Word: michels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Despite advances of learning in our computer age, we read daily horoscopes with credulity, and we persist in our study of the still-beguiling works of ancient Merlins. On the Internet, mysterious quatrains of the 16th century French physician and prognosticator Michel Nostradamus purport to contain foreknowledge of plagues and fires and even of 21st century politics. Visions of apocalypse in the Bible's Book of Revelation are persuasive enough to inspire generations of doomsayers and to drive some believers to suicide...
...Lippard. Selfless, sober, rational, public spirited--what, one is frivolously tempted to wonder, is such a paragon doing in the Whitney, an institution more noted in the '90s for staging tributes to delinquent cult figures like the late Robert Mapplethorpe and the equally late and even more overpraised Jean-Michel Basquiat? Not even the most obsessed Christian Fundamentalist could find much to burn in LeWitt, except a few tufts of pubic hair in some of the early serial closeups of nudes, done in homage to the sequential-motion studies of the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and about as erotic...
...everything from Kant to Huxley in lieu of giving them actual thoughts. It is not rare that one encounters such grand generalities as, "He was surprised at how miserable he felt. Far removed from Christian notions of grace and redemption, unfamiliar with the concepts of freedom and compassion, Michel's worldview had grown pitiless and mechanical." Such a statement flounders in the context of a work of fiction, and unfortunately is not redeemed by any breathtaking originality...
...capable of appalling masochistic sexual rituals. As for his individual characters, there is of course no action for them to take other than to wander off into oblivion. Bruno checks into a mental institution where he spends the rest of his pathetic days numbing his libido with cocktail medications. Michel, after discovering a way to clone perfectly rational non-egotistical human beings that will in a few years time subsume flawed humanity, simply disappears. Such episodes could, under different circumstances, be viewed as truly funny and truly scandalous satire. But posed as the outcomes of or even the solutions...
...Michel Houellebecq...