eighteenth-century European marketplace for art. Coinciding with style's elevation from mere taxonomic concept into primary bearer of an artwork's meaning, this miscellaneous pluralism would pose a new set of problems or challenges for the modern artist, for whom the act of choosing a style would come to take on unprecedented weight. Schlegel's interesting is both an effect or byproduct of the rise of stylistic pluralism and an effort to solve the problem, through an explicit embrace of stylistic variation, eclecticism, and hybridity. Is there a similar historical narrative for curiosity? For a historical narrative about curiosity, I'd refer readers to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age , where he traces its significance as the "libido of theory." Curiosity seems to have been feminized in a way that interest has not -- on this see Laura Mulvey's Fetishism and Curiosity , which, if I recall correctly, reads curiosity as an antidote to fetishism. The interesting seems more explicitly comparative than curiosity. 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