The love of art

art, oikophilia, and philokalia

Daniel Gustafsson

pp. 226-240

in: Christian Maurer, Tony Milligan, Kamila Pacovská (eds), Love and its objects, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

This chapter does not question whether or not an artwork may be an appropriate object of love but takes this as given; indeed, the chapter not only assumes that at least our greatest artworks are lovable but that love is integral to both their creation and their reception. As Rowan Williams has argued, "central to "making other" [the transformative labor of art] is dispossession, disinterested love" (2005, p. 161). A love that lets what is created be, in its otherness from its creator, is a requisite of good art. Otherwise the work gets weighed down by the possessive self-interest of its maker and fails to exist as a gift to others.