Beauty: Exploring Critical Perspectives

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Rather than accept society’s ‘preferred metaphors’ about beauty at face value, the authors in this volume question the fact that beauty can also surprise us in the least foreseeable setting, at the most unexpected moment and in the most surprising or unsettling ways. Their work underscores beauty’s ephemeral, transitory, fleeting and at times confounding nature. The way beauty reveals itself to us, they point out, may challenge or even contradict established conventions, norms and values about aesthetics. The emergence of unconventional metaphors and analogies about beauty in these chapters calls on us to pay attention to competing and seemingly intractable connotations of fear, darkness, ugliness, oppression, repression, callousness and dejection that won’t leave us indifferent to their appeal. How we, as researchers, envisage beauty as a topic of investigation tells us as much about our conceptualization of beauty arising from particular scientific perceptions as about the language and symbols that express this perception. It raises the important question about why we rely on conceptual constructs to explain beauty and whether beauty remains a mystery to be explored or, ultimately, one best left unexplained.