An argument about beauty.pdfVIP

Susan Sontag An argument about beauty 1 Responding at last, in April of 2002, to see past. The Pope likes venerable ideas. the scandal created by the revelation of And beauty, as a term signifying (like innumerable cover-ups of sexually pred- health) an indisputable excellence, has atory priests, Pope John Paul II told the been a perennial resource in the issuing American cardinals summoned to the of peremptory evaluations. Vatican, “A great work of art may be Permanence, however, is not one of blemished, but its beauty remains; and beauty’s more obvious attributes; and this is a truth which any intellectually the contemplation of beauty, when it is honest critic will recognize.” expert, may be wreathed in pathos, the Is it too odd that the Pope likens the drama on which Shakespeare elaborates Catholic Church to a great–that is, in many of the Sonnets. Traditional cele- beautiful–work of art? Perhaps not, brations of beauty in Japan, like the since the inane comparison allows him annual rite of cherry-blossom viewing, to turn abhorrent misdeeds into some- are keenly elegiac; the most stirring thing like the scratches in the print of a beauty is the most evanescent. To make silent ½lm or craquelure covering the beauty in some sense imperishable re- surface of an Old Master painting, blem- quired a lot of conceptual tinkering and ishes that we reflexively screen out or transposing, but the idea was simply too alluring, too potent, to be squandered on Susan Sontag has been a Fellow of the American the praise of superior embodiments. The Academy since 1993. Best known as a novelist and aim was to multiply the notion, to allow essayist–her b