Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself. The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations. (Or if it is an “idea,” it is about the form of sensibility.) Rilke described the artist as someone who works “toward an extension of the regions of the individual senses”; McLuhan calls artists “experts in sensory awareness.” And the most interesting works of contemporary art (one can begin at least as far back as French symbolist poetry) are adventures in
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