In jazz and rock music, a virtuoso musician improvises melodies, sometimes drawing the listener into a malestrom of notes. When these fall short, listeners are unmoved, unchanged, unaffected. In popular culture, when a performer achieves an intensity, hundreds, if not millions, of people are moved to emulate the performer in dress, in taste, in art. Intensity is the difference between erotic films, which are sexy, and pornographic films, which curiously are not sexy. Sex itself can be edifying.
Pornography fails because film footage of people simply having sex can lack intensity.
The pursuit of intensity is not the end of the story. For better or worse, the pursuit of intensity carries with it the possibility of decadence. In principle, heroin use is the same as mountain climbing, and kinky sex is the same as sky diving. They aim at the intensity of the experience, regardless of the danger of the pursuit. This telos of aestheticism underlies many contradictory phenonmena.