LACMA Post - Mapplethorpe

I started my visit to LACMA (I think it was 12/22 -- rainy and dreary) in the Caravaggio and His Legacy exhibit. I came on strong with the handful of Caravaggios in the first room, but then my attention flagged while wandering into the Legacy part. I let myself get distracted by at least one of the men viewing the exhibit with me, which was amusing considering the subject of the show.

After that (and the Ken Price, which I quite liked), I found the small Mapplethorpe X, Y, and Z Portfolios exhibit and spent a little time in there, both taking in the work and enjoying the scandalized few who wandered in without noticing the "mature images" warning outside.

Edmund White's introductory text for the Z Portfolio is mounted in the room with the photos, and that's where I found this--

Because sexual desire, finally, is a form of love -- of wanting to possess, explore, probe, taste, invade and inhabit an alien body if only for a moment. Not love in the sense of sustained social responsibility but love as passion, as appetite, as irrepressible yearning. Oddly enough, passion, like art, is always irresponsible, useless, an end in itself, regulated by its own impulses and nothing else.

Then I sped through the Kubrick. More in a bit.