 readings from Dalí on modern art by Salvador Dalí. This is good. There's a couple paragraphs I'm going to read but I'm going to start a little bit before even though it's kind of kind of tough language. Spare with it and then the paragraph, the introduction of the ugly into modern art began so and so it becomes more readable. The least magnificent ideological cuckolds with the exception of the Stalinist, Stalinian cuckolds are two in number. First, the old Dadaist cuckold whose hair is turning white, who receives a diploma of honor or a gold medal for having tried to assassinate painting. Second, the almost congenital cuckold, the dithirambic critic of antiquated modern art who straightaway auto-recuckolded himself by Dadaist cuckolding. Dalí is so right. Since the dithirambic critic has contracted marriage with antiquated antiquated modern art, the latter has been constantly unfaithful to him. I can mention at least four examples of this cuckolding. One, he has been betrayed by the ugly. Two, he has been betrayed by the modern. Three, he has been betrayed by the technical. Four, he has been betrayed by the abstract. The introduction of the ugly into modern art began with the romantic adolescent naivete of Arthur Rimbaud when he said, quote, beauty seeded herself on my knees and I grew weary of her. It is by virtue of these key words that the dithirambic critics negative negativistic to the nth degree and hating classicism like any self-respecting sewer rat discovered the biological agitations of the ugly and its unavowable, unavowable attractions. They began to marvel at a new beauty which they claimed to be unconventional and beside which classical beauty suddenly became synonymous with quaintness. All ambiguities became possible, including that of savage objects, ugly as mortal sins, which is what they really are. In order to remain attuned to the dithirambic critics, painters dedicated themselves to the ugly. The more of it they turned out, the more modern they were Picasso, who is afraid of everything went in for the ugly because he was afraid of bourgeois, just a horrid artist. I could tell you a little more, it's a subnote, bourgeois Adolf William, to quote the 20th century, born in 1825, died in 1905, covered with diplomas and gold medals. He is regarded as the general of conventionalists. But he, unlike the others, meaning Picasso, but Picasso, unlike the others, went in for it on purpose, thus cuckolding those dithirambic critics who claimed to be rediscovering true beauty. Only as Picasso is an anarchist, after having knifed bourgeois half to death, he was going to give the puntilla and finish off modern art at one blow by out-ugling alone in a single day the ugly that all the others combined could turn out in several years. For the great Pablo, the angelic Raphael, the divine Marquis de Sade, and I, the rhinocerontesque Salvador Dali, actually have the same idea as to what an archangelically beautiful being may represent. This idea, in fact, in no way differs from the one instinctively possessed by any crowd in the street, bearer of the heritage of Greco-Roman civilization, when it turns around, petrified with admiration at the passage of a body, let us call a spade a spade, of a Pythagorean body. At the algid moment of his greatest frenzy of ugliness, I sent Picasso the following telegram from New York. Pablo, thanks! Your last ignominious paintings have killed modern art, but for you, with the taste and moderation that are the very virtues of French prudence, we should have had painting that was more and more ugly for at least 100 years before reaching your sublime adeficios esperentos. You, with all the violence of your Iberian anarchism, have achieved the limits and the final consequences of the abominable in a mere few weeks, and this you have done as Nietzsche would have wished by marking it with the seal of your own blood. Now, all that remains for us is to turn our eyes once more to Raphael. God preserve you. Salvador Dali.