She bought us sight unseen. Like a mailorder bride. So she’s gonna be kinda nervous. I mean, are we ugly? Are we smart? Are we cool? Are we too cool? Do…we speak English?
Michael Scott, on the acquisition of Dunder Mifflin by Jo Bennet and Sabre
Tumblr users, on the acquisition of their blogs by Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!
Today in science we learned that you can never gain cold, you can only have an absence of heat; and it made me think that maybe hatred doesn’t exist, and there’s only an absence of love.
Actually, love and hatred are like magnetic poles—equally driven obsessions with opposite ends.
Love obsesses over a person with a desire for flourishing, for enrichment, for ultimate success; hate obsesses over a person with a desire for decline, for erosion, and for ultimate failure.
The “cold” to love’s “heat”, the perpendicular to its magnetic pull, is not passionate hate. It is passionless indifference.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.