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Showing posts from September, 2019

Raising children: Family happiness in theory and practice

MSZ 4-1980 After our findings about the intelligentsia's insatiable need for meaning, which is currently turning back to the family and identifying children as the object of commitment and sacrifice who should thank their parents for this, we no longer dare rule out the possibility that even MSZ readers, after years of disappointment in a boyfriend or girlfriend, will fall for the idea of having children so that they can give and receive for once unalloyed affection, according to the motto  Becoming a father is not difficult ...  There is already something oppressive about this thought, which is why there are constant complaints that problems increase with children and raising them is more difficult than herding cats. But nobody takes this as a reason to let them be. On the contrary – good advice is much appreciated and should therefore stop at this point. The eager assessment of parental practice certainly does not intend to criticize, but to lament its success, because i

Art in capitalism: Exhibitionistic acts of freedom

MSZ 20 – December 1977 m o n o c h r o m e   This is where the tabloid reader laughs: recently, a work by the German art professor Joseph BEUYS, consisting of a baby’s bathtub carefully covered in grease, accidentally fell into the hands of some lowbrow politicians who had it cleaned up and misused it as a champagne cooler; when the creator unsuccessfully tried to sue for damages, arty intellectuals had one more anecdote to confirm that a special attitude is necessary to enjoy art nowadays, without which art objects can’t even be distinguished from everyday objects. By contrast, the various friends of the working taxpayer had a new occasion to give voice to the old suspicion that artists are frauds who only pretend to make an effort at creating beautiful things, and let fools pay for art scams. “Since the beginning of the imperialist era, has it not been a foregone conclusion that everything an artist produces is art, and that it is enough if he himself and a few luminar