Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

64 DON’T STARE
Figure 6.1. Dan Reynolds, “ ‘Whatever you do, don’t stare at my father’s
glass eye,’ ” February 6, 2007. Courtesy of www.Cartoonstock.Com.
the profound or the trivial. Proper scientific curiosity wins Nobel Prizes.
Idle curiosity makes us busy bodies. Salacious curiosity induces us read the
National Enquirer . A blunt instrument, curiosity overtakes; it mows down
and gobbles up the object of its contemplation. Curiosity recontextualizes
its object. Curiosity in the service of mastery tames the extraordinary. But
its ardent focus can also elaborate the mundane into the exotic, the ordinary
into the rare. Like wonder, the word curiosity names both the desire to render
the strange familiar and the strange thing itself. The force of curiosity
makes something into a curiosity (figure 6.1).