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In 1947, Erich Fromm, a humanist, psychoanalyst and philosopher, developed a theory of character that divided people into five “orientations,” mostly determined by their relationship to stuff. He characterized four of these — the receptive, exploitive, hoarding and marketing orientations — as part of the “having” mode, which is focused on consuming, obtaining and possessing. (The fifth orientation was “productive,” which focuses on experience and human connection.) Fromm specifically linked the hoarding orientation to the Protestant work ethic and the American merchant middle class and argued that this orientation is characterized by, among other things, being “constipated and squinty.”
rip bill haast
A secret of his success was the immunity he had built up by injecting himself every day for more than 60 years with a mix of venoms from 32 snake species. He suspected the inoculations might have explained his extraordinarily good health, but he was reluctant to make that claim, he said, until he reached 100.
Mr. Haast, who was director of the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, a snake-venom producer near Punta Gorda, Fla., died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in southwest Florida, his wife, Nancy, said. He was 100.
Mobility trumps rigor. More than in images or abstraction per se, there is a tremendous interest today in what the art historian Dario Gamboni has called ‘potential images’, that is, ‘those established—in the realm of the virtual — by the artist but dependent on the beholder for their realization, and their property is to make the beholder aware — either painfully or enjoyably — of the active, subjective, nature of seeing.’ That is, seeing one thing rather than another is not a given; it is a commitment — and a form of painting that lays emphasis on this latent state of the image (which is also a latent state of abstraction) is one that throws back on the viewer the question of his or her own choice or predisposition in determining what to see. In particular, the whole phenomenon of ‘painterliness’ has a different value today than it did in the past. It functions less as a signifier of the individual artist’s stylistic signature or as the trace of emotional expression or of the labor of making that would have been concealed by a smoothed-over high finish — though it can still be all of those — than as a way of allowing the painting to linger in the condition in which things are still unsettled, metamorphic, in transition.