philoxenia

Philoxenia – love of strangers (hospitality)

Or love of the strange, which seems something quite different.

From McKenzie Wark’s article A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, And His Art Collection:

Xmas is more like a philoxenia than a philanthropy: A love of making the event of the strange.

The great philanthropists turn out, on closer inspection, to be nothing of the sort. Their acts are, like Xmas, about the making present of some strange excess in the world. There is no love of our kind involved. Nancy Cunard, Gerard Lebovici, Edgar Kaufman: these were not great philanthropists. They were patrons of the strange, practitioners of philoxenia. They did not ‘collect’ art and erect vanity museums. They were the secret Santas of another life.

I’m having trouble grasping the point with respect to art, but I like his point with respect to Xmas:

For the child, Xmas has nothing to do with ‘consumerism’. The gift just appears. Its a bit of what the surrealists called the marvelous. For the adult, it is a way to give to the child without expecting the child to be grateful to the parent. Rather, it is so the child can know that world itself could be generous.