Is the word itself a problem? Are 'beauty' and 'the beautiful' the same thing? Or are we dealing with something which is literally in the eyes of a billion beholders, eliciting a billion reactions and consequently a billion unique definitions?
Does it matter? Is preoccupation with beauty a distraction from other considerations, such as functionality, utility or practicality? Is beauty merely one of life’s luxuries, or is it directly related – in both positive and negative ways – to health, happiness, well-being, sense of self and other essentials for survival? How does beauty inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty?[29]
The writers of this pitch dance around their own relativity dogma like butterflies on fire. And then they go on to state "The Making Sense of Beauty conference seeks to explore these questions in an inclusive environment that welcomes participants from all disciplines, professions and vocations. As we come together to engage in a rich interdisciplinary conversation we will wrestle with issues that cross the boundaries of the intellectual, the emotional and the personal." But something tells me that if I go to that conference and state my sincere belief that Beauty is objective and absolute, I will be crucified by relativists who only give the slightest lip-service to the possibility that the 20th century excommunication of Beauty might have been a giant, colossal mistake, and I will also be ostracized for behaving in any sort of an assertive, masculine manner, which behaviour will be seen as suspect and potentially dangerous.
No, I don't think my assertions would be welcome at all, as they would only serve to threaten the entrenched and now fossilized counter-intuitive subjectivist dogma that Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and that there can never be any valid consensus which would prove otherwise – i.e., that there may be even the slightest something objective about Beauty. According to the new status quo, ugliness is only a relative form of Beauty; and destruction, deconstruction, decomposition, demolition, decadence, debauchery, decay, death, disease and excrement are only negative manifestations of Beauty masquerading in ugly guises which are only seen as ugly or negative – or not beautiful – by uninitiated, naïve, provincial, idiotic philistines.
This relativist ideology that they are advocating is one of irony because it transposes beauty and ugliness. And irony – which became the de facto religion of the 20th century art world and its adherent nihilist pseudo-intelligentsia – is so dated. That irony so widely celebrated in the Anglosphere as being the antidote to Old World hyper-ornamentation with its hokey and sentimental decorative excess, has itself become backwards, retrograde, passé, hokey, suburban, common, provincial, philistine – it's even become a nostalgic, sentimental reaction to the uncertainty of the New Age which is dawning and threatens to sweep away many 20th century fixtures such as Modernism, Conceptualism, etc. The irony game is over but its dogmatists are clinging onto it for dear life.
Beauty is not ugly.
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