Of optimal views and other anxieties of attending to the beautiful and sublime

Abstract

A meditation on how intrusions of self-consciousness alter, upset, or interrupt aesthetic experiences. The focus is on the impulse to identify optimum moments in sunsets, fall foliage, etc., and possible explanations for this urge to identify the optimum. Then follow, by various associations of ideas, discussions of the anxieties of the expert who fears he is no longer moved by great works, to the general anxieties of properly attending to great art in museums, primarily the anxiety of when you can declare yourself ‘released’ from further homage. The large theme is how full immersion into the aesthetic experience is threatened to be undone by some aspects of the aesthetic experience itself, and then if not by that, by other anxieties about playing our roles of appreciators of beauty properly.

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