⇝ no h8 ⇜

«This is quintessential biennale art: visually seductive, responsibly researched, culturally portable and diplomatic, a protest conducted with fine-print slogans and no concrete demands. It all, in the end, feels increasingly lifeless, like a relic from a bygone era of neoliberal globalisation.  In Minor Keys is what’s been called a ‘posthumous exhibition’ – due to Kouoh’s sudden death last May – but perhaps what is really being mourned is the institution of the biennale itself: the fantasy of a cultural Olympics where political antagonisms can be temporarily sublimated through aesthetic experience and euphemistic commentary.»

«In art, you’re trying to produce an enigmatic space that is almost discursively inaccessible but carries a discursive promise nonetheless. When I’m writing, I can’t do that; I’m trying to produce fiery, lucid thoughts that aim at clarity.»

«As usual with charisma, this seems to be nothing but a psychic interaction between hyperactive unconscious processes at the edge of sanity and the zombielike existence of supposed normality in which individuation has been totally extinguished, it seems perfectly necessary to become a "follower" of whomever seems to be alive». 

«Today it is imperative to understand that art is not the effect of progress, nor a flaw due to a lack of progress, but rather a sort of biological lavishness that has escorted us since the birth of humanity.»

«“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics,” the mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote, in 1940. But matrix multiplication, to which our civilization is now devoting so many of its marginal resources, has all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board. It is possessed of neither beauty nor symmetry: in fact, in matrix multiplication, a times b is not the same as b times a. As the matrices increase in size, the arithmetic requires great computational power to solve. The latest large language models can involve about a trillion individual weights. A weeks-long hero run for such a model can use tens of thousands of G.P.U.s and require ten trillion trillion operations, which is more than the number of observable stars in the universe.»