Thursday, March 12, 2009

Paglia (still) rules


There is, I must insist, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is a primal power, coarse and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 57.


This accounts, no doubt, for our (Western) fetishising of vision to the detriment of the other senses, turning "nature", and everything else for that matter, into a spectacle.

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