Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 33, Issue 11

[G.H.Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net>]

On Aug 10, 2007, at 10:47 PM, Chris Dodds wrote:

> on. We have to acknowledge the media landscape has changed somewhat 
> over the last decade, and gamers are now editors of newspapers and 
> publishers of blogs, hence unprecedented levels of interest in MUVEs 
> from news agencies. The excitement over SL is due to its nature as a 
> social tool capable of generating complex creative and capitalist 
> outcomes.

gh comments:

IN THE 1930'S masses of people supported the rise of Fascism. Just 
because a large group of people with the blessings of large 
corporations support an idea, it doesn't mean that it's a good idea. 
Addicting the Chinese population to opium was also a strategy of the 
British Empire. That was a great idea from their perspective. Ijust 
finished reading the Calvin Tompkins Biography of Duchamp. This is what 
Duchamp has to say about art.

"Works of art could not be understood by the intellect, he maintained, 
nor could their effect be conveyed in words. The only valid approach to 
them was through an emotion that had “ some analogy with a religious 
faith or a sexual attraction---an aesthetic echo.” This echo, however, 
was heard and appreciated by very few people. It could not be 
learned---either you had it or you did not---and it had nothing 
whatsoever to do with taste, which was merely a parroting of 
established opinion. “Taste gives a sensuous feeling, not an aesthetic 
emotion,” Duchamp said. “ Taste presupposes a domineering onlooker who 
dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into beautiful 
and ugly,” whereas the ‘victim’ of an aesthetic echo is in a position 
comparable to that of a man in love or a believer … when touched by 
aesthetic revelation, the same man, in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes 
receptive and humble.” pp. 368-369,Duchamp, A Biography by Calvin 
Tompkins, published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996