And, of course, the temple par excellence of culture is the modern museum in which the objects of art seamlessly mirror back to us the satisfaction (repressed, unconscious as it is) of our teleological drive to historical mastery bewitching ourselves into thinking we have achieved it.  Art in this sense is double-edged:  it is not simply a materialization of an object of historically significant beauty, and the sublime, but in its very sublimality it hides from us our own desire to capture and control the infinite and to be the master of the genius (the one who transgresses the norm).  Thus the art museum can be seen as the policing of genius, the arresting of the beautiful, and the sentencing of the sublime to the cellblock otherwise known as “the museum.”

The above passage comes from Creston Davis’ recent post entitled ‘A look into the blind spot of love.’

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Illustration above by Sana Pearl Park

Tags:aestheticsartbeautyCreston DavisloveSana Pearl Park