Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas

  • On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
    Princeton, 134 pp, US $15.95, September 1999, ISBN 0 691 04875 4
  • Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey
    Art Issues, 216 pp, £15.95, September 1998, ISBN 0 9637264 5 5

Our century has been distrustful of beauty. Our philosophy follows Kant, who found beauty only in a contemplation of nature and art which yields an ‘entirely disinterested satisfaction’, pleasure bereft of desire. In literature and the arts, Modernism prized what is difficult, discomforting and edifying. As the gap between high and low culture became ever wider, the beauty which mattered to intellectuals, when it mattered to them at all, came to seem different in kind from the beauty which mattered to the world at large, and, for that reason, irrelevant and empty: the higher the pleasure it provoked, the less like pleasure it seemed.

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