Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance – not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel). It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and – this is the worst of it – continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 22

Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfilment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposites to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us.

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance, much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

Doing so not out of some death drive or some involutive, regressive disposition toward undifferentiated forms, but from an impulse to go as far as possible in the expression of all its power, all its faculties – to the point even of dreaming of abolishing death.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) pp. 16-19

The dynamic of modern societies rests on a perpetual flight into the future which creates an illusion of stability; it holds together an organism in a perpeptual state of transformation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 101

Nowadays, with the most wonderful communications equipment imaginable, we are broadcasting a culture which is at best an absence of culture, a product of chance.

Jacques Ellul, as quoted in Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 97

The idea that generalized aggression can be refined into peaceful competition, profitable to all, is the great myth of liberalism, and it assumes that the hypothesis of the harmony of interests is proven – which is far from being the case – and that the search for wealth is an end in itself, unconnected with the will to power and the struggle for power – a notion which is immediately contradicted by observation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 75

The aim of bourgeois ethics, to eliminate all forms of death and impose the value of life, without qualification, could only take root where biological death was actually seen as undesirable. Of course, traditional societies attach strong meaning to death, poverty or sickness; but the exalting of biological life as the supreme value is inhuman and, by its qualitative density, destroys the very meaning of existence. The West, by disenchanting the world, has made life on this earth into the value par excellence. When you no longer have eternity before you, life becomes an anxious struggle against time. Earthly time may become infinite, but this infiniteness only gives unlimited scope to the anxiety of modern man. The infinite accumulation of works is a phantasmagorical substitute for immortality. This obsessive fight against time, disregarding the enjoyment of the present moment, is characteristic of Western man.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) pp. 55-56

Modern society, by 'inventing' economics – i.e. by creating an autonomous 'sphere' for the production, distribution and consumtion of material wealth, a sphere in which it is legitimate and necessary to allocate means as efficiently as possible – has reduced culture to the narrower preoccupations of the 'Ministries of Culture' possessed by many civilized nations. This reduction originates in Western metaphysics, which, since Plato, have been accustomed to splitting the unity of being into matter and spirit. This presumably means that culture becomes no more than the awareness (perhaps a false awareness) which a society has of its 'material' practices through religion, art and all its means of expression.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 39

Vad har gjort det omöjligt för oss att leva i tiden så som fiskarna i vattnet, så som fåglarna i luften, så som barn? Det är kejsardömets fel! Idén att upprätta och bevara ett kejsardöme har skapat historiens tid. Kejsardömet har inte förlagt sin existens till årstidscykelns mjukt återkommande tid, utan till ryckig tid som hör samman med uppgång och fall, med början och slut, med katastrof. Kejsardömet dömer sig att leva i historien och stämpla mot historien. Endast en tanke upptar kejsardömets undermedvetna: hur det ska bära sig åt för att inte upphöra, inte dö, utan förlänga sin era.

J. M. Coetzee, I Väntan På Barbarerna (Brombergs, 2002) p. 177

But we do not repeat a beginning by reducing it to something past and now known, which need merely be initiated; no, the beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true beginning.

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Anchor Books, 1961) p. 32

All capitalists and financiers, as well as any homo economicus (meaning all of us), tend to become ordinary 'criminals' who collude to some extent in the economic banality of evil.

Serge Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Polity, 2009) p.19

No, I don't believe in History as an upwards progression… and that, upon reaching paradise – represented by the last judgment, or by communism – History ceases to exist.

Anselm Kiefer, 'With History Under His Skin', in Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba (Edizioni Charta, 2006) p. 50

I've always been interested in the intermingling of different eras: there's our era, but also the geological era and the astronomical era. There are three in all.

Anselm Kiefer, 'With History Under His Skin', in Anselm Kiefer: Merkaba (Edizioni Charta, 2006) p. 49

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who, if he's a painter, has only eyes, if he's a musician has only ears, if he's a poet has a lyre in each chamber of his heart, or even, if he's a boxer, just muscles? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending, stirring or pleasant events of the world, taking his own complexion from them. How would it be possible to disassociate yourself from other men; by virtue of what ivory nonchalance should you distance yourself from the life which they so abundantly bring before you? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso, 'Statement to Simone Téry' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) p. 649

EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences first-hand – learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. Self-determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom); in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self-administration and decentralization (three-fold structures) occurs: FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

Joseph Beuys, 'I Am Searching for Field Character' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) pp. 929-930

It is only with a real and long enough awakening that a person becomes present to himself, and it is only with this presence that a person begins to live like a human being. To know oneself is to know the world, and it is also paradoxically a form of exile from the world. I know that it is this presence of myself, this self-knowledge which causes me to dialogue with the world around me by making art.

Ana Mendieta, 'Art and Politics' in Art In Theory, 1900-2000, 2nd ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2003) pp. 1064-1065