9 Quotes & Sayings By Jennifer Birkett

Jennifer Birkett is a psychologist and an author of inspirational books. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Reading University and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of East London. She is an accredited Counsellor to the Standards Board for Counselling, a Fellow Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and a member of the Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s Professional Standards Committee. She is also a member of the British Psychological Society’s BPS Applied Psychology Section Council, the BPS Behavioural Neuroscience Section Council, and a member of the BPS General Practitioners Section Council Read more

She has been an invited speaker at many international conferences on relationships, mental health, and trauma recovery.

Art makes murder into the supreme image of Beauty and...
1
Art makes murder into the supreme image of Beauty and in doing so sets free the vengeful God. (referring to Jean Lorrain's LE VICE ERRANT) Jennifer Birkett
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Hidden away behind the closed doors of aristocratic and bourgeois privilege, concealed under those ultra-respectable masks of black frock coat and veil, the green glow of corruption flickers into sight, steadies, and spreads everywhere, fostered by Lorrain's horrified and complicitous gaze. This decadent detective is at one with the criminal he pursues, acknowledging openly that the representation of corruption is one of the most pleasurable forms that corruption can take. In this enterprise, art is the mask that both exposes and conceals culpability. Jennifer Birkett
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The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game — and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands. Jennifer Birkett
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Art serves to confront that which is outside order, to give form to the obscene. In the process, it opens it to transformations that can not only make it safe for public consumption, not a powerful vehicle through which to address the public imagination. Jennifer Birkett
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The decadent artist markets other people's pain Jennifer Birkett
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Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced — he must confess — by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market. Jennifer Birkett
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Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment. Jennifer Birkett
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In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. . Jennifer Birkett