Nothing spectacular, but I'm thinking about how (earnest) flowers are a taboo in art these days. Does anyone like Georgia O'Keeffe anymore? I certainly don't, but I get interested whenever subject matter is widely marginalized.
"The emergence of the aesthetic of artifice was directly related to the disappearance of a whole realm of signification: that of a natural world infused with mystical attributes . . . Nature lost the metaphoric vitality associated with creation, becoming a dead emblem of its former meaning . . . As a model of ideological purity (or even better the lack of all ideology) [Nature] was redeemed wholesale in the 19th century, but as ornament it was decried as kitsch. This literal association of artifice with death is the counterpart of the assumption that Nature, because of its life giving qualities, is also authentic and transcendental, while artifice (and all of culture for that matter) must be counterfeit and superfluous since it intervenes with the raw materials of nature, investing them with extrinsic meaning. [This thinking] ignores that human perception is by definition artificial, requiring the translation of nature into culture- the symbolic conversion of things into representations."
From The Artificial Kingdom by Celeste Olaquiaga
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