"the fact that we find things interesting only when they seem to differ from others of their type, points to the fact that we live in a world understood as fundamentally taxonomized. this doesn’t mean that it’s a world devoid of wonder or surprise—only one in which, as mikhail epstein notes, the unknown must be immediately related to what is already known. in fact, epstein provocatively argues that the interesting is a way of explicitly using understanding to check wonder; or mitigating the ‘alterity of the object’ with ‘reason’s capacity to integrate it’—like a scaled-down version of the two phases of the kantian sublime. in any case, in its efforts to reconcile the individual with the generic, the interesting might be described as an explicit response to the modern routinization of novelty. it’s also a response to what we might call the mediatization or informatization of reality—to the fact that ‘the observation of events throughout society now occurs almost at the same time as the events themselves’ (as niklas luhmann put it). one sees this reflected in conceptual art’s fascination with its coextensiveness with publicity, and also in its fascination with systems, networks, and media."