"Nietzsche and Heidegger are largely responsible for the damned that we focus on art from the creator's point of view than the beholder's point of view. I disagree with them, and tend to see the creator of art as an especially well-equipped spectator. Nietzsche also makes it needlessly sexist by calling art focused on the spectator "woman's aesthetics," and he associates it with passivity--"

"I was drunk on intellectual construction, theory, abstract sculpture; swooping and serving crazily through uncharted sky. From that distance, all three-dimensional objects, found or constructed, sentient or inanimate, myself or others, were noumena: enigmatic entities assigned meaning by the encompassing conceptual framkework within which they are embedded."

"To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have." One implies a presence, and the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms."

Baudrillard by way of Emmanuel