When Émile Durkheim wrote on the concept of anomie (expanding on Jean-Marie Guyau`s work) in his 1897 book Suicide, he spoke of one end of anomie: a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion causing a destructive mismatch (moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations).
This is happening in the XXI century world, in many countries: those totalitarian (military or religious) societies where the social rule, expectations, and repression conform a cage around individuals, deposessing them of their individuality, their aspirations, subtly (or otherwise) imposing a social corset where the individual can not be itself, concentrating only on breathing, surviving.
Tomorrow, January 21st, 2012, NY
As I walk towards my office, I see an ad that makes me sick (as a matter of fact, I see many, but this one points to something other that the consumerism-sexism-excess that we are so dangerously getting used to).
The ad says “Turn now into memories”. How wrong is that?!!
Now is now. Now has to be now. Now should be now. Now has to remain now.
When you strive to “turn now into memories”, you are missing out on the real now.
Thanks to Sara, there is a very easy way to add code to your site to protest against SOPA:
Drop the following code in between your two tags on your site, your users will be redirected to the blackout page that describes what you are doing and why.
`
Then, when the protest is over, simply remove the added code. The protest is starting at 12am on 1/18, and lasts 24 hours.
<div> Today, the Wikipedia community <a title="w:en:Wikipedia:SOPA initiative/Action" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action">announced its decision</a> to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the <a title="Press releases/English Wikipedia to go dark" href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_to_go_dark">statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here</a>). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the <a title="w:en:Stop Online Piracy Act" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Stop_Online_Piracy_Act">Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)</a> in the U.
Yesterday, along a MeetUp group, we visited several art galleries in Chelsea (NY): Mike Weiss Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, Luhring Augustine Gallery, Metro Pictures Gallery, The Pace Gallery, and Mary Boone Gallery.
Leaving my personal comments on the displayed works aside (as usual, the pleasure of this kind of pilgrimage is to leave your mind and senses open, and let the works and stimuli slowly sink in), one thing surprised me quite a lot: Ai Wei Wei‘s work Sunflower Seeds was supposed to be walked on (at least it did at the Tate Modern in London, for the first 10 days of the exhibit), but at Mary Boone Gallery there is a security guard that prevents visitors from doing exactly what the artist intended.
