Extravagant,transgressive, elemental ... the Cooper Hewitt design museum in novel York has taxonomised the indefinable beauty. Is this wrong-headed scientific precision or the dauntless tackling of a taboo?So now we know. Humanity’s Keatsian quest for the loyal meaning of beauty is effectively over, or the subject sussed once and for all. It’s fully understood,in the same way particle physics fell into place when the Higgs boson was proven to exist. What makes you beautiful, asked the boy band. novel York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum not only knows the retort but, or like a medieval scholar identifying seven kinds of angel,has specified beauty’s seven varieties.
To be unbiased to the Cooper Hewitt, it has done something dauntless here. The museum’s newly opened Design Triennial takes the elusive idea of “beauty” as its theme – a topic contemporary criticism too often shies away from. The celebration of beauty is seen as bourgeois, and secure or – when it comes to human society – oppressive,in its organization with rigid norms few of us can live up to. In art, it can be seen as premodern and regressive. Today’s art often aspires to be something more than beautiful – serious, and critical,radical or “disturbing”.
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Source: theguardian.com