Reason to Destroy Contemporary Art

For all the paradoxical anti-philosophy of contemporary art as a post-conceptual practice, it is in every case correlationist. As such, contemporary art has nothing to offer non-correlational realism. Put the other way, a rigorous realism can readily dispense with art as it now stands without loss or limitation. From yet another angle, realism’s provocation to art is the undoing of aesthetic experience as a condition or term of art, even in the avowal of art’s ineluctable materiality. Which is to say that realism speculatively indicates the conditions for another art than contemporary art

The Value of Everything

The affirmation of value over price assumed and instantiated in contemporary art (CA) through its constitutive sur-valuation cannot but be inclined towards pricing. Parochially, the art-market can then advance without hindrance across any instance of CA. More expansively, in bringing or adding value to everything while assuming that the indeterminacy of its sur-valuation negates or escapes pricing, CA is a transmission mechanism for the speculative pricing of everything, for universal financialization

The Speculative Time Complex

The basic thesis of the post-contemporary is that time is changing. We are not just living in a new time or accelerated time, but time itself—the direction of time—has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. The main reason for the speculative reorganization of time is the complexity and scale of social organization today. If the leading conditions of complex societies are systems, infrastructures and networks rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy, as do the semantics and politics based on it. Correspondingly, the present as the primary category of human experience—in its biological sentience at least—which has been the basis for both the understanding of time and of what time is (or, at least, what it is presumed to be), also loses its priority in favor of what we could call a time-complex

Coronary anomalies and anatomical variants detected by coronary computed tomographic angiography in Kashmir, India

Background: Coronary Artery Anomalies (CAAs) presenting in adulthood are rare and associated with adverse cardiac events, including sudden cardiac death. Coronary artery anomaly is the second most common cause of Sudden Cardiac Death (SCD) in young athletes. Cardiac Computed Tomographic Angiography (CTA) is a readily available non-invasive imaging modality that provides high-resolution anatomical information of the coronary arteries. Multi-detector row CT is superior to conventional angiography in defining the ostial origin and proximal path of anomalous coronary branches.Methods: This was a prospective study included 186 patients who underwent coronary CTA from December 2018 to November 2019 in Government medical College, Srinagar on a 256 slice CT. The indications for coronary CTA were an equivocal, or non-diagnostic stress test, atypical chest pain, suspected anomalous coronary, as well as the evaluation of cardiac cause of syncope.Results: Ramus intermedius was the most common anatomical variant seen in 25 patients (13.4%). The prevalence of coronary anomalies in this study was 5.66% including myocarding bridging. The most common anomaly was high take off of coronary artery from sinotubular junction accounting for 1.6%.Conclusions: Coronary Computed Tomographic angiography is much superior in detecting coronary artery anomalies than invasive coronary angiography because of the absence of soft tissue information like as is needed in myocardial bridging. Proper knowledge of the anomalies and their clinical significance is highly important in planning treatment and easing hardships of cardiologists in dealing with them

ContraContemporary

‘Contra-contemporary’ takes issue with the famous statement by Frederic Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The essay contends that this statement is not only a modernist redux that paradoxically affirms the ‘eternal present’ of contemporaneity; it moreover proposes that it is not so much the absence of the future that is our problem today, but rather a surfeit of futurity that conditions and thus precedes the present in a risk society. The new, understood in Arendtian terms as the new-born present resulting from human action, is increasingly impossible in a postmodern condition that is contra-contemporary. Moving beyond the modern-postmodern deadlock, the essay concludes by envisioning what politics and art might look like in this contra-contemporary condition

Artist As Quarry

A discussion between Tirdad Zolghadr and Suhail Malik that aims to help artists understand themselves as institutional actors within the field of art without defining this institutionalisation as an intellectual loss or strategic compromise. The contention is that artists who drop the guard of personal self-protection and cease to emphasise individual self-interest can now access the real prerogatives that contemporary art has to offer. In Zolghadr’s terms, the proposed move is from “quarry as victim” to “quarry as mine or reserve”; from the pathos of hunted prey to contemporary art as a resource to be mined collectively

Introduction: Art and finance

The editorial premise of this special issue is that the adage ‘art and money do not mix’ is now wholly untenable. As detailed in our extended interview with Clare McAndrew, the art market has grown rapidly over the last twenty years, leading to systemic and structural changes in the art field. For some, this growth of the market and its significance for art is an institutional misfortune that, for all of its effects, is nonetheless inconsequential to the normative claim that art and money shouldn’t mix. This commonplace premise looks to keep the sanctity or romance of art from the business machinations of market mechanisms, as eloquently summarised by Oscar Wilde’s definition of cynicism (‘knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing’). This issue repudiates that normative moral code, and precisely for the reasons just stated: by now, the interests of the art market permeate all the way through the art system. The interests of the art market shape what is exhibited and where; what kinds of discourse circulate around which art (or even as art) and in what languages; and what, in general, is understood to count as art. In short, the art market – comprising mainly of collectors, galleries and auction houses – is now the primary driver in what is valuable in art. And it is not just value and valuation that are transformed by the recent expansion of the art market. Together with increased interest in art by both financial firms and individuals from that sector as private collectors-investors, the expansion of financial markets in a period also characterised by rapid growth in the art market and increased power within the art field for its highly commercialised operators may, combined, suggest a common endorsement of speculation and risk across these sectors. Contemporary art’s speculations and unmooring of stable meanings or coordinates are met by risk-based, speculative accumulation strategies on the side of finance itself

Effect of oral L- arginine versus intravenous hydration on maternal and fetal outcome in idiopathic oligohydramnios

Background: Adequate amount of amniotic fluid was required for normal growth of fetus. Oligohydramnios or reduced amount of amniotic fluid is associated with adverse maternal and perinatal outcome due to increase in induced labour and operative deliveries. Idiopathic oligohydramnios is a condition in which no other risk factors are associated with pregnancy. This study was done to compare the effect of L-arginine and IV hydration on improvement of amniotic fluid index and fetal growth.Methods: Total 50 patients were included in the study according to inclusion criteria and divided equally into two groups randomly. IV hydration was given to one group and other group received L- arginine sachet orally. The effect on AFI and fetal outcome was compared.Result: The result was compared with respect to age, gravidity, gestational age and AFI at the time of study and after giving treatment. Maternal and fetal outcome was compared which shows that L-arginine was more effective in increasing the AFI and thereby leading to favorable results in the form of increase in gestational age at time of delivery and fetal weight.Conclusion: This study shows that both IV hydration and L-arginine are useful in treatment of oligohydramnios. But L-arginine appears more advantageous over IV hydration in improving pregnancy outcome and reducing perinatal morbidity and mortality