The ruin lies in ruins. Brian Dillon, co-curator of Tate Britain’s Ruin Lust exhibition, admits as much at the start of his accompanying book: “It seems that the harder we think about destruction and decay […] and the further we explore the very idea of ruin itself, the less the whole category holds together” (p.5). So while book and exhibition offer numerous valuable thoughts on what the ruin can mean, why it rose to prominence in art and writing of the eighteenth century, and how it persists in the modern imagination, a systematic and unified appreciation of the topic is bound to remain out-of-reach.
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