What is Wrong with Us

Eccentricity, which is the unselfconscious difference from other men in the way of going about life, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, has given way to exhibitionism, the conscious adoption of a mark of difference merely to stand out from one’s peers

Orwell knew, this sort of nonsense is inherently dangerous. Ready-made phrases, he cautioned, ‘will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need ... will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

Such phraseology’, says Orwell, ‘is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them’.[9] It distances language from reality by deadening imagination

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity’, says Orwell. ‘When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.’[

Originality, as distinct from novelty, always evolves within a tradition

To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly texts,’ he says, ‘contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality

Appropriation art approaches the spectator with a nod and a wink. You have to be aware of what is being appropriated to get the message - and you take satisfaction from the fact that you know what is being copied and others don’t. The intended message doesn’t get across unless the spectator has, somewhere in his or her memory bank, an image of the prime original. Appropriation, in its fully developed form, is addressed to the art-literate only.

The artwork is the constructed situation which arises between the audience and the interpreters of the piece

contemporary art can now, in the eyes not only of a major official cultural institution, and also in those of the mass public drawn to that institution, be simply the impact produced by a certain kind of charismatic personality. It has become a substitute religion, though one without any kind of stable theological framework. And certainly without any central body of doctrine (disputed as this might be on occasion by various competing sects).

As another celebrated

The best prescription to decrease the symptoms and perhaps cure the illness is a wide range of reading in the best of literature, what Matthew Arnold referred to as the best that is thought and known.