The Joy of Looking
The chapter locates the subversive political potential of Blake’s art not in its cultivation of an audience elite enough to rise to the challenge of the sublime but in its viral medial appeals to audiences’ heterogeneous tastes for beauty. Individual Blake pictures have long tended to circulate apart from the composite, multi-media art to which they are supposedly integral. The chapter argues that this tendency activates formal potentials in the art. Blake worked at a time when aesthetic philosophers conceived of aesthetic experience, particularly of “the beautiful,” as an organic legislative force. The chapter argues for the potential radicalism of Blake’s multi-media art for its own age—and for others—on the grounds that it turns “the beautiful” into a legislative force designed to activate and exploit the disintegrated, heterogeneous wants of the populations that experience it.