Art Museums and Impermanence

Art maintained a sacral aura but was detached from its original religious situation. With the evolution of the art museum, art itself became aestheticized, enjoyed primarily for its own sake, not as a marker of some transcendent reality. It might seem odd to say that art was “aestheticized,” for we tend to think of those terms as being almost synonyms. It was not always so. Indeed, it is worth noting that the term “aesthetic” in our contemporary sense is of fairly recent vintage, having been coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in the mid-18th century. Art, of course, is vastly older, being coterminous with the birth of our humanity.