Boucher, Mon Cher: Part Two

François Boucher - A Summer Pastoral, 1749

Boucher, Mon Cher: Part One

François Boucher - Sleeping Venus, c. 1734

The Bling Is The Thing

Damien Hirst - For the Love of God, 2007


'Sometimes when you're drunk you can see better.'

Damien Hirst

Go Mad Like It's 1899

Fight Club (soap), d. David Fincher, 1999

'Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.'

'Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.'

'There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.'

'The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.'

'Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

Les Poupées Noir

Hans Bellmer - Poupées, 1935


'This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena...for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization - what our children have to fear is not the cars in the highway but own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.'

From Crash by J.G. Ballard, 1985.

To Hell And Back Again

Charles Burns - Self Portrait


'This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, demons walked the Earth, made it their home, their Hell. In time, they lost their purchase on this reality, and the way was made for mortal animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges: certain magics, certain creatures.The books tell that the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed - infected - by the demon's soul. He bit another and another...and so they walk the Earth, feeding. Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out and the Old Ones to return.'

Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres - Napoleon on his Imperial throne, 1806


Napoleon was passionately attached to the theatre and (to a lesser extent) the opera, but there was scarcely any other aspect of Parisian life in which he interfered more. From Milan in 1805, Napoleon told Fouché that he thought a new play about Henri IV was 'too close to the present day' even at two centuries' distance (clearly he viewed the assassination of Henri somewhat subjectively, in the light of various recent plots against himself). He added, 'I think that you should prevent it, without showing your intervention.' In particular he objected to the words, in the heroic King's mouth, 'je tremble' on the ground that 'a sovereign may be afraid, but he must never say so.

From Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne.

King Of The Cocksuckers

Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) - Deadwood, 2004-6


'Swearengen's swarthy brute-ness and intelligent charm clearly relates him to some famous literary figures, most obviously Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff but also Oliver Twist's Bill Sikes. In casting McShane, Deadwood acknowledges this heritage physically: compare him, for example, with Robert Newton or Oliver Reed playing Sikes in Oliver Twist (Lean, 1948) and Oliver! (Reed, 1968). However, these figures, while not exactly one-dimensional, do not have the complexity of Swearengen. As David Ellison argues, it is important to acknowledge that Swearengen represents a "fusion of characteristics that Dickens could only distribute across characters. In other words, Swearengen is Sikes in all of his brute menace but he is also Fagin - a super-adaptive, improvisational opportunist with a dab line in self-parody." In this way, one of the major achievements of Deadwood lies in Milch's discovery of McShane's ability to nuance a British kind of villainy: one that references but also transcends (Americanizes?) the binary tic of Victorian psychology that opposes, say, Heathcliff against Edgar, Jekyll/Hyde, Picture/Dorian, Jack the Ripper/Prince Albert. [The] fortuitous casting of McShane Swearengen (the real Al was born in Iowa) allowed David Milch to articulate and realize a depth to Swearengen that not only enhanced the vividness of a real historical character but was also to overcome one of the pervasive oddities of nineteenth-century British literary characterization....Al Swearengen, as played by McShane, is a philosophic intervention into the nature of characterization itself.'

From Al Swearengen, Philosopher King by Jason Jacobs.

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Eight

View of Beyond Belief (exhibition) - Damien Hirst, 2007

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Seven

Ron Mueck - Dead Dad, 1996-7

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Six

Thomas Eakins - The Gross Clinic, 1875

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Five

Anatomy Class - Unknown, c. 1810

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Four

"Medical Venus" (Specola Collection, University of Florence)

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Three

Anatomical Teaching Model of a Pregnant Woman (Stephan Zick, 1639-1715)

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part Two

Rembrandt - The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632

My Body Lies Under The Scalpel: Part One

Gerard David - König Kambyses und der Richter Sisamnes, 1498

The Boy Whose Name Was Stolen By Art

Hippolyte Flandrin - Young Male Nude, 1855


'Mute icons are the only kind of beauty we find acceptable today.'

Mark Rothko

I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again

Frank Miller - Sin City


'Only after disaster can we be resurrected.'

Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), Fight Club, 1999 (d. David Fincher)

Careful, He Can't Hear You

Head Of Christ - 15th-16th C (Netherlands, North Brabant)


'I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.'

Orson Welles

And Yet So Far Away

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau - The Eiffel Tower, 1898


'When good Americans die they go to Paris.'

Oscar Wilde

She Comes In Colours: Part Seven

John Currin - Rotterdam, 2006

She Comes In Colours: Part Six

Vanessa Beecroft - VB55 (7 April 2005, Neuen Nationalgalerie)

She Comes In Colours: Part Five

Cindy Wright - Nipple, 2003

She Comes In Colours: Part Four

Sarah Lucas - Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992

She Comes In Colours: Part Three

Lucian Freud - Naked Girl, 1968

She Comes In Colours: Part Two

Egon Schiele - Nude, 1910

She Comes In Colours: Part One

François Boucher - Marie-Louise O'Murphy, c. 1752

Tales Of Horological Madness

Clock Face (Alice in Wonderland)


'The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.'

Albert Einstein

Games Of Truth And Chance

Blogopoly Board


'I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.'

Albert Einstein

Ask Questions First

Piet Mondrian - Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black, c. 1924/1925


'We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.'

Albert Einstein

Shoot Later

Jasper Johns - Green Target, 1955


'If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.'

Albert Einstein

When The Wheel Was Square

Kasimir Malevich - Red Square, 1915


'If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.'

Albert Einstein

There's Nothing Simple About Simplicity

Kalachakra Sand Mandala


'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'

Albert Einstein

In A Galaxy Not So Far Away...

Venus


'Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.'

(Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

The Door To Paradise Is Not Always Open

Lorenzo Ghiberti - Adam and Eve, Gates of Paradise, 1425-52


'An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.'

Victor Hugo

A View Of The Biggest Room Of All

Claude Monet - Le Bassin d'Argenteuil, 1872


'A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.'

Marcel Proust

Part of Us Will Always Remain Unspoken

Henry Fuseli - The Silence, 1799-1801


'Silence is the wit of fools.'

Anatole France

Strange Days Are These

Paul Gustave Doré - Canto XII, Purgatory, The Divine Comedy (Dante), 1857


'Hell is empty and all the devils are here.'

William Shakespeare

Eternity Weeps When You Cut It In Half

Anselm Kiefer - Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven, 1970

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix - Dante and Virgil in Hell, 1822


'Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.'

Mark Twain

Bleed Me An Ocean

Andres Serrano - Bloodstream, 1987


'The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The Gods At Play

Jesus action figure


'Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Scepticism Is Money In The Bank

René Descartes on the 100F note


'Doubt grows with knowledge.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The Neverending Moment

Edward Hopper - Hotel Lobby, 1943


'Few people have the imagination for reality.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

I Heard You While You Weren't Talking

Jenny Holzer - The Living Series: It Takes a While, 1980-82


'When ideas fail, words come in very handy.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The Problem Is The Answer

The Trapezium Nebula


'Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

If I Were Roman, Ya Ha Deedle Deedle, Bubba Bubba Deedle Deedle Dum

Johann Wilhelm Tischbein (1751-1829)- Goethe in the Roman Campagna, c. 1848


'A unused life is an early death.'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Clouds Are A Dreamer's Best Friend

John Constable (1777-1837) - Cloud Study, 1822


'One symptom of impending nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.'

Bertrand Russell