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| Does he look like he's laughing? |
The prism of æsthetics is not just an aspect of the struggle for national self-overbecoming, it is the struggle rarefied. To the ancients, there was no way to divorce their art from their cultural vantage.
You would not publish a scientific treatise on species of weeds and not consider the art of the actual object: the lavish woodcut illustrations, for instance, or Euclidian layout and typography, as well as esoteric symbolism splashed lavishly throughout. The binding would be hand-tooled, decorated and gilded, so that even to such a stark and (to a modernist viewpoint) seemingly artless subject, Form would remain as important as Function.
