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Jennifer Birkett Quotes

Jennifer Birkett quote from classy quote

Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Art Corruption Crime Criminal Culpability Decadence Lorrain Respectibility

The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Art Corpse Corruption Mask Seduction Squalor Thrills Vice

Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Art Consumption Obscene Order

Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced – he must confess – by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Collusion Consumer Crime Criminal Decadence Guilt Lorrain Perversion

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Decadence Decadents Guilt Masochism Murder Punishment

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.

~ Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett Artists Consumer Decadence Decadent Diginty Disempowerment Masochism Murder Self Disgust Voyeurism
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