The Quotation of Beauty. From: Venus In Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th Century Art, by Wendy Steiner

From the book cover:

“In Venus in Exile renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art—the female subject and ornament—became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes Venus in Exile on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice.”

In the introduction to the book, Steiner writes:

“For start, I think, we must stop treating beauty as a thing or quality, and see it instead as a kind of communication. We often speak as if beauty were a property of objects: Some people or artworks “have” it and some do not. But … the judgment of beauty in a person or artwork varies enormously from one person to the next, and in the course of time, even within the same person. These shifts and differences are meaningful and valid, and not ”falling away” from some “truth” or “higher taste”. Beauty is an unstable property because it is not a property at all. It is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a “self” and an “Other”: “I find an Other beautiful”. This act of discovery, we shall see, has profound implications.” p.p. xx-xxi