51�Թ�

Either way, the urge to aestheticize work remains.

“Everything Rises” now has an original score throughout, along with text taken from recorded conversations between Tines and Koh — in part, Tines said, “because it’s about sharing the truth of our experiences, instead of tying to aestheticize our experience. I don’t need to find a poem that represents something I can say more directly.”

Since purchasing the site in 1977, he has constructed a labyrinth of chambers and tunnels that aestheticize the experience of sky-watching.

This book does tend to skirt over or even coldly aestheticize unpleasant truths, like the “half-burned bits of bodies” floating past a film crew in the river Ganges; or the fact that Chatwin died of AIDS, not specified here; or even a chauffeur’s offer of a handshake refused by the vestigial “nobles” with whom Ivory, blackballed by college fraternities, found himself consorting after his success.

“I wanted the show not to aestheticize trauma, and despair and ruin,” says Farhat, adding that her aim was “to emphasize how beautiful the works are and . . . how aesthetics are so important to Syrian artists.”