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Art Mind Beauty

Art Mind Beauty

vol 28 no 2


Art/Mind/Beauty tackles one of the questions exercising the minds of philosophers in the age of neuro-science - how does the mind create notions of beauty and why are some artists and audiences drawn to the fragile, the shimmering, the highly decorative and the nature-inspired? Has contemporary art been diminished by the absence of these visual pleasures? Perhaps beauty and a sense of the ineffable have crept back without our noticing. Could this be related to a fear that time is running out for the natural world? Artists who inspired this issue include Imants Tillers, Jon Cattapan, John Mawurndjul, Doreen Reid Nakamarra, Catherine Woo, Stieg Persson, David Keeling and Philip Wolfhagen (painters); Hossein & Angela Valamanesh, Giles Bettison, Kirsten Coelho, Timothy Horn, Ah Xian, Robyn Stacey, Karl Wiebke, Robin Best and Tina Gonsalves (other media). Editor Margot Osborne.


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NAVA - National Association for the Visual Arts

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You are here » Artlink » vol 28 no 2 » The romantic spirit

The romantic spirit

Jennifer A. McMahon, feature

In 2007 Jennifer A. McMahon, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, published a book called Aesthetics and material beauty: aesthetics naturalized. (See book review by Michael Newall, this issue of Artlink.)
In the late 1970s McMahon was an art student looking for truth. Her move to philosophy to find truth makes use of Kant's doctrine of aesthetic ideas and argues that our perceptual and cognitive orientation to the world is reaffirmed through finding forms that seem to draw us to them for their own sake. When this occurs it unleashes ideas like immortality, infinity and freedom for which there are no perceptual counterparts. She argues that Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but what constitutes the eye of the beholder is determined by culture.



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