Beyond Beauty

Description

The American abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman famously declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty. Not long after that, Andy Warhol was reconciling the world of art with the world of everyday life, painting soup cans and soda bottles. In this book, Federico Vercellone provides an account of the decline of beauty as a Platonic ideal from early German Romanticism to the twentieth century. He traces this intellectual trajectory from Goethe, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, through modernism and the avant-garde move ment, to the work of Adorno and Heidegger. Rather than the death or destruction of beauty, Vercellone argues instead that beauty in the twentieth century came back to live in reality and everyday life. He suggests this is a new edition of the classical ideal rather than an abandonment of it, and further makes the case for the ecological significance of this orientation and outlook. Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction. Beauty and the Twentieth Century Does Beauty Have a History? A History of Beauty In Myth, Beyond Myth The Spectre of Beauty Chapter I. The Romantic Farewell to Beauty The Airy Premises of a Necessary Catastrophe Form, Style, Entropy Decorum and Expression Chapter II. The Non-containing Form: From Nietzsche to Spengler Mimesis and Descriptive Knowledge From Goethe to Dilthey Nietzsche and the Decline of Form From Nietzsche to Goethe and Beyond Spengler and Beyond Apollo vs. Faust Chapter III. From Modernity to the Avant-Garde The Gothic Style and the Avant-Garde Expressionism and the Gothic Style From Goethe to Worringer and Beyond Croce: An Enemy of the Avant-Garde? Chapter IV. From Negativity to the Event: Adorno after Heidegger Philosophy of Art as Rearguard Adorno: From Negative Dialectics to Aesthetic Utopia A Hopeless Hope From Adorno to Benjamin, from Jünger to Heidegger Chapter V. The Dissolution of the Artwork and the Rebirth of Ancient Beauty Aesthetics as Energetics From Philosophy to Surrealism “The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty . . .” “High and Low” Conclusion. Classicism, Again Enlightenment without “Nostos” An “Ecological” Thought Notes Bibliography Index