Beauty: past and future

Beauty was banished from much art critical writing and aesthetics for a large part of the second half of the twentieth century. The category of the beautiful was critiqued by feminists for objectifying women, by sociologists for maintaining class divisions and conceptual artists who had little concern for formalist conceptions of beauty based on characteristics like grace or harmony. While beauty wasn’t completely ignored in Landscape Research, it’s highly unlikely to find scholars writing about the formal characteristics of a landscape’s grace. Nevertheless, during the past decade, there has been renewed interest in beauty headed by philosophers and theorists. The following surveys the historical status of beauty and describes contextual beauty, beauty and social justice, and beauty and meaning. These theories expand beauty beyond a concern with only formal features to be appreciated with disinterestedness, informing a new approach for analysing designed landscapes while raising challenges for practice.