"Robert Mapplethorpe was an aesthete’s aesthete, trying with each photograph he took to capture a kind of formal blissfulness that shreds philosophy, politics, conjecture, and any other form of bull-shit standing in the way of that 'perfect moment' when what you see is exactly and horrifyingly and gleefully what you get, devoid of values, faith, hope, charity, whatever. Through what he was able to freeze with a lens, he excavated morals and manners, setting one form of beauty next to another form of beauty next to a form of horror or porn or fever, all of those juxtapositions intended both to provoke and to satirize the process of provocation. He was after what the great novelist Vladimir Nabokov describes as 'aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.' "
Original Article: http://aeqai.com/main/2015/11/perfect-mess-after-the-moment-reflections-on-robert-mapplethorpe-at-the-contemporary-arts-center/