Still, art named a new way of relating to the public, distinct from politics and religion and set apart from eros.

Whereas rape violates the integrity of another by acting against her desires, seduction manipulates desires to align with an end of the seducer.

The second identifies a peculiarly modern thorniness to the entanglement of iconoclasm and iconophilia, generated by the institutions and cultural forms that shape image relationships in modernity.

The artistic image is for contemplation; the pornographic, like the advertising image, is for consumption. Both pornographic and advertising images’ desires terminate in the assimilation of the image to the beholder. While the art image controls desire by excluding it, the pornographic image controls desire by consuming the cause of that desire.

However obvious that may seem to us now, the fine arts were disembarrassed of eros through a series of distinctively modern philosophical and institutional developments. Chief among the philosophical developments was the consolidation of certain arts under the rubric of the fine or beaux (beautiful) arts and an understanding of the emerging paradig

As the church lost its role as the dominant commissioner of images, it also lost its grip on the cultural narratives around breasts—a loss registered as artists depict breasts other than Mary’s.

Mahmood suggests that it is, perhaps, not even readily intelligible to many Modern Westerners. To the extent that the image and the prototype are understood to be linked arbitrarily, the image simply conveys information or misinformation about the prototype.

Horst Bredekamp argues that it was through artists exaggerating the internal negations of images that Christianity was able to tolerate a tradition of image-making. In the teeth of a command not to make images, artisans justified Christian image-making by expressing that prohibition in the image itself.

The two types of image relationship—critique and consumption—emerge from the two image models dominating the Modern West: the model of critical distance denies the erotic; the model of total consumption literalizes it. Both express anxieties about how desire threatens our sovereignty, with each offering divergent strategies for containing it.