Quote of the day, yay!

'I am where I am by choice, not necessarily mine, but maybe the choice of a few songwriters who forty years ago wrote a couple of songs that twenty years ago I spent a few months listening to, in combination with one or two books that made me read fifty more. I have always found the concept of “points of no return” much more appropriate than the idea of “queering,” and even though I see that it has specific disadvantages (the lone heroism of punctuation, the imminent danger of getting lost), the commitment to irreversibility that it entails not only makes it less susceptible to commodification or silent corruption, but also, and more importantly, provides a somewhat meaningful and stable definition of “post.” Which could be useful, just as it dawns upon us that the most advanced form of capitalism may be the one that is the most tightly interlaced with the fluctuating pathways of allegedly post-capitalist selves.

[...]

What I personally resent, as it marks an irreversible political shift, much like the fall of the Wall, is the transition from music to art as the core cultural coordinate system of German society. Music, as Leitkultur, was democratic. The arts are feudal. If you dropped out of school in a provincial town, you still had access to the system of music. The system of the arts doesn’t even grant access to the majority of Berlin art students. And while the rapidly changing macroeconomic conditions make it increasingly attractive to seek refuge among the entourage of kings, collectors, and gallerists, rather than to depend on the state, or its abolishment, it’s even obvious to most of its secret admirers that feudalism doesn’t scale very well.'

-- Sebastian Lütgert, excerpt from Down and Out in All the Wrong Places (Berlin 2010), e-flux journal #17, 06/2010