On Beauty: A Manifesto

In: Beauty: Exploring Critical Perspectives
Author:
Patricia A. Sayre
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These days, merely suggesting that art might bear some important relation to beauty marks one as hopelessly out of date. It seems to me, however, that without any concern for beauty, the arts become an exercise in cleverness producing little of lasting value. While any number of stories might be told about how matters have come to pass, my concern here is less with analysing why beauty has fallen out of favour than with declaring me a partisan of beauty. In this paper I want to lay out some philosophical parameters for thinking about the pursuit and ultimate creation of beauty. My key suggestion is that rather than equating the pursuit of beauty with an attempt at defining it, as philosophers are so often wont to do, we should think of the pursuit of beauty as the response to a call. However, even if treating beauty as a call ultimately makes defining beauty irrelevant, there is still value in the Socratic effort to grasp that which beautiful things have in common because this effort can have a powerful generative effect. My interest in such an outcome is practical as well as theoretical. For I speak here not just as a professor of philosophy but also as a student nearing the end of her course of studies for the BFA. I thus have a personal stake in understanding how responding to the call issued by something beautiful can, in turn, prompt us to produce objects of beauty that issue a call of their own.

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