Term
Esthetic
used in 48 texts across the archive
“The esthetic is a postponement or deferral of sacrifice, and narrative is the exemplary esthetic form because it thematizes deferral, makes it explicit.”
In use
“The esthetic is thereby reabsorbed back into ritual and elicits the millennia long suppressed producer’s desire of all the people.”
“The satiric dimension within the esthetic is this moment of the scene at its most scenic, where we have what Gans once referred to as the “fearful symmetry” where each is at once potential victim and potential attacker, threatening and vulnerable simultaneously.”
“Yet no student of painting or sculpture considers the pictorial or plastic components of artworks as in themselves devoid of esthetic interest, apprehended and integrated by means of a formal “competence” to which the esthetic is irrelevant.”
Key texts