Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism with Blue Triangle and Black Square, 1915 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism with Blue Triangle and Black Square, 1915 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam).Theodor Adorno writes:I believe that in general it is a prejudice going back to what might be called the intellectual version of the middle-class parlour, according to which the products of the mind are the property of the great thinkers, poets and composers, and so forth, whose plaster busts used to grace these parlours in the old days. They may have disappeared now, but may well survive in spirit, invisibly, and to even more disastrous effect because of that invisibility. We should prefer to say that a significant product of the mind is the result of a union of the mental effort of its producer and the objective ideas that are involved, and this is the ideal of mental activity in general. Moreover, Ladies and Gentlemen, this objective substance is moral in nature, and I should like to offer it to you almost as a maxim. The essence of a mental product is that in it the will of the individual thinker is submerged in the subject-matter, in the coercion exerted by the subject-matter, to the point where that will disappears entirely. Intellectual products are not the expression of intention and of the person who creates them, but represent the extinction of that intention in the truth of the objective matter at hand. -- source link
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