“If to “aestheticize” is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled—much hangs on the words “merely” and “rather than.” Opportunism isn’t the same as committed attention. But we can also define the “aesthetic” not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what’s still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched.”