Ornament and Crime
The quotation from de Quincey in the post below makes me think of the following moment in Adolf Loos' "Ornament and Crime":
"The child is amoral. To our eyes, the Papuan is too. The Papuan kills his enemies and eats them. He is not a criminal. But when a modern man kills someone and eats him he is either a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his paddles, in short everything he can lay his hands on. He is not a criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty percent of the inmates show tattoos. The tattooed who are not in prison are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies at liberty, it is only because he has died a few years before committing a murder."
"The child is amoral. To our eyes, the Papuan is too. The Papuan kills his enemies and eats them. He is not a criminal. But when a modern man kills someone and eats him he is either a criminal or a degenerate. The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his paddles, in short everything he can lay his hands on. He is not a criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty percent of the inmates show tattoos. The tattooed who are not in prison are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies at liberty, it is only because he has died a few years before committing a murder."
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 12:39 PM
2 Comments:
Is the Loos quote the one you typed up on the old typewriter and left lying around your apartment building a long time ago?
I don't think so. As much as I love this Loos quotation, it is racist, so I don't think I would publically post it in a residential building. (Blogs are public, of course, but no one lives in your blog, or has to walk by it everyday to get home.)
I have a very vague memory of what you're talking about, though. Was it when I lived (for the first time) at the corner of 51st and Dorchester? And I typed up a paragraph and posted it on the cork board next to the elevator? But I think that was something about Martha Stewart, or something by her, wasn't it? Or was it from the "refrigerator of culture" manifesto I bought at north side Powells, the one I appropriated for my "The Collapse of the Tourist/Traveler Dichotomy" manifesto?
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