The aesthete’s worship is conditional on the power to dominate the admired object

Evidence

“An aesthete kneels before something not because he has really submitted to it but because he derives pleasure out of bracketing the displeasure of obeying an object that he can dominate if he wants to.” Which is to say that such admiration can have a long leash but one that is at the end predicated on the maintenance of the “ultimate security” of the aesthete. African art can be allowed to influence Cubism, but only insofar as it is absorbed within the comfortable zone of a distinctly European artistic mode. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the grafted-art article’s theme of how non-Western craft is only admitted into European modes on European terms.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘African art influences Cubism only within a distinctly European zone’ point could serve as a supporting example in ‘Grafting & Growth’ about how non-Western aesthetic practices are absorbed as raw material on colonial terms.