When the work of art is instead offered for aesthetic enjoyment and its formal aspect is appreciated and analyzed, this still remains far from attaining the essential structure of the work, that is, the origin that gives itself in the work of art and remains reserved in it. Aesthetics, then, is unable to think of art according to its proper statute, and so long as man is prisoner of an aesthetic perspective, the essence of art remains closed to him.
—
Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content, p. 102 (via yourharbour)
This is one of those ideas that takes itself way too seriously, but on the other hand might be exactly right. The concept of an “origin that gives itself in the work of art and remains reserved in it” probably isn’t something that you can just assert, though. What if it doesn’t remain reserved in it, or never gets put into it in the first place? What if the essence I experience when I deal with a work of art is actually the awakening by some aesthetic means of forces that are already inside me, which may or may not have anything to do with the ‘origin’ of the work? Oh Holy Jesus what kind of a madhouse would we be in then?
