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Only a Promise of Happiness - The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Paperback)
Loot Price: R593
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Only a Promise of Happiness - The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Paperback)
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List price R686
Loot Price R593
Discovery Miles 5 930
You Save R93 (14%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth
century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers
deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from
horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the
margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative,
"aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander
Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its
place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and
desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their
moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life. Nehamas makes
his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical
depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and
literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and
Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of
artworks is generously illustrated. Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may
depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The
perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if
the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and
direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in
pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a
tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always
dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to
understand, and not suppress.
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