““It was a truth that Leo Tolstoy declaimed a century or so ago: our response to art has the agency to do what “external measures—by our law-courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspections” cannot. 31 Centuries later, we sense it still, as did Tolstoy, John Keats, and art critic Michael Brenson made the rare argument that “the aesthetic response is miraculous. Such an astonishing amount of psychological, social, and historical information can be interwoven into a single connective charge that a lifetime of thinking cannot disentangle the threads.” 32””
