Abstract

An ancient Greek proverb declares: ‘beautiful things are difficult’. One obvious difficulty arises from their almost limitless variety: sights, sounds, people, natural phenomena, man-made objects and abstract ideas may all bebeautiful, but what do these things have in common? It is not just beauty's breadth of application, then, that makes it difficult, but the way in which its meaning varies depending on context. The beauty of a child may mean something quite different from the beauty of an old and wizened face, let alone the beauty of a supermodel. In common parlance,beautifulmay be used as a general term of approbation alongside others likelovelyorfine, while in academic discourse, the wordbeautyhas a life of its own: since the emergence of aesthetics as an independent discipline in the mid eighteenth century, beauty has been constantly theorized and responded to in different ways that have laden the term with its own peculiar historical baggage. And although some of these philosophical reflections on beauty may have trickled into the common cultural consciousness, in general they seem a far cry from beauty's most ubiquitous incarnation in modern Western society, in the cosmetics industry; to put it another way, if you go into a beauty salon in search of a Kantian ideal of disinterested contemplation, I suspect you will be disappointed.