Good taste is reverence for that which towers before you, silent and steady. We cannot quite shake the truth that things possess real quality, and to recognize it is not hubris but humility, a submission to what stands before us. Elaine Scarry calls this posture “radical decentering,” a step outside into otherness. In these surreal moments, we glim... See more

Yet, despite this wingspan, these aesthetics rarely crystallize into real-life practices; to don them does not require any reckoning with their true substance. St. Augustine aptly asserts in Soliloquies, Book I, that “What is not loved for itself is not loved.” We may have a Renaissance painting set as our desktop background and a growing collectio... See more