duns scotus

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. - Banksy 

 Better over the top under the top

" I don't write music, I invent it"

- Stravinsky

"A man climbs a mountain because it is there

"A man makes a work of art because it is not there"

- Carl Andre

bonus Andre-ism 

"Twenty years ago [Clement] Greenberg was listening to painters; now he's talking to them. The result is a formula for what painting should look like"

 That’s funny, I don’t like The Shining either. I’ve never watched it all the way through. Find a lot of Kubrick rather ponderous actually. But that’s the classic thing, though isn’t it, when a writer is so good, the way their mind works so compelling, it’s not really relevant whether you actually like the thing they’re enthused about, they’ve created this sort of surplus value - not quite the right term - but (from your point of view as still unconvinced or unmoved by the spur to the writing you’re reading), they’ve created something out of nothing. 

Same, actually, when they attack something dear to you - the critique is so well done, so provocative, that it creates a supplementary value - you don’t resent it, it’s a challenge to argue the defence.

 One thought for you - what values does the deconstruction of a dance music form add to it? The original deconstruction (ie Derrida, et al) was critical  - it involved very close work on philosophical texts, intended to unsettle and undermine its precepts, expose the hidden assumptions, the cognitive blindspots - showing how, for instance, one term in a binary was in complicity with the other term and dependent on it. Essentially the goal was to reveal the shaky foundations on which a philosophical or ethical or political argument was made. How does that transpose to the practice of making a "sort of" house track or a not fully functional jungle tune? Wouldn't it be more valuable - literally more constructive - to actually build a new form of dance music, rather than create this off-kilter, defective version of an existing dance form, which if nothing else does the job it was designed for?