Reinvigorating Beauty: Novel Perspectives on an Old Aesthetic Category

Beauty is a crucial aesthetic category, and yet an often suspect and neglected one. Artists, critics, scholars and theorists have criticised the aesthetic category as conservative, deceptive, bourgeois, superficial, excluding, abusive, and a handmaiden to capitalist exploitation. But in a historical moment dominated by environmental crises and political conflict beauty needs reinvigoration as critical concept and antidote. The conference asks how we can critically speak and write about what appears, is perceived as, or is made to be beautiful today. Drawing on recent research in philosophy, empirical aesthetics, art history, film studies, and sociology it showcases ongoing research on beauty that reinvigorates its social, political and existential functions.

Programme

The conference will take place in Groningen from 29 September to 1 October.

Download the programme:

Registration

To attend the conference, please register here:

Organizers: Julian Hanich, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, and Sanna McGregor