The truth about beauty
In the late 1940s, the German art historian Hans Sedlmayr observed that ‘many things that are classified as “back-ward”... might be the starting-point of real inner progress’. At a moment when the art establishment has abandoned art for political attitudinizing, the path forward begins with a movement of recuperation. In an age when anything can be a work of art, the question of whether something is art has ceased to be compelling: what matters is whether something is a good work of art, and about this the art world has rendered itself hors de combat. Should we be pleased with this state of affairs? Or, to put it another way, is the celebrity of people like Damien Hirst or Marina Abramović or the Chapman brothers a good thing for art?
