Ever since the renaissance, the female body has been a primary symbol of artistic beauty in the West. With the advent of the avant-garde and modernist art, beauty became suspect. This work explores how this happened, tracing the century's troubled relationship with beauty.
The renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women's taste as the engine of liberal values.
Surveys a wide range of cultural controversies, from the Mapplethorpe affair to Salman Rushdie's death sentence. This book seeks to show that the fear and outrage these events inspired were the result of dangerous misunderstandings about the relationship between art and life.
Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and America's Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Face-book and Twitter, our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing. The author shows us the very meaning of the arts in the process of transformation.
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