<Dom> Worked on a mega insult, but just didn't have the nerve too post it. Give me a mean, devastating, low blow first! That could help I think..

I suppose the cruellest most unkindest cut of all would have been if my plea for mass intolerance had been met with total silence. And everyone just toddled off to be nice elsewhere.

<Jess> Zzzzipppp! Who *was* that masked superperson? Still trying to work out "woman's man's woman" ... as in, uh, who does what, and with which, and to whom.

Never mind. As you were, les grenouilles. Or as the old show tune from Li'l Abner says:

Put 'em back the way they was
They was dumb, they was heathen
But at least they was breathin'
Put 'em back the way they was.

Good night from me, Editor and Chief

click for larger view

(Solution)1.f3+ gxf3 2.Qe6+ Kf4 3.e3+ dxe3 4.Qf6+ Ke4 5.d3+ cxd3 6.Rc4+ Nd4 7.Qe6+ Kf4 8.Rxd4+ cxd4 9.Nd5+ cxd5 10.Bd6+ cxd6 11.Qf6+ Ke4 12.Rg4+ Nf4 13.Rxf4+ gxf4 14.Bf5+ gxf5 15.Qe5+ dxe5 16.Ne6# (known as "The Iron Cage" in the old Soviet Union,courtesy Benzol)

I will start out from a particular case, chosen for its simplicity, and, secondarily, its celebrity – a "pure" ready-made… the bottlerack Duchamp proposed to the public in 1914 under the literal title <Bottlerack>. There are basically two ways of accounting for such an object; they do not at all have the same significance… The first… says that this bottlerack *constitutes* the work in question, or that the work *consists* in the bottlerack. The second… says that, in this case, Duchamp's work consists not in this commercially available bottlerack, but rather in the act, or, more expressively, *gesture*… of proposing it as a work of art… Of these two interpretations, I adopt and will defend the second… If we argue that the bottlerack "by" Duchamp is an artwork, while granting that this object, like ready-mades in general, was not promoted for aesthetic reasons, as Duchamp himself confirms, we can infer… that the artistic is not always bound up with… the aesthetic. If we say that the work here consists, not in this particular object, but in the act of proposing it, we leave open the possibility that there is an aesthetic quality, not to the object, certainly, but to the act… In other words, the fact that the ready-mades are anti-aesthetic or un-aesthetic in intent (which seems to me hardly open to doubt) does not at all mean that we cannot, at a secondary level, treat this intent itself (and not the object it bears on) as aesthetic.

There is no legislating judgments of taste, and an art lover who finds aesthetic qualities in a bottlerack (which certainly possesses them to some degree), as others compare <Fountain> [Duchamp's urinal] to a Brancusi, Arp, or Moore, has, of course, a perfect right to do so. In that case, however, the object – bottlerack or urinal – should be attributed to its true creator, who, inasmuch as he (not Duchamp) is responsible for its aesthetic qualities, should be given credit for his work, as happens whenever a coffeepot or a toaster is exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art for the quality of its design and the greater glory of its designer… But we do not, in fact, exhibit it in this spirit… we exhibit it to (as it were) perpetuate the act of proposing it, which the art-world thus makes its own. "Duchamp once defied us to exhibit the kind of bottlerack that is commercially available, and we now face up to the challenge, the reasons for which we have (since) understood" – reasons which… are not of an aesthetic nature, in the ordinary, "straight" sense: that is, they do not stem from any interest in the *form* of this bottlerack.

Duchamp, aka Saint Marcel, is of course already one of our presiding deities. He was playing the Reti and Alekhine's Defence by 1924 and perhaps even earlier -- which makes chess the first artform where hyper- or post- modernism was widely adopted.

Amusing to note, btw, how Nabokov describes in <The [Luzhin] Defence> (1930) the style of the novel’s hero greatest opponent, Turati (allusion to Reti?):