Why would anyone care what, say, Charles Babbage was trying to do, when he didn't actually do it in any sort of useful way? Surely this is largely how knowledge is produced—over time, with lots of false starts, and language and technique that is not yet adequate to the problem at hand.
> Is there any argument here other than "Adorno is an old git who hates change, young people, and popular entertainment"?
I think there is a very serious argument going on here. The nub of it is in this paragraph:
> I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.
Adorno is basically saying that the distortion of the experience of listening to music inevitably caused by dressing it up for mass broadcast results in a dilution of what is 'essential' in that music – roughly speaking, the capacity for revelation. The attempt to make the music more 'accessible', usually by cloaking it in cliché (what he calls here "the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria"), divests it of the potential to be revelatory. It actively lessens the chance of experiencing one of the "qualitative leaps" of understanding he's looking for in music—something beyond words, beyond discourse; an experience of the sublime, of something both absolutely beyond us and yet, afterwards, constitutive of us. Something that cannot be learned (no "pedagogical path"), but which can be known. It's obviously a high bar to set (almost insane, certainly irrational, to most people today) but it's worth engaging with, I think.
I think you're right that Adorno would despise most YouTube musicians. After all, there is hardly a better example of the fetishisation of technique, equipment, and process (not to mention the unquestioning habituation to cliché) than what you'll find on the average YouTuber's channel. (I say this as a regular watcher of many YouTube guitarists, some of whom I really like.) The idea, totally general on such channels, that you can follow existing patterns and paths to mastery (where the satisfaction comes from memetic reproduction of the already known) is obviously antithetical to the view of art and revelation outlined above.
Finally, I don't think there's anything conservative about Adorno's argument here. He is ultimately arguing against holding up what already exists (the Western classical tradition, in this case) as a fixed symbol of greatness, ready to bestow its gifts of historical authority and sophistication on anyone intelligent enough to encounter it. Adorno is saying the greatness of a work cannot be divorced from the nature of both its presentation and the audience's engagement with it. It is a sometimes subtle but I think fundamental difference of perspective to the conservative view of 'the canon'.
They don't have everything when it comes to tech or more niche material, but Kenny's (https://www.kennys.ie/) is very good and offers free (and often fast) shipping.
That also looks like a good alternative for the EU and some other countries, with delivery at €1 per book. (Just not the USA, which is €9.50 for some reason.)
The same Nobel prize that was given to Peter Handke in 2019? I like Handke's work an awful lot, as I do Tokarczuk's, but he's certainly not someone who furthers any "progressive-left agenda".
It's not a CMS thing, it's a Chrome thing.[1] It highlights the text in the URI fragment when you click through to the page, and also auto-scrolls to that text.
It appears that Google Search has started to add those text fragments onto URLs in search results. Is there a setting or a browser extension that allows me to get rid of them?
Or you can just stream the movies with less friction more options and a wider catalogue. People thought netflix would en being the spotify of movies. They were wrong, so now watch a robust pirate scene to re-flourish.
As a counterweight to the other opinions here, I'll just say that I think these chairs, particularly when grouped together, are immensely beautiful. I understand they are not intended as chairs one sits in for eight hours a day, but as lightweight, easy-to-make occasional furniture. There are other examples of Judd's furniture, mostly the desks[1] and tables[2], that are more 'practical' in the traditional sense, and which could even be described as approachable and warm.
I actually made a copy of his library bed[3] out of plywood last year, and intend to make some of these chairs (and maybe one of the desks) when I have some time this summer. I believe this is what the furniture was intended for: easy DIY replication, minimum of fuss with the maximum aesthetic impact. Easy to understand if one is familiar with Judd's work as an artist/sculptor, which is obviously the biggest influence on his furniture. You could also look to Gerrit Rietveld, Enzo Mari, and Shaker furniture as background for Judd's designs. I'd recommend reading his 1993 essay "It's Hard To Find A Good Lamp" [4] and seeking out a PDF of his (very rare) 'Furniture Retrospective' book[5], which places this work in its proper context. As he says in that essay, "Conventions are not worth reacting to one way or another."
As an aside, it is frustrating to read (over and over again) that one could only like this work, and work like it, out of some cooler-than-thou pretence. This is a very common bad faith response to art and design that does not (and does not seek to) conform to traditional expectations. As someone whose tastes run very much in a modernist direction, I find the assertion that "since it's so ugly, it must be avant-garde so I'll pretend to like it" ungenerous and shallow. Is it that difficult to accept that there are other ways of looking at the world, other traditions and other intentions? I'm not saying it's all good (when was it ever?), but the assumption of bad faith in those who respond to it is wrong.
'Dialectic of Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.
Don't want to open up a whole other can of worms but this is very clearly the role of a union in quite a number of industries. Such a body would offer both legal and financial support in a situation where an engineer was being asked to do something they felt was illegal or sketchy.
