#twintowers — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #twintowers, aggregated by home.social.
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Konnte mich in all den Jahren nie überwinden, die Ausgabe ins Altpapier zu werfen.
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#memories #25yrsago #2001 #manhattan #newyorkcity #brooklynbridge #twintowers #bnw #monochrome #photographer #photography #usa #remembrance
Analog photo. New York, NY, USA, January 2001.
Photo and edit: The Blotch 666
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#memories #25yrsago #2001 #manhattan #newyorkcity #brooklynbridge #twintowers #bnw #monochrome #photographer #photography #usa #remembrance
Analog photo. New York, NY, USA, January 2001.
Photo and edit: The Blotch 666
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#memories #25yrsago #2001 #manhattan #newyorkcity #brooklynbridge #twintowers #bnw #monochrome #photographer #photography #usa #remembrance
Analog photo. New York, NY, USA, January 2001.
Photo and edit: The Blotch 666
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#memories #25yrsago #2001 #manhattan #newyorkcity #brooklynbridge #twintowers #bnw #monochrome #photographer #photography #usa #remembrance
Analog photo. New York, NY, USA, January 2001.
Photo and edit: The Blotch 666
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#memories #25yrsago #2001 #manhattan #newyorkcity #brooklynbridge #twintowers #bnw #monochrome #photographer #photography #usa #remembrance
Analog photo. New York, NY, USA, January 2001.
Photo and edit: The Blotch 666
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“The Saudi cutout and the CIA shadow over 9/11”
by Kit Klarenberg in The Cradle on Substack
“On the eve of 9/11’s silver anniversary, it was widely reported that a forthcoming New York District Court civil case brought against notorious Saudi government operative Omar Bayoumi would deliver ‘smoking gun’ proof tying Riyadh directly to the attacks. Yet evidence alleging that Saudi intelligence managed two future hijackers as potential assets and did so through a ‘liaison relationship’ with the CIA has lain largely unexamined in plain sight”
https://thecradlemedia.substack.com/p/the-saudi-cutout-and-the-cia-shadow
#Press #SocialMedia #US #Saudi #CIA #TwinTowers #NineEleven #Bayoumi #FBI #CoverUp
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/91937/ Inside Afghanistan on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – Watch Thursday’s ITV News at Ten #9/11 #Afghanistan #america #Anniversary #crown #England #holiday #HOSPITALS #itv #ItvNews #Kate #MiddleEast #NewYork #news #NewsAtTen #plant #plants #prince #PrinceOfWales #princess #PrincessOfWales #RoyalFamily #royals #tax #terrorism #Tourism #tourist #TwinTowers #UnitedStates #USA #Wales #war #William #WorldTradeCenter
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9/11: The "Official Story" Is a Fairy Tale for Adults
Two planes. Three buildings. A trillion-dollar accounting error. A passport that survived a fireball. If you believe the government's version, you'll believe anything.
Three Towers, Two Planes, One Impossible Physics Problem
Let's start with the simplest fact that no one in the mainstream media wants to explain: on September 11, 2001, two planes hit two buildings, but three buildings fell down.
World Trade Center Building 7 was a 47-story skyscraper that was not hit by any plane. It suffered only minor fires and superficial damage. Yet at 5:20 PM that afternoon, it collapsed into its own footprint at virtually free-fall speed — the signature of a controlled demolition.
Building 7 housed the offices of the Secret Service, the CIA, and — most crucially — the US Securities and Exchange Commission. All the files for approximately 3,000 to 4,000 SEC cases, including the Enron scandal, were destroyed in that collapse.
Enron. The biggest corporate fraud in American history. The investigation files. Gone.
And what did the 9/11 Commission Report say about Building 7? Nothing. Not a single word.
If that doesn't make you pause, nothing will.
The "Pull It" Moment
Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center complex, gave an interview for a PBS documentary in which he described the decision-making on September 11. His words: "I remember getting a call from the fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."
"Pull it."
In demolition industry terminology, "pull" means to bring a building down with explosives. Silverstein's spokesman later claimed he meant "pull the firefighters out" — but you don't "pull" firefighters. You pull buildings. And Building 7 came down in a textbook controlled demolition.
Six Weeks Before
Here's a detail that should have been on the front page of every newspaper: Larry Silverstein signed the lease for the World Trade Center just six weeks before 9/11.
Six weeks.
And what did he do almost immediately after signing that lease? He negotiated a massive insurance policy — $3.55 billion in coverage, with a clause specifically covering terrorism.
The previous insurance on the property was roughly half that amount. Silverstein reportedly insisted on the terrorism clause. And after the attacks, he went to court arguing that because two planes hit two towers, he should be paid twice — nearly $7 billion.
A man leases a property six weeks before its destruction, quadruples the insurance, adds terrorism coverage, and then argues for a double payout. In any other context, investigators would call that a motive.
The Mastermind in a Cave
The official story tells us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of 9/11, coordinated the entire operation from a cave in Afghanistan using a phone and a laptop.
A man on dialysis. In a cave. In one of the most remote regions on Earth. Directing the most sophisticated terrorist attack in history, coordinating 19 hijackers across the United States, managing flight schools, finances, and logistics — all from a cave.
Meanwhile, the hijackers allegedly brought down the World Trade Center with box cutters. Utility knives. Against trained pilots and crew. And they supposedly overpowered the passengers on four separate flights.
If you believe that, you also believe that a passport belonging to one of the hijackers — Satam al-Suqami — survived the fireball explosion that supposedly cremated him, flew out of his pocket, and landed intact on the street blocks away, ready to be found by investigators.
The bodies of hundreds of victims were never recovered. But the hijacker's passport? Pristine.
The President Who Knew
On the morning of September 11, President George W. Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, reading "The Pet Goat" to a group of second-graders.
He was informed that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He stayed in the classroom for another five to seven minutes.
Later, in December 2001 and again in January 2002, Bush claimed he saw the first plane hit the tower on television before entering the classroom. "I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower," he said.
But here's the problem: no cameras were trained on the World Trade Center at the time of the first impact. No live footage of the first plane hitting the North Tower existed until much later. The first crash was not broadcast live.
So how did Bush see it?
Either he was lying, or he had prior knowledge. His spokesman later called it a "mistaken recollection".
A mistaken recollection about the most significant event of his presidency. Right.
The Pentagon: The Day Before and the Day Of
On September 10, 2001 — one day before the attacks — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech at the Pentagon. In that speech, he admitted something extraordinary:
"According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."
$2.3 trillion. Missing. Unaccounted for. The day before the Pentagon was hit.
The following day, a plane — or something — struck the Pentagon. And the very section of the building that was hit? The area where the accounting and financial records were kept.
The missing money? The records that might have explained it? Destroyed.
Less than 48 hours after Rumsfeld admitted the Pentagon couldn't account for trillions, the evidence went up in flames. If you're a conspiracy theorist, that's not a coincidence. That's a cover-up.
No Plane, No Bodies, No Parts
The Pentagon is one of the most secure buildings on Earth. Cameras cover every inch of it. Multiple security cameras recorded the approach.
Not a single frame showing the plane hitting the Pentagon was released to the public for years. When footage was finally released in 2006, it was grainy, low-resolution, and showed nothing clearly identifiable as a Boeing 757.
The hole in the Pentagon was approximately five meters across — far too small for a 757 with a wingspan of nearly 38 meters. Conspiracy theorists pointed out that the lawn was clean after the attack, with no wing debris, no tail section, no engines.
At most plane crashes around the world, you find bodies, seats, luggage, engine parts, landing gear — debris scattered across a wide area. At the Pentagon, the official story claims the plane completely disintegrated on impact, vaporized by the heat of the explosion.
But if the plane vaporized, why were there no bodies? Why no plane parts? Why did witnesses describe a missile or a military aircraft?
And why did the government fight so hard to keep the footage secret?
The Dancing Israelis
On the morning of September 11, five men were arrested in Liberty State Park, New Jersey. They had been videotaping the attacks — and witnesses reported they were celebrating, "dancing" as the towers burned.
They worked for a company called Urban Moving Systems, which the FBI later determined was a Mossad front.
They were detained, interrogated, and eventually deported. The official explanation? They were just "celebrating" — nothing to see here.
But if five men with cameras and a Mossad cover company were positioned to film the attacks before they happened, that suggests foreknowledge. And foreknowledge suggests involvement.
The Passport and the Phone Call
We already mentioned the hijacker passport that survived the fireball. But let's add another detail.
The alleged hijackers were supposedly led by a man on dialysis in a cave who used a satellite phone and a laptop to coordinate everything.
But satellite phones in Afghanistan in 2001? Laptops in caves? The logistics are absurd. The 9/11 Commission itself found that the attacks were planned and executed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — a man who was later captured and waterboarded 183 times. The "intelligence" used to justify the Iraq War came from torture. And the CIA destroyed the tapes of those interrogations.
The evidence is gone. The "mastermind" was tortured into confession. And the American public was told to accept it.
What the 9/11 Commission Didn't Investigate
The 9/11 Commission was delayed, underfunded, and based on testimony extracted from torture.
It didn't mention Building 7. It didn't investigate who funded the attacks. It didn't examine Operation Able Danger, the military intelligence program that allegedly identified some of the hijackers before 9/11. It didn't look at the war games being conducted on the morning of 9/11 — simulations of hijacked planes flying into buildings — that were running at the exact same time as the real attacks.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney testified in secret, off the record, not under oath, and behind closed doors.
What were they hiding?
The Pattern
Two planes. Three buildings. A leaseholder with terrorism insurance. A president who "saw" a crash that wasn't broadcast. A Pentagon with $2.3 trillion missing. No plane footage. No bodies. No parts. A passport that survived a fireball. Five Israelis filming and celebrating. A commission that investigated nothing.
You don't have to have all the answers to know that the official story doesn't add up. You just have to be willing to look at the facts and ask the question that the mainstream media refuses to ask:
Who benefited?
The military-industrial complex got a blank check for endless war. The surveillance state got the PATRIOT Act. The financial crimes of Enron and others got buried in the rubble of Building 7. And the American people got a story — a story that falls apart the moment you examine it.
Two planes did not bring down three towers.
Wake up.
#9/11 #September-11-attacks #9/11-conspiracy-theories #9/11-truth-movement #World-Trade-Center #Twin-Towers #WTC-7 #Building-7 #controlled-demolition #free-fall-collapse #Larry-Silverstein #leaseholder #terrorism-insurance #insurance-fraud #double-payout #$3.55-billion #$7-billion #Enron #SEC-files #financial-records #Secret-Service #CIA #9/11-Commission #9/11-Commission-Report #Khalid-Sheikh-Mohammed #KSM #cave #laptop #satellite-phone #dialysis #box-cutters #hijackers #19-hijackers #Satam-al-Suqami #passport #fireball #George-W.-Bush #Emma-E.-Booker-Elementary #The-Pet-Goat #Sarasota #Florida #prior-knowledge #foreknowledge #Donald-Rumsfeld #Pentagon #$2.3-trillion #missing-trillions #September-10-2001 #Pentagon-accounting #Pentagon-crash #no-plane #missile #Boeing-757 #no-bodies #no-plane-parts #no-debris #security-cameras #surveillance-footage #grainy-footage #Liberty-State-Park #dancing-Israelis #Urban-Moving-Systems #Mossad #FBI #deportation #celebrating #videotaping #war-games #Operation-Able-Danger #NORAD #air-defense #stand-down #PATRIOT-Act #surveillance-state #military-industrial-complex #false-flag #inside-job #cover-up #media-complicity #torture #waterboarding #CIA-tapes #destroyed-evidence #Iraq-War #Afghanistan-War #endless-war #oil #pipeline #geopolitics #New-World-Order #deep-state #shadow-government #mainstream-media #corporate-media #propaganda #psychological-operation #psyop #limited-hangout #plausible-deniability #whistleblowers #Richard-Gage #Architects-and-Engineers-for-9/11-Truth #Scholars-for-9/11-Truth #thermite #nano-thermite #molten-steel #steel-beams #jet-fuel #office-fires #footprint #collapse-speed #symmetrical-collapse #seismic-data #dust-samples #WTC-dust #health-effects #first-responders #Giuliani #emergency-response #pull-it #demolition-terminology #insurance-clause #terrorism-clause #Silverstein-interview #PBS-documentary #fire-department-commander #building-owner #lease #Port-Authority #New-York-City #New-Jersey #Shanksville #Flight-93 #United-93 #Flight-77 #American-11 #United-175 #American-77 #hijacking #cockpit #transponder #FAA #military-response #Cheney #Secret-Service #bunker #PEOC #off-the-record #not-under-oath #closed-doors #secret-testimony #evidence-destruction #Saudi-Arabia #Saudi-hijackers #visa #immigration #flight-schools #money-trail #financing #Al-Qaeda #Osama-bin-Laden #Afghanistan #Tora-Bora #escape #CIA #Pakistan #ISI #9/11-families #victims #survivors #Ground-Zero #toxic-dust #cancer #compensation #cover-up #truth #awakening #red-pill #question-everything #do-your-own-research #never-forget #false-narrative #official-story #fairy-tale #conspiracy #conspiracy-theory #conspiracy-fact -
Mi vergogno ad ammetterlo, ma oggi il mio primo pensiero riguardo all' #11settembre2001 non sono i 3000 morti ma i #social, che sarebbero nati pochi anni dopo e hanno fatto business e creato carriere politiche sulle teorie del complotto (che pure già esistevano). Prima di quel diluvio di merda, e aspettando di leggere anche su Mastodon confronti e paragoni, un reportage dell'epoca: America anno zero - RaiPlay https://www.raiplay.it/programmi/11settembre-americaannozero
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RE: https://toot.wales/@DramatisPaws/117247950957035319
Oh, that is so fitting.
Filling the gaping hole in the skyline, with a representation of th ehuman life that was lost.
#911 #119 #twintowers
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Drones recreate Twin Towers to honor 9/11 victims
Retired NYPD officer James Smith watched a drone show of 2,977 lights recreate the Twin Towers to honor every single person killed in the September 11 attacks, including his wife Moira Smith. #News #Reuters #Newsfeed #September11 #NeverForget911 #TwinTowers #NYPD #JamesSmith #MoiraSmith #NewYorkHarbor #DroneShow #25thAnniversary #911Tribute #NineEleven #NewYorkCity #Remembrance #WorldNews #HumanInterest #2026…
https://fllics.com/zh/video/drones-recreate-twin-towers-to-honor-9-11-victims/
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/91650/ Remarkable true stories of surviving 9/11 #11thSeptember #2001 #25thAnniversary #9/11 #911 #congress #DonaldTrump #GroundZero #history #itv #ItvNews #manhattan #NewYork #ny #NYC #RealLifeStory #RealStories #RealStory #survivor #TERROR #terrorism #TrueCrime #TwinTower #TwinTowers #United93 #US #UsHistory #USA #war #WashingtonDc #WhiteHouse #WORLDTRADECENTRE
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/91594/ 9/11: Drones light up NYC ahead of 25th anniversary • FRANCE 24 English #9/11 #Anniversary #attacks #drones #FRANCE24 #FRANCE24English #FRANCE24 #FRANCE24English #NewYork #September11 #TwinTowers #WorldTradeCenter
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“America loves to think of itself as a beacon of freedom to humanity. Its historical record of infamy will never disturb this self-conception. But after 9/11, ambitious architects of repression from Moscow to Beijing to Tel Aviv were inspired by the infamy. Never would there be a better opportunity than the War on Terror to unleash their visions for power unconstrained by justice…what Washington…wanted”
#GlobalWarOnTerror #GeorgeW #DickCheney #Iraq #911 #TwinTowers
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/how-the-war-on-terror-went-global?r=ct3l&utm_medium=ios
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“America loves to think of itself as a beacon of freedom to humanity. Its historical record of infamy will never disturb this self-conception. But after 9/11, ambitious architects of repression from Moscow to Beijing to Tel Aviv were inspired by the infamy. Never would there be a better opportunity than the War on Terror to unleash their visions for power unconstrained by justice…what Washington…wanted”
#GlobalWarOnTerror #GeorgeW #DickCheney #Iraq #911 #TwinTowers
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/how-the-war-on-terror-went-global?r=ct3l&utm_medium=ios
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“America loves to think of itself as a beacon of freedom to humanity. Its historical record of infamy will never disturb this self-conception. But after 9/11, ambitious architects of repression from Moscow to Beijing to Tel Aviv were inspired by the infamy. Never would there be a better opportunity than the War on Terror to unleash their visions for power unconstrained by justice…what Washington…wanted”
#GlobalWarOnTerror #GeorgeW #DickCheney #Iraq #911 #TwinTowers
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/how-the-war-on-terror-went-global?r=ct3l&utm_medium=ios
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https://www.europesays.com/videos/91162/ Trump claims firefighters carried him to safety ‘right after’ 9/11, but his account is disputed #'fakeNews' #9/11 #9/11Attacks #DonaldTrump #FactCheck #firefighters #FirstResponders #FRANCE24 #FRANCE24English #FRANCE24 #FRANCE24English #GroundZero #islam #misinformation #muslims #NewYork #NewYorkCity #OneLibertyPlaza #rescue #SocialMedia #TERRORATTACKS #terrorism #TrumpTower #TruthSocial #TwinTowers #WhiteHouse #WorldTradeCenter
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Donald Trump's tales of what he supposedly saw and did on 9/11 have always been tall, but they reached new heights (or lows) yesterday, when he claimed to have been carried away by firefighters soon after the attack. Daniel Dale fact checks the story for @CNN.
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Firefighter, EMT, Stuyvesant High School Student Describe 9/11 Exposure http://www.democracynow.org/2026/9/8/firefighter_emt_stuyvesant_high_school_student #uspoli #TwinTowers #toxicexposure #healthcare
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in a week some (not the fat orange cunt) will commemorate the over 3,000 people who were murdered on 9/11. Let's also remember how excited the fat fucking #PedoPresident was on the news that he "owned" the tallest building after the #TwinTowers were destroyed
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FORM to SUBMIT QUOTES to the GUARDIAN USA re: 9/11
Picture is tops bc THAT's ME ON THE RIGHT - WTC Number 7, right across from World Trade. When I started there (near the top), WTC was still under construction. The freight elevator was still going up and down, finishing the top floors.
#WorldTradeCenter #WTC #7WTC #USA #PortAuthority #TwinTowers #Dubya #Bush #weapons of #mass #destruction #Cheney #WarCriminal #OurPutin #WarCrime #President
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/14/september-11-impact-callout -
“To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow”*…
Solar System (1876), a quilt by Ellen Harding Baker. Courtesy the Smithsonian Libraries and ArchivesFurther, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy WikimediaThese discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
“How art invented humanity,” from @aeon.co.
Apposite: “The Case for Aesthetic Education.”
* Kurt Vonnegut
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As we muse on the mystery of musing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
#anthropology #art #culture #highwire #history #humanity #images #mind #PhilippePetit #philosophy #Psychology #Science #tightrope #TwinTowers #WorldTradeCenter -
"Twin towers" in San Gimignano
#fotografia #sangimignano #tuscany #italy #TwinTowers #newyork @[email protected] @foto
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Some amazing shots of the old Twin Towers in this classic 80s hip-hop video. I doubt anyone can get this close to any buildings these days.
#music #hiphop #rap #TwinTowers #NYC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJdWkhpsCTE&list=RDHJdWkhpsCTE
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Dated 1979, quite unsettling.
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11 settembre, la prova generale è stata in Brasile
#boomerissimo #brasile #dirottamento #11settembre #9/11 #twintowers #wtc
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My new report argues that the Petronas Twin Towers were built on the broken backs of Sabah and Sarawak. It's time to demand the return of our Maruah and reject the gaslighting of Federal elites.
#Sabah #Sarawak #MA63 #Petronas #MalaysiaPolitics #EconomicExploitation #SocialJustice #Borneo #OilAndGas #Federalism #Dignity #Maruah #Activism #Energy #ResourceControl #Politics #CurrentAffairs #Corruption #History #Inequality #TwinTowers #Truth #Advocacy #DigitalWeblog
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@Ghostsheetz … #trump & the #fascists around him wants to hit you deep in your heart. Like 911 #twintowers #nyc 2001 …
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On this day...24 years ago, 10:00am Sept 11, 2001.
In one single moment life may never be the same.
As you live and enjoy the breaths you take today and tonight, before you go to sleep in preparation for your life tomorrow, kiss the ones you love; snuggle them a little tighter and never take one second of your life for granted.
For the things you end up missing most in life; are often the things you least appreciated when you had them.
#wewillneverforget #911 #twintowers