Hence in chapter 10, in contrast to the subtraction stories that focus on scientific enlightenment, Taylor considers the central role of art in creating this “open space” that characterizes our secular age. One of the features of post-Romantic art, he suggests, is a fundamental shift from art as mimesis to art as poeisis — from art imitating nature to art making its world. This was necessary precisely because the flattening of the world meant the loss of reference. We find ourselves in Baudelaire’s “forest of symbols” but without tether or hook, without any given to which the symbols/signs
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