What is beautiful
is the object in its drapery,
under its veil, in its hideout.

…The task of art criticism is not
to lift the veil but rather,
through the most precise knowledge of it
as a veil, to raise itself for the first time
to the true view of the beautiful.

…The only way to view beauty
as a secret
is through knowledge of the veil itself.
In order to recognize what is veiled,
one must first turn towards the veil.
The veil is more essential than
the veiled object.

It is the dress that is divine.
The veil is essential to beauty,
So beauty cannot be undressed or unveiled.
This impossibility of unveiling
is the very nature of beauty.

— Excerpt Capitalism and the death drive,
In Your Face: How the Arts Are Turning into Pornography.
Or: On the Compulsion to Get Down to it, Without Seduction
By Byung-chul Han p. 82

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The photographs taken at the Lincoln Park Conservatory offered by Michael are worth dwelling on.  Perhaps Nature strikes us as beautiful, so often and so reliably, because Nature is always veiled…  I offer that possibility for your contemplation.

Nature is never pornographic, — “in your face,” with a mainline “hit” of contrived affect. 

I believe that you recognize the difference.  I do.

Here are the images once again, a rendering of the sublime, — a veil of something which we cannot know.

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