Vital Beauty

the long version

In this book, leading philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to design practice and art. The conception of beauty presented in Vital Beauty aims to draw a line under a century filled with excessive worship of the sublime in art and architecture. Vital beauty, in this book, is conceived as a form of beauty that is imperfect and impure. Over 150 years ago, British art critic John Ruskin came up with the concept and thereby liberated beauty from classical perfection and harmony. In this he acknowledged the fact that we live in a world of currents and forces and that these forces bring forth objects. Vital beauty might just be the ideal label for the combination of the vitality of material and information flows, and the beautiful mountains, clouds, books and edifices that they produce.