"Our universe will never run out of these little gilded men. Even when the standard was abandoned, I melted my down for the Gold years ago, making sure even the Gods couldn't sort them out."
Charlton Heston's remark to a journalist upon asking him about his Awards and his relationship to The Academy.
“ If there are no more teams then we should make all the umpires wrestle to the death. It’s the only fucking way to play anymore…how could anybody win or lose if everybody has a whistle?...keep all the referee pieces on the board.”
-Barry Bonds’ cryptic response to a question regarding his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs.
King Midas asked the gold-toothed coyote, “How many values did you have to feed on in former times? What good teeth did you have? And today? What’s missing? –a question for dentists? economists? – artists?
King Midas is typically read as an allegory on the inherent uselessness of pure exchange value: when it comes down to digestion, gold is just another heavy stone. In the valley of looming debts, Midas, no longer allegorical, becomes tacit function: we credit everything with value and, likewise, our values are provided by an endless credit. We virtual Midasians exert ourselves to give value to everything we touch, whether it is the production of more values (virtual time/space of credit), evaluations to extend existing values (debt creditor relations), or the rearrangement of what and how we value (when debts are collected). If everything we touch takes on value (meaningful enough for mercantile), we consequently we undergo an inflation of values by valuing less but more often. This is the aesthetics of deficit. Deficit is not as a blanket denunciation of contemporary art, but as the very condition of its practice. “Gaseous values will lead to more then a little virtual indigestion,” laughed the gold-toothed coyote. To defer this reckoning with our deficit spending, and in the face of our values becoming empty morsels, we go into a frenzy of exchange hoping the mechanical programs of communication will sort us out.
An economist’s response: exchange does not strengthen bubbles, it stabilizes them.
Anything refusing to be exchanged must be exterminated at all costs or else cause the whole bubble, the alibi, to implode. Mr. Saul Alvarez’s Transmutation of gold into lead, when coexistence is no longer plausible presents such a conundrum: are convictions too unseasonable for equivalence, too pregnant for peer evaluations, made presentable only in death? “Participate or perish because only dead men are heroes,” said the gold-toothed coyote...
“I heard about that ‘post-comedian’ type, yeah yeah, laughter completes the joke, we all laugh to make sense of stuff. Sure, sure. But I tell jokes because I’m fucking mythological, I’m not funny because I get a lot of laughs, I’m funny because I make them laugh when they absolutely refuse to.” - Dave Chappelle's response when asked about the state of art.
“Nietzsche is the only thing worth reading. Personally I’ve never had to read a word, I don't do well with redundancy.” –Kate Moss when asked about university
