Beauty Again
On Singularity, Truth, and the Conditions of Art Today
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21840498Keywords:
Beauty, Aesthetics, Singularity, Modern Art, Kitsch, Plato, NietzscheAbstract
This paper examines the role of beauty in the history and theory of art, arguing that its marginalization in the late twentieth century has led to a crisis in the relation between art, truth, and action. Drawing on Nietzsche’s conception of life as an aesthetic phenomenon and Plato’s critique of mimetic art, the paper traces the gradual displacement of beauty by rational, institutional, and conceptual frameworks. It further analyzes the emergence of kitsch and the increasing mediation of meaning in contemporary art. Against this development, beauty is reconsidered as a condition of immediacy, singularity, and judgment. The paper concludes that the reintroduction of beauty is essential for restoring the possibility of meaning in art and life. Paradoxically, if beauty is not restored as a constitutive value of art – just as truth is to science and justice to politics – the very distinctions between performance and truth, presentation and reality, pretending and genuine emotional expression, original and fake, true action and its simulation risk collapsing. Beauty, as singular necessity – as exercised and exemplified in art – is the condition for meaning in art, and therefore in life.
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