What ever happened to beauty? Since the late 1960s she seems to have been in exile. Postmodern artists traded her in for flirtations with truth, strength, and purity of form. It was then that women started stripping off their heavy makeup and Barbie doll clothing in an effort to gain equal footing with men. And men, anxious too to break some of society's molds, shed their business suits and leisurewear--then the paragons of male beauty. But as art critic Dave Hickey unwittingly predicted during the '80s, that quality--which Plato believed to be eternal and absolute--is the "issue of the '90s."

After three decades of playing wallflower because she was thought by many artists to be frivolous, easy, tired, and even shallow, beauty is dancing again. Uncontrollable Beauty is filled with exciting essays by artists, critics, curators, and philosophers whose definitions of this elusive quality are often at odds with the Platonic ideal. When beauty besets critic Peter Schjeldahl, his mind is "hyperalert," his body eases, and he is often aware of his "shoulders coming down as unconscious muscular tension lets go." Renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois also experiences beauty as opposed to encountering it: "Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun ... beauty in and of itself does not exist." Artist and coeditor Bill Beckley blames beauty's banishment on Wittgenstein--who, in a 1938 lecture at Cambridge, said that beauty is most often meant as an interjection "similar to Wow! or rubbing one's stomach"--and his undue influence on conceptual artists of the '60s and '70s. Each essay collected here is rigorous in its definition of this elusive yet powerful force in art and aesthetics. Taken together, the writings are an invigorating read for artists and viewers alike.


From Independent Publisher
Bill Beckley and David Shapiro have compiled a massive tome of essays, arguments, conversations, letters, and poetry to attempt to define aesthetics in all its varieties: painting, sculpture, concept of art, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and poetry, among other disciplines. Among the tacticians of beauty called upon are Louise Bourgeois, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Peter Schjeldahl, Agnes Martin, William Rubin, Thomas McEwilley, and Robert C. Morgan.Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe notes that in the art world, "the idea of the beautiful is always threatening to make an appearance or comeback but it tends always to be deferred."Peter Schjeldahl weighs in: ""Beauty is Truth. Truth Beauty?" That's easy. Truth is a dead stop in thought before a proposition that seems to obviate further questioning, and the satisfaction it brings is beautiful."Santayana is quoted: "To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it."Agnes Martin: "When I think of Art, I think of Beauty, Beauty is the mystery of Life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection."(Yet others have argued "beauty is in the eye of the beholder.").Louise Bourgeois: "Beauty? It seems to me that beauty is an example of what the philosophers call reification, to regard an abstraction as a thing. Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun. People have experiences. If they feel an intense aesthetic pleasure, they take that experience and project it into the object. They experience the idea of beauty, but beauty in and of itself does not exist. Experiences are sorts of pleasure, that invoke verbs. In fact, beauty is only a mystified expression of our own emotion." These are just a few of the many conceptions that permeate this volume, which taken in its totality represents the wellspring of art itself, in its many forms and dichotomies. Jacqueline Lichtenstein talks of "Platonic cosmetics." Hubert Damisch ruminates on Freud and his rare and singular interpretation of Kant. Even the evidence and myth of Pygmalion, and, some feel, his modern antithesis, Robert Mapplethorpe, are observed.What is essential is the understanding of the nature of truth and beauty, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Francis Bacon's interpretations of the playwright. One volume can only penetrate the midst of internal and external debate that we see all around us. But its importance in the technological age is to remember that despite its necessity, the computer as a form can never replace the dynamics and feeling of professional artists, sculptors, painters, playwrights, poets, and novelists with an aesthetic form and grace.


New York Times
“Many of the writings offer beauty a fresh face, casting it as a healing, personal, unpredictable, ungovernable experience.”


Christian Science Monitor
“ Beauty is definitely back in style . . . They reject what they call the strain of intolerance and aesthetic “Puritanism.”


Communication Arts
“Includes... spirited writing for readers who appreciate passion and reflexive theories from Caravaggio to Mapplethorpe . . . diverse and expansive.”


Off-the-Wall, Spring 1998
"Bill Beckley's recent interview with [Louise] Bourgeois is one of the many highlights of the anthology . . . . Including a wide variety of texts never before published in book form by people such as Julia Kristeva and Ariane Lopez-Huici . . . and major statements on the topic by critics, poets, and artists, as well as the first complete presentation of the famous pitched battle which unfolded in the pages of Artforum between Thomas McEvilley and William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe . . . , this anthology offers an unsurpassed collection of contemporary approaches to the very loaded notion of beauty, and its contested place in the appreciation and practice of art."


Rain Taxi, Summer 1998
"The concept of 'beauty' becomes revitalized and more interesting. What is more important is the book's effectiveness at defining a space for the discussion of beauty's relevance to contemporary art. Uncontrollable Beauty makes clear that a larger reconsideration of beauty is not only needed, but has already begun."


New York Magazine, March 23, 1998
"[Bill Beckley has] gathered nineteen existing essays on beauty by critics and artists whose writing he admires . . . commissioned new pieces . . . and tracked down the entire heated public debate that took place between critic Thomas McEvilley and MOMA's Kirk Varnedoe and William Rubin."


Art in America, 1998 Spring Book Selection
"An extraordinary volume."


Sam Hunter, Emeritus Professor, Princeton University
"An absorbing and provocative farrago of commentary devoted essentially to the complex art of our time, ranging widely in tone and stylistics from the stolidly doctrinaire to the heedlessly irreverent, and generously embracing topics of aesthetics, morality, and contemporary art theory. This remarkable collection of opinion reconfigures the hoary and devalued Victorian concept of beauty, moving us closer to the ever mercurial art object as well as our own personal sensations as we encounter its many guises. From Meyer Schapiro's lucid criteria of value to Louise Bourgeois's tactic of mystification and defiance the book is full of singular revelations and contrasts in ideology and discourse on the part of an admirable group of artists, poets, theorists, and dedicated observers and creators of art today."


New York Times, April 11, 1998
"To many, the very word beauty seems to have become a muddled cliche. Time for a new definition, or at least a refinement of old ones, the critics included in this volume say. Thus many of the writings offer beauty a fresh face, casting it as a healing, personal, unpredictable, ungovernable experience."


Book Description
In 1998, a prestigious group of artists, critics, and literati offered in a single collection their incisive reflections on the question of beauty—past, present, and future. This esteemed collection of essays, entitled Uncontrollable Beauty, provoked debates about beauty in art and culture, arousing widespread curiosity and stimulating passionate discussion that helped to usher in a new era of appreciation for beauty in art. In response to the enduring popularity and acclaim for this anthology, Allworth Press has just published a paperback edition of Uncontrollable Beauty, edited by Bill Beckley and David Shapiro.


From the Publisher
Chosen one of the best art books of 1998 by the editors of Amazon.com, the hardcover edition was the subject of reviews and articles in such respected media as the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, Art in America, and Communication Arts. "Uncontrollable Beauty seeks to examine the changing role of beauty in the twentieth century and give beauty a kind of critical makeover," the New York Times wrote. "Thus, while turning to Kant, Freud, John Ruskin, and even Dr. Seuss for inspiration, many of the writings offer beauty a fresh face, casting it as a healing, personal, unpredictable, ungovernable experience."


From the Author
The range of works in this volume is enormous, encompassing Meyer Schapiro's skeptical argument on perfection; contributions from artists as profound as Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin; and reflections of critics, curators, and philosophers on the problems of beauty and relativism. The esteemed writers and thinkers underline how the sense of beauty today is an inescapable domain of multiple perspectives. This volume contains the insights of some of today's most innovative art theorists and critics, such as John Ashbery, Hubert Damisch, Arthur C. Danto, Max Fierst, David Freedberg, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, John Hejduk, Dave Hickey, James Hillman, Kenneth Koch, Julia Kristeva, Donald Kuspit, Jacqueline Lichstenstein, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Thomas McEvilley, Robert C. Morgan, Frank O'Hara, Carter Ratcliff, William Rubin, Meyer Shapiro, Peter Schjeldahl, Robert Farris Thompson, Kirk Varnedoe, Marjorie Welish, and John Yau.


From the Inside Flap
Duplicated by no other anthology in print, this collection is essential reading for all students of art today and anyone trying to comprehend contemporary debates on the role of beauty in recent art and culture. Uncontrollable Beauty is part of the Aesthetics Today series, co-published with the School of the Visual Arts.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

About theAuthor

Bill Beckley is an artist who has exhibited extensively in America and Europe since 1970. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the Sammlung Hoffmann Museum in Berlin. He teaches semiotics, literature, and film at the School of Visual Arts in New York and is the editor for the Aesthetics Today series from Allworth Press, which includes Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Redeeming Art and The Dialectic of Decadence by Donald Kuspit, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt by Thomas McEvilley, and Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975 by Carter Ratcliff.

David Shapiro, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1977 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Poetry, is the author of eight volumes of poetry and many works of literary and art criticism. He has received fellowships from both the National Endowments of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities.

SYNOPSIS

Now in paperback! In this acclaimed art anthology, a prestigious group of artists, critics, and literati offer their incisive reflections on the questions of beauty--past, present, and future--and how it has become a domain of multiple perspectives.
Here is Meyer Schapiro's skeptical argument on perfection . . . contributions from artists as profound as Louise Bourgeois and Agnes Martin . . . and reflections of critics, curators, and philosophers on the problems of beauty and relativism. Readers will find fascinating insights from such art theorists and critics as Dave Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert -Rolfe, Donald Kuspit, Carter Ratcliff, and dozens more. For all art lovers, this is an unmatched and essential resource.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times

"Uncontrollable Beauty seeks to examine the changing role of beauty in the twentieth century and give beauty a kind of critical makeover . . . Thus, while turning to Kant, Freud, John Ruskin, and even Dr. Seuss for inspiration, many of the writings offer beauty a fresh face, casting it as a healing, personal, unpredictable, ungovernable experience."

Christian Science Monitor

"Artists are rebelling against the visual starkness and political agendas of art of the recent past, and are growing increasingly unafraid to discuss their work with words like "vibrancy," "lushness," even "glamour." For them, beauty is definitely back in style . . . Many of today's most articulate defenders of beauty are people like Hickey, Beckley, Schjeldahl. They reject what they call the strain of intolerance and aesthetic "Puritanism" running through the art world."

Sam Hunter

An absorbing and provocative farrago of commentary devoted essentially to the complex art of our time, ranging widely in tone and stylistics from the stolidly doctrinaire to the heedlessly irreverent, and generously embracing topics of aesthetics, morality, and contemporary art theory....From Meyer Schapiro's lucid criteria of value to Louise Bourgeois's tactic of mystification and defiance the book is full of singular revelations and contrasts in ideology and discourse on the part of an admirable group of artists, poets, theorists, and dedicated observers and creators of art today. -- Sam Hunter

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING