tetelestai! It is finished.” He had perfectly fulfilled the goal His Father had set for Him. God has a telos for history. He had a telos for His Son. He has a telos for His children. He wants to transform us until we become like Jesus Christ. Ephesians 4:13 expresses the telos God plans for us: “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect [teleion] man.” The adjective teleion gives the idea of “complete, mature, grown up into full age.” Just as infants grow for years before reaching maturity, we will spend our lives growing into Christ’s teleion character—all our efforts in discipleship stretch toward this destination (Colossians 1:28). God’s commands are given to encourage His children to teleion character. “Now the end [telos] of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned” (I Timothy 1:5). The Telos Institute International aims to help you toward teleion, Christlike character, lighting the way to the glorious Telos Who waits at the end of your journey. Telos (philosophy)From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA telos (from the Greek word for "end", "purpose", or "goal") is an end or purpose, in a fairly constrained sense used by philosophers such as Aristotle. It is the root of the term "teleology," roughly the study of purposiveness, or the study of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology figures centrally in Aristotle's biology and in his theory of causes. It is central to nearly all philosophical theories of history, such as those of Hegel and Marx. One running debate in contemporary philosophy of biology is to what extent teleological language (as in the "purposes" of various organs or life-processes) is unavoidable, or is simply a shorthand for ideas that can ultimately be spelled out nonteleologically. Philosophy of action also makes essential use of teleological vocabulary: on Davidson's account, an action is just something an agent does with an intention--that is, looking forward to some end to be achieved by the action.
|
Lexicon..pt II
Thymos, one element of Plato's tripartite division of the soul — the other two being reason and desire — can be translated as spiritedness. It is the location of such feelings as pride, shame, indignation, and the need for recognition for oneself and for others.
Thymos can overrule both reason and basic animal instincts and propel one into a duel over an insult, or into a burning building to save a child, or into a war for a cause one finds just. According to Hegel, humanity is at its peak when it thymotically risks its life for the sake of a greater good. On the other hand, it is also what drives suicide bombers and other terrorists.
Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History and the Last Man, puts it thus: "Thymos is something like an innate human sense of justice."
He elaborates in two distinct directions:
- "...people believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people act as though they are worth less — when they do not recognize their worth at its correct value — they become angry..."
- "Thymos... as such is the psychological seat of all the noble virtues like selflessness, idealism, morality, self-sacrifice, courage, and honorability."
Lexicon..pt I
Agent (grammar)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In linguistics, a grammatical agent is the participant of a situation that carries out the action in this situation. Also, agent is the name of the thematic role (also known as the thematic relation) with the above definition. The word comes from a participle of the Latin verb, agere.
Typically, the situation is denoted by a sentence, the action by a verb in the sentence, and the agent by a noun phrase.
For example, in the sentence "Jack kicked the ball", Jack is the agent. In certain languages, the agent is declined or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. In Japanese, for instance, the agent is typically affixed with |ga| (the hiragana が). Although Modern English does not mark grammatical role, agency is informally represented using certain conventions; for instance, with the morphemes "-ing", "-er", or "-or", as in "eating", "user", or "prosecutor". (Cf. agent noun.)
The notion of agency is easy to grasp intuitively but notoriously difficult to define: typical qualities that a grammatical agent often has are that it has volition, is sentient or perceives, causes a change of state, or moves. These are in fact the qualities that Dowty included in his definition of a Proto-Agent, and according to his theory, the nominal with the most elements of the Proto-Agent and the fewest elements of the Proto-Patient tended to be treated as the agent in a sentence. This solves problems that most semanticists have with deciding on the number and quality of thematic roles. For example, in the sentence His energy surprised everyone, His energy is the agent, even though it does not have most of the typical agent-like qualities such as perception, movement, or volition.
The grammatical agent is often confused with the subject, but these two notions are quite distinct: the former is based explicitly on its relationship to the verb, whereas the latter is based on the flow of information, word order, and importance to the sentence. In a sentence such as "The boy kicked the ball", "the boy" is the agent and the subject. However, when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice, "The ball was kicked by the boy", "the ball" is the grammatical subject, but "the boy" is still the agent. Many sentences in English and other Indo-European languages have the agent as subject.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Personalism
peter halley image (above) ...me in California (below)
Where shall I begin and how shall I presume? To risk to dare to challenge. To release, engage, vomit out the collected phlegmata of shirked responsibility. Time drags on and the indictment grows, the coachmen awaits, the question looms. You are on. You are on. Hurry up please, it's time.Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The Book
Written by Jed Perl
Art - Criticism; Art - History Hardcover
October 2005 $35.00 978-1-4000-4131-2 (1-4000-4131-7)
desc
A fascinating, panoramic exploration of art and culture in mid-twentieth-century New York City from one of our most important and influential art critics.
New Art City takes us from the solitude of the artist’s studio to the uproarious bars where artists gathered, from the ramshackle bohemian neighborhoods of downtown Manhattan to the Midtown streets where steel-and-glass skyscrapers were rising and art galleries were proliferating. We encounter a kaleidoscopic range of artists. There are legendary figures–Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd–as well as still undervalued ones, such as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, and the eccentric thinker John Graham. We encounter, too, the writers, critics, patrons, and hangers-on who rounded out the artists’ world. Jed Perl helps us see what the artists were creating and understand how they confronted an exploding art audience. And he makes clear how the economic boom of the late 1950s and the increasingly enthusiastic response to Abstract Expressionism ushered in the rapacious art world of the 1960s and the theatricality of Pop Art.
Artists drew strength from the dizzying onslaught of Manhattan, and produced a tidal wave of new forms. These included Hofmann’s brazen flourishes of color; Pollock’s quicksilver skeins of paint unfurling panoramic arabesques; and the crushed, jagged, turning-back-on-itself calligraphy of de Kooning’s gnomic alphabets. And there was much more: Burgoyne Diller’s levitating rectangles; Nell Blaine’s explosive renderings of quotidian scenes; Ellsworth Kelly’s extraordinary simplifications, suggesting sails or semaphores.
A brilliant tapestry of social history, biographical portraiture, and criticism, New Art City illuminates a revolutionary, unprecedented time and place in American culture.
__###REPLACE###.name.verbose__
The New York Times Notable Book of 2005
A Christian Science Monitor Book of the Year
"There is no account of twentieth-century art in that fabled powerhouse of culture, New York, that comes anywhere near this astonishing book by Jed Perl. Perl has seen and digested everything: New Art City is the deep creative work of a decade and more; it is the story that all of us (both in the art world and out of it) have been hoping for – personal but authoritative, witty, written straight on without a syllable of the vile jargon of academe. It comes out of a deep understanding of America and its individual makers, both as artists and as people, in their relations to one another and to other cultures. I found it enthralling.”
—Robert Hughes
“The full story of how New York ‘found its place its the history of art’ has never before been told in such compelling detail. Documenting his narrative from dozens of hitherto-unexamined sources – films, diaries, letters, and novels, as well as critical writing – Jed Perl builds up a vast canvas that depicts the period in American art often called ‘heroic,’ and is as heroic as its subject.”
—John Ashbery
“This great bear-hug of a book never loses control of its dazzling account of the persons and places, the events and ideas that fused into the New York School. Vasari and Apollinaire would have welcomed New Art City.”
—Roger Shattuck
"A quirky and brilliant panorama of the triumphant Manhattan art scene in the middle of the last century."
—Sean Wilentz
“Perl matches the furor of ‘60s-era critics with his own invective. His passion is refreshing in an era that venerates every major 20th-century movement without discrimination.”
—Jonathon Keats, Forbes
“Perl’s highly readable and exhaustively researched history is bound to stand as the definitive volume on this hectic and fertile period in American art for years to come. “
—Ann Landi, ARTnews
“With ‘New Art City,’ Jed Perl has written the history of the New York art world’s rise to dominance in the 1950s. His narrative spans four decades and brings the city and its many artistic worlds alive in a vast and rich panorama. . . A delight to read. He never stoops to fashionable language to give substance to his ideas, and his avoidance of the arcane lingo that now passes for art criticism is refreshing. . . I was amazed at how engaging this story becomes in the hands of a brilliant critic who is also a painter and art historian — talents that too seldom merge. Start spreading the news — Jed Perl has given us a new standard book in the art-historical field.”
—Tom Freudenheim, The New York Sun
“In a statement from the late 50’s, the poet and art critic James Schuyler effused that to be a writer in New York was to be ‘affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.’ In Jed Perl’s New Art City, his new book about the Manhattan art world at mid-century, he captures that same vivacity and force . . . Few critics have as much sheer passion for their subject. The pleasure of reading New Art City comes from seeing that passion channeled into a larger structure, a project that has occupied the author for more than a decade. What should one call this book, anyhow? It’s hard to imagine research any more scrupulous than Perl's, yet words like ‘history’ or ‘survey’ make it sound too dry. As its title suggests, the book is more of a virtual city . . . If New Art City were a painting, it would probably be de Kooning’s ‘Excavation,’ the artist’s grand breakthrough from 1950. That canvas . . . is a huge tapestry of intersecting vectors. Its title invokes the uncovered energies of New York City, yet it maintains the beguiling autonomy of all the best abstract art. Perl’s book creates a similarly vast panorama, an overarching structure that opens onto new surprises at every turn. It has the startling immediacy of wet paint.”
—Peter Campion, The San Francisco Chronicle
Selected as one of the six best books of 2005: “This almost impossibly rich book evokes, explores, illuminates, and analyzes the Manhattan art world of the 1940s through the early 1960s, a period that famously saw the ‘triumph of American painting’ and New York’s concomitant rise to supremacy as the world’s artistic capital . . . the sort of grand marriage of criticism, history, and biography that Edmund Wilson achieved in his finest books . . . New Art City is a thrilling achievement.”
—Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
“Panoramic, fascinating . . . carefully researched . . . By far the most thorough account of the ‘triumph of American painting’ that we have. Perl conveys the messiness and richness of the era as the artists lived it. It is a splendid achievement and an exceptionally worthwhile read.”
—Terry W. Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor
“Only a New Yorker could have written such a pulsating book about the fascinating, panoramic exploration of art and culture in mid-century New York City. This is an art history that is crisply written and always relevant by the art critic of The New Republic, a man who hasn’t missed much since the 1980s.”
—Booklist
__###REPLACE###.name.verbose__
Jed Perl was born in New York City in 1951. He received a BA from Columbia College and studied painting at the Skowhegan School in Maine.
He was a contributing editor to Vogue in the 1980s and has been the art critic for The New Republic since 1994. Among his books are Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I and Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Deborah Rosenthal.
