Beauty-making functions as a defense against temporality and death

Evidence

Architecture, he maintains, is not only about domesticating space, wresting and shaping a liveable place from space. It is also a deep defence against ‘the terror of time’. The ‘language of beauty’ is ‘the language of a timeless reality.’ To create a beautiful object ‘is to link time and eternity’ in such a way as to redeem us from time’s tyranny. … The aim of spatial constructs is ‘not to illuminate temporal reality so that [we] might feel more at home in it, but to be relieved of it: to abolish time within time, if only for a time.’ — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1295

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s postmodern ‘waning of historicity’ and to the consumerist ‘eternal present’ debate in periodization theory — the rival account this chapter is being read against. — connects to: Beauty is the temporal synthesis of past, present, and future that we desire.; Beauty’s powerlessness becomes the negative image of redemptive hope — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 250; Being-towards-death frames mortality as the source of authentic existence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 933 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense claim about aesthetic production as existential redemption from time — the load-bearing insight that modernist spatialization of representation is motivated, not incidental.

Broader Connections

• Art and play preserve depth only by retaining life’s traces in autonomous forms #corroborates (0.72)
• Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability #corroborates (0.72) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 184