Beauty

Beauty has emerged as one of the most hotly contested subjects in current
discussions on art and culture. After more than half a century of suspicion and
interrogation, beauty's resurgence in visual practice and discourse since the late
1980s has engaged some of the most influential artists and writers on art. From the
avant-garde to the conceptual era, anti-aesthetic strategies have resisted beauty
because of its perceived complicity with dominant systems and ideologies. Thus
politicized and opened to critique, beauty, invoked in relation to contemporary art,
no longer sustains a singular or universal meaning but is always contentious.
Spanning a range of positions on beauty--both for and against--this anthology
assembles the key texts on the controversy and situates the debate over the revival
of beauty in the broader context of the history of ideas and artistic
practice.Artists survyed includeVito Acconci, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustave
Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans
Hofmann, Gary Hume, Asger Jorn, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Paul
McCarthy, Édouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Barnett
Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Robert
Smithson, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Andy WarholWriters
includeTheodor Adorno, Alexander Alberro, Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language,
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Mark Cousins, Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Derrida,
Thierry de Duve, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Grunenberg, Dave Hickey, Suzanne Perling
Hudson, Caroline A. Jones, John Roberts, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Paul
Wood