Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African Americans to straighten their hair? What inspires beauty queens to measure up as flawless objects for the male gaze? Why does a French performance artist use cosmetic surgery to remake her face into a composite of the master painters' version of beauty? How does beauty culture perceive the disabled body? Is the constant effort to remain young and thin, often at considerable economic and emotional expense, ethically justifiable? Provocative essays by an international group of scholars discuss aesthetics in aesthetics, the arts, the tools of fashion, the materials of decoration, and the big business of beautification—beauty matters—to reveal the ways gender, race, and sexual orientation have informed the concept of beauty and driven us to become more beautiful. Here, Kant rubs shoulders with Calvin Klein. Beauty Matters draws from visual art, dance, cultural history, and literary and feminist theory to explore the values and politics of beauty. Various philosophical perspectives on ethics and aesthetics emerge from this penetrating book to determine and reveal that beauty is never disinterested.
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"... lively and well-written ..."--British Journal of Aesthetics, April 2002
About the Author
Peg Zeglin Brand is an artist and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. Her new collection of essays, Beauty Revisited, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
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Aesthetics for Every Reader,
By Kynancy (Louisville, KY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Beauty Matters (Paperback)
This compilation of essays is accessible for the non-scholar and covers a wide range of topics related to beauty and aesthetics. It touches on both traditional aesthetics and more inclusive aesthetic systems, and the various authors draw on everything from biology to popular culture. The approaches encourage us to think about our visual environment and the arts in new ways and remind us of how important, in today's world, are a fluency with the languages of beauty and imagery.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Two conflicting but strongly entrenched intuitions about beauty hold sway in the hearts and minds of many. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
maintenance mimesis, beauty pageant values, courtesan culture, virtual beauty, phallocentric structures, beauty matters, divine women, aesthetic surgery, human beauty, classical body, masculine gaze Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Miss America, Carnal Art, Calvin Klein, Imperial China, African American, Third Realm, Luce Irigaray, Naomi Wolf, Karole Armitage, Miss Universe, The Watteau Duets, United States, Writing Women, Mona Lisa, The Mollino Room, Vanessa Williams, Arlene Croce, Immanuel Kant, Los Angeles, Art of the Bedchamber, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Cultural Studies, Drastic Classicism New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Two conflicting but strongly entrenched intuitions about beauty hold sway in the hearts and minds of many. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
maintenance mimesis, beauty pageant values, courtesan culture, virtual beauty, phallocentric structures, beauty matters, divine women, aesthetic surgery, human beauty, classical body, masculine gaze Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Miss America, Carnal Art, Calvin Klein, Imperial China, African American, Third Realm, Luce Irigaray, Naomi Wolf, Karole Armitage, Miss Universe, The Watteau Duets, United States, Writing Women, Mona Lisa, The Mollino Room, Vanessa Williams, Arlene Croce, Immanuel Kant, Los Angeles, Art of the Bedchamber, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Cultural Studies, Drastic Classicism New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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37
books
cite this book:
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- The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf on 8 pages
- The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty by Dave Hickey on 4 pages
- Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery by Kathy Davis in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 312
- Beauty Restored by Mary Mothersill in Front Matter, page 108, and page 110
- Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage by Sally Banes in Front Matter, page 287, and Back Matter
See all 100 books this book cites
- Revealing Art by Matthew Kieran on 4 pages
- Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture by Janell Hobson on 4 pages
- Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (Understanding Feminist Philosophy) by Carolyn Korsmeyer on 4 pages
- Revealing Art by Matthew Kieran in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology by Sandra Harding on page 183, page 185, and page 188
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