Naturally, the popular version of formalism, which was already casually formulated by Nietzsche, is indefensible. For the artist, form is supposed to be the real content of the work. Art plays with form for its own sake. Content only does service as an alibi. This type of formalism, which, incidentally, cannot be eradicated, is, in fact, no more than a kind of bourgeois aestheticism. Ostensibly, art would be about playing, as much as possible, on the aesthetic—literally: the sensory—registers contained in a medium.

— Frank Vande Veire on Dirk Braeckmann