Art of Gibberish

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

The rewards for academic gibberish, closely related to the purely verbal, non-visual, entirely nihlist criticism and rationalizations for Duchampian dadaist Conceptual art and its offshoots, continue to pour in. One "professor" of sociology has been promoted to distinguished professor of sociology, even after his Journal "Social Text" was completely hoodwinked by the Sokal Hoax noted in a previous post. From "CUNY Rewards a Laughingstock" (12/06/2004):

In the non-academic world, Aronowitz was instantly recognized as a charlatan. At CUNY, little more than an instant later, he is "recognized." That's the problem—and it's larger than Aronowitz. Absurdity—in a person or an idea—is no bar to academic promotion. Stripped of the Darwinian control of a reality check, humanities professors nationwide are now spinning out invincibly ignorant, incandescently silly variations on the ancient theme of Protagorean relativism—variations that go by resonant names like "poststructuralism," "perspectivism," and "discourse analysis." Their common features: baseless, shifting, virtually impenetrable jargon, and a dogmatic insistence that there is no independent reality beyond appearances, that knowledge is always a tool of power.

The inevitable outcome of such theorizing is the denial that "facts" exist or that "evidence" can establish objective truth. From this follows a generally unspoken corollary: the demotion of truths such as the European slave trade, the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulags to the status of well-received rumors.

Aronowitz, indeed, provoked Sokal's hoax by his commitment to the relativist point of view—even in the realms of mathematics and physical science. The resulting whiff of national humiliation does, in a sense, distinguish Aronowitz from most of his peers. But he is only one among hundreds of professors of gibberish currently employed at American universities. It is up to the schools themselves to stop perpetuating nonsense.

Fanatics such as this cling to their religion to the end, as do their legion counterparts in fine art who perpetuate the same pointless nonsense that is powerless to communicate or express anything, even its own contrived, "challenging" absurdity.

- badbadart.blogspot.com/2004/12/art-of-gibberish.html

[blaise]

Relativism and deconstructionism are both aspects of decadence. They exist only in a society possessing a surfeit of wealth sufficient to support the academic hustlers who propound such arrant nonsense or the wannabes in the audiences who pretend to understand them.

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

M. said:

The rewards for academic gibberish, closely related to the purely verbal, non-visual, entirely nihlist criticism and rationalizations for Duchampian dadaist Conceptual art and its offshoots, continue to pour in. One "professor" of sociology has been promoted to distinguished professor of sociology, even after his Journal "Social Text" was completely hoodwinked by the Sokal Hoax noted in a previous post. From "CUNY Rewards a Laughingstock" (12/06/2004):

In the non-academic world, Aronowitz was instantly recognized as a charlatan. At CUNY, little more than an instant later, he is "recognized." That's the problem—and it's larger than Aronowitz. Absurdity—in a person or an idea—is no bar to academic promotion. Stripped of the Darwinian control of a reality check, humanities professors nationwide are now spinning out invincibly ignorant, incandescently silly variations on the ancient theme of Protagorean relativism—variations that go by resonant names like "poststructuralism," "perspectivism," and "discourse analysis." Their common features: baseless, shifting, virtually impenetrable jargon, and a dogmatic insistence that there is no independent reality beyond appearances, that knowledge is always a tool of power.

The inevitable outcome of such theorizing is the denial that "facts" exist or that "evidence" can establish objective truth. From this follows a generally unspoken corollary: the demotion of truths such as the European slave trade, the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulags to the status of well-received rumors.

Aronowitz, indeed, provoked Sokal's hoax by his commitment to the relativist point of view—even in the realms of mathematics and physical science. The resulting whiff of national humiliation does, in a sense, distinguish Aronowitz from most of his peers. But he is only one among hundreds of professors of gibberish currently employed at American universities. It is up to the schools themselves to stop perpetuating nonsense.

Fanatics such as this cling to their religion to the end, as do their legion counterparts in fine art who perpetuate the same pointless nonsense that is powerless to communicate or express anything, even its own contrived, "challenging" absurdity.

- badbadart.blogspot.com/2004/12/art-of-gibberish.html

No comment! I'm at a loss for words.

[MC Habber]

I remember reading the article a few years ago and getting a good laugh out of it.

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

The Sokal hoax repository

[blaise]

On occasion I have heard academic hustlers pontificate in verbal constructs that sounded like isolated phrases consisting of terms from biology, physics, mathematics, philosophy, and economics strung together into a mishmash by an uncritical (or naive) computer. These were painful experiences. I was tempted to interrupt the speakers with outbursts such as, "I laugh at your pretensions, I laugh at your bulbous nose, comb-over, and pigtail." I restrained myself while expressing nothing more than a scarcely audible sigh. When I encounter such balderdash in print I simply don't read on. Of course I enjoyed the spoof.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Quotes: From Art to Antiart

"As for me, I certainly consider a great appreciation of painting to be the best indication of a most perfect mind, even though it happens that this art is pleasing to the uneducated as well as to the educated. It occurs rarely in any other art that what delights the experienced also moves the inexperienced."
"The first great care of one who seeks to obtain eminence in painting is to acquire the fame and renown of the ancients. It is useful to remember that avarice is always the enemy of virtue. Rarely can anyone given to acquisition of wealth acquire renown. I have seen many in the first flower of learning suddenly sink to money-making. As a result they acquire neither riches nor praise. However, if they had increased their talent with study, they would have easily soared into great renown."
-- Alberti, from On Painting

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
"Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish."
-- Michelangelo

"Drawing is the probity of art."
"To draw does not mean to simply reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that. Drawing includes three and a half quarters of the content of painting. If I were asked to put up a sign over my door I should inscribe it: School for Drawing, and I am sure that I should bring forth painters."
"Drawing contains everything, except the hue."
"Expression in painting demands a very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good if it has not been formulated with absolute exactitude. To seize it only approximately is to miss it and to represent only those false people whose study it is to counterfeit sentiments which they do not experience. The extreme precision we need is to be arrived at only through the surest talent for drawing. Thus the painters of expression, among the moderns, turn out to be the greatest draftsmen. Look at Raphael!"
"One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil. As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good."
-- J.A.D. Ingres

"In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature."
-- Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

"Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity."
"In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History."
"Painting's washed up. Who'll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?"
-- Marcel Duchamp

"Take an object.
Do something to it.
Do something else to it.
Do something else to it, again."
-- Jasper Johns

"This telegram is a work of art if I say it is."
-- Robert Rauschenberg

"They've [the neo-Dadaists] looted Duchamp's store, but all they've done is change the wrapping paper."
-- Pablo Picasso

- badbadart.blogspot.com/2005/01/quotes-from-art-to-antiart.html

[blaise]

Many years ago, when I was an aspiring young chess player (who achieved only moderate success despite devoting more hours to Caissa, the goddess of chess, than I did to my academic studies), I met Marcel Duchamp on several occasions at a well-known chess club to which both of us belonged. By that time Duchamp had forsaken art in favor of chess but failed to achieve even moderate success in his new passion. Nevertheless, his fellow members eagerly sought his company. By virtue of being young I was able to extricate myself from the lure of a tournament chess career and correct my misguided life course. Unfortunately for Duchamp, he was left in limbo and continued to live his remaining years on a reputation he had no further interest in.

[blaise]

Here's an experiment worthy of Derrida.

He should elongate and flex his neck forward, point his head down, and direct it into his rectum. Then he should thread it carefully along his alimentary canal (taking care not to damage his delicate sphincters) and his glottis until his head resumes its usual position.

Next, he should flex his neck backward and downward until his head enters his rectum and traverses his alimentary canal. This time, when his his head emerges it would be facing in the opposite direction. So it really does matter which way he sticks his head up his ass. The relative gives way to the absolute.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Blaise said:

Here's an experiment worthy of Derrida.

He should elongate and flex his neck forward, point his head down, and direct it into his rectum. Then he should thread it carefully along his alimentary canal (taking care not to damage his delicate sphincters) and his glottis until his head resumes its usual position.

Next, he should flex his neck backward and downward until his head enters his rectum and traverses his alimentary canal. This time, when his his head emerges it would be facing in the opposite direction. So it really does matter which way he sticks his head up his ass. The relative gives way to the absolute.

Perhaps you should develop the idea into a paper.

Working title:

Deriding Derrida - An About Face

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

P&G buys out Gillette, Molson's provides loan guarantees.
I guess George got out of the cattle packing business be4 the Mad Cow scare hurt his holdings. After selling his ski hills it was all downhill.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Exactly. At no point did he ever even consider using paint, never mind a brush. But he drew allright - he drew plenty of cash. A perfect illustration of the level to whch the state of the art has sunk.

[blaise]

M. said:

Perhaps you should develop the idea into a paper.

Working title:

Deriding Derrida - An About Face

Einstein advanced both a General Theory of Relativity and then a Special Theory of Relativity to cover a more restricted set of conditions.

The Derrida experiment would be a special case in that it requires a pinhead cranium to avoid rupturing the walls of the distensible passages. Come to think of it, the heads of people who fall for his gibberish just might satisfy that condition.

[franko]

MIT students pull prank on conference
Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted

[/b] [/center]
Thursday, April 14, 2005 Posted: 7:29 PM EDT (2329 GMT)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

more on gibberish (or is it moron gibberish?)

the . . . um . . . “paper”

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

franko said:

MIT students pull prank on conference
Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted

[/b] [/center]
Thursday, April 14, 2005 Posted: 7:29 PM EDT (2329 GMT)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

more on gibberish (or is it moron gibberish?)

the . . . um . . . “paper”[/quote]
Ah, the adage "people get the government they deserve" does sometimes hold true. What a relief!

[blaise]

M. said:

Ah, the adage "people get the government they deserve" does sometimes hold true. What a relief!

Not all people get the government they deserve. Sometimes they get pulled down along with the swirling excrement that outvoted them by pulling the wrong lever. Democracy ain't perfect.