Finally, the promise of rain other than a bit of drizzle that wets the road. It was a a touch of autumn on my walk last night at Victor Harbor before returning to Adelaide and then heading out west to Perth and the heat.

The sublime talk is seen as little more than a turning towards the archaic emotive language of Romanticism. Why cannot we speak of the sublime in the contemporary context whilst refusing to reduce the sublime to the spiritual and transcendent experience?

For Burke or Kant the sublime meant the experience of human limits, notably the limits of rationality.It expresses the edge of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and instability of the postmodern world.Did not modernism reinvent the sublime in terms of the primitive? Modern art was born in the late 19th century partly out of the frisson between imperialist European powers and the cultures to which they suddenly had unrestricted, and for those cultures often catastrophic, access. Wasn't something more creative and ambiguous going on than the pejoratively labelled "primitivism"? Thus Pablo Picasso invented Cubism after seeing African masks.

Others hold that modernism was the true art of the sublime and talk in terms of the utopian sublime of modernism---meaning the idea of art seeking its own dissolution by dissolving itself into life.