When More Is Less

E.O. Wilson
Consilience
(1998)

The explanation for the rarity of great beauty may be (and I continue to speculate) the behavioral phenomenon known as the supernormal stimulus. Widespread among animal species, it is the preference during communication for signals that exaggerate the norms even if they rarely if ever occur in nature.

e.g. Male butterflies who can be more attracted to mechanical replicas

that have the biggest, brightest, and most rapidly moving wings

than to actual females.

Males [of this species] appear to have evolved to prefer the strongest expression of certain stimuli they encounter, with no upper limit. The phenomenon is widespread in the animal kindgom.
(p. 231)

Maybe this explains the rarity of great beauty. Or maybe it's a warning to all of us in the animal kingdom that we had better hang onto at least the vestiges of medieval asceticism, by way of which certain upper limits are constructively established. Otherwise we'll end up eating and fucking plastic replicas, and thinking we've done well this way.

Détourn or Deform?

"A Maximum of Openness: Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Karen Kurczynski"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 195

JdJ: ... If you look at it, you can see that I printed it in the smallest font possible so that no one could read it. And it was on purpose. I was already at that moment not very happy with the guys in Drakabygget, mainly Thorsen, I must say. The Drakabygget people were making détournements of articles of mine, such as "Gog and Magog," in their magazine. They even did it with articles by Jorn. You could say there was a degree of faking in what they were doing. One thing that has not been mentioned is that we, the Situationists, always had an anti-copyright declaration in all the magazines. ... Of course it means that everything is permitted, but you don't expect your comrades to deform your texts as they were meant to be serious.

KK: Deform or détourn?

JdJ: Deform, I think. It's a good question.