White on ornamentation

Edmund White The Burning Library "The Wanderer: Juan Goytisolo's Border Crossings"

Artistically he has taken the post-modernist technique of intertextuality but given it an Arabic flavor not only through quotations from Arabic and Persian writers but also through the imitation of of esthetic rules behind Muslim music and architecture — repetition, abstraction, fluid variations on fixed themes, improvisation. Whereas Western art subordinates the parts to the whole, demotes decoration and promotes functional or structural clarity, Muslim art dissolves or rejects these hierarchies and prizes ornamentation and spontaneity.

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how odd that ornamentation would be associated with spontaneity
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And so for day 387
04.01.2008