Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics

(Paperback)

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An art anthology about beauty. In this collection of essays, a group of artists, critics and literati offer their reflections on the question of beauty - past, present and future. The range of these works encompasses Meyer Schapiro's sceptical argument on perfection, contributions from artists as profound as Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin, and reflections of critics, curators and philosophers on the problems of beauty and relativism. The volume also contains the insights of some of today's innovative art theorists, such as Dave Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Peter Schjeldahl and Julia Kristeva, as well as the writings of critics such as Arthur Danto, Donald Kuspit and Carter Ratcliff. These writers and thinkers underline how the sense of beauty today is an inescapable domain of multiple perspectives.

Author Bio

Bill Beckley is an artist who has exhibited extensively in America and Europe since 1970. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Sammlung Hoffmann Museum in Berlin. He teaches semiotics, literature, and film at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is the editor for the Aesthetics Today series from Allworth Press, which includes Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Redeeming Art and The Dialectic of Decadence by Donald Kuspit, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt by Thomas McEvilley, and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975 by Carter Ratcliff. He lives in New York City. David Shapiro, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1977 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Poetry, is the author of eight volumes of poetry and many of literary and art criticism. He has received fellowships from both the National Endowments of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities.