THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

His visitor reported himself as sticking to his guns in favour
of painting, and received the following outburst in reply:
What could be more disgraceful, more disorderly than an exhibition
of painting? Nothing of that peaceful regularity which sustains the
health of the mind. Not even a common measure. Nothing but disparate
dimensions, separate frames, medleys of colour without relation,
a scattering of originality in thousands of hues, thousands of forms,
thousands of objects without connection, without a pleasant gradation
from one to another.
It is necessary to restrain this anarchy. It is necessary to order,
regulate, discipline, classify. When, Sir, these works of our painters
and sculptors are described by my methods, their descriptions condensed
in my files, my files numbered, arranged in rows, put away in
alphabetic, chronologic, numeric, nominal, decimal, «mondial» order —
when art rejects dancing to a frenetic jazz band ... and returns to the
wisdom of my pigeon-holes — When art finally, O sublime perfection,
will be a card and a number — then your friends will find, not
a Spring exhibition, but a perennial exhibition from which the merchant
has been forever banished.
Thereupon, his host whispered mysteriously to his visitor that
ihe figures on the Brussels town-hall showing the slaying of
a dragon by an angel represented in effect «the spirit of Lucre
and ME». Then he became absorbed in a moment of internal
contemplation. Emerging from it, he touched the cabinet beiore
him with «his sovereign finger, that finger made to support
a forehead round and heavy with omniscience*, and summed
up his work:
Here is the miracle of method, MY miracle, and the wonder of uniformity,
MY wonder. In this cabinet you have the world — Why do I say
world? ... The Universe, the universe completely contained in ten cubic
metres of cards ... Man has erected cathedrals to house the Host. This
is true, but beyond the Host there is an idea, there is God, while
here ... here, Sir, there is ME 43 .
EXPULSION
Despite Otlet's anathemas and appeals to the «righteous
indignation* of the public, the Government was in no way
swayed from its decision to resume the Palais Mondial for the
English Rubber Fair. Otlet had published a pamphlet at the
end of September 1923 designed to refute the charges of the
Government that the UIA had no rights to the areas occupied
by it in the Palais du Cinquantenaire. Its rights, according to
Otlet, were in fact threefold: legal rights (embodied in arretes
royaux and other documents), rights in fact, and moral
rights. 44 «The decision of the Government is final. The Union
of International Associations must submit to it,» Baron Ruzetti,
the Minister for Public Works, informed Otlet and La
Fontaine. 45 267