One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship -
Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.
My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
What we need is to use what we have.
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.