from Cabinet magazine, issue 40: "A work of art possesses, according to Brandi, a dual nature: on the one hand, its existential reality (its thingness), and on the other, its pure reality (its bid to transcend that thingness). It is its measure of the latter, of course, that actually makes a given object a work of art. What art is (cue soundtrack of German idealism) is the mysterious/paradoxical/magnificent presence of transcendence in mere things. Made, but freed from their mere becoming by their reach for eternity, such objects exist in time (as objects) but also defy (as works of art) simply being pinned to that past on a timeline, since they possess a transhistorical power to present to a consciousness, in any given present, reality as such: call it "Consciousness" (or Spirit, or Geist, or whatever).
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