Turn-Ons

“We eagerly consume noisy ephemeridae, here with a bang today, gone without a whimper tomorrow—movies, beach-wear, pulp magazines, this morning’s headlines and tomorrow’s TV programmes—yet we insist on aesthetic and moral standards hitched to permanency, durability and perennity” (Banham, 3)

 

 

 

“If the attitude of the cosmetician toward the body is a minimalism, then it is of a very different sort than the Minimalism spawned by the art world more than two decades ago. While the two share a desire to collapse the time of impact of a work to the immediate, the former pursued that goal by distilling form and material into an essence that radiated (spiritual) affect through unmediated presence. The reductions of cosmetic minimalism, on the other hand, are anorexic, a compulsion to starve the body until it dissolves into pure (erotic) affect, like a Cheshire cat in heat.” (Kipnis, 26)

 

 

 

“As the apparatus of cultural diffusion becomes increasingly technological, its ‘products’ become less viewable as discrete, individual events, but rather more as related elements in a continuous contextual flow, i.e., the book-novel compared to TV” (McHale, 109)

 

 

 

“45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.” (Sontag, 288)

 

 

 

“Giedion’s effort to clean up architectural discourse by covering architecture’s nakedness in the folds of articulate speech parallels the fact that many of the buildings he described were meant to exemplify the cleansing property of architecture” (Lavin, 71)

 

 

 

““Get rid of everything in your house or apartment that doesn’t represent who you are,” counseled quotable style guru Quentin Crisp. “You should regard your home as your dressing room.” (Garber, 94)

 

 

Done