Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century

The lavishly illustrated Regarding Beauty surveys late twentieth-century Western art to address why the timeless notion of beauty has recently been so hotly contested and, in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, so highly politicized. Are there accepted standards of beauty, or does beauty exist solely in the mind? Is beauty eternal, or a fleeting experience subject to changing fashion and tastes? Can one find beauty in ugliness? Hirshhorn Museum curators Neal Benezra and Olga M. Viso, analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto, and Haus der Kunst curator Hubertus Gassner contribute essays regarding these questions in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition of approximately eighty paintings, sculptures, and installations by thirty-four artists. Emphasizing parallel approaches rather than trends or movements, illustrations juxtapose works by well-known Europeans and Americans of the past -- Yves Klein, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol, for instance -- with the creations of a broad and diverse group of international contemporary artists to dramatize the fertile field of beauty as it relates to the figure, landscape, and abstraction. Regarding Beauty argues that beauty has not disappeared from the dialog of art and that, on the contrary, it has persisted as an essential element in the evolution of art as the 20th century passes into history.