Art Mind Beauty

Art Mind Beauty

vol 28 no 2, 2008


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



You are here » Artlink » vol 28 no 2, 2008 » Australian Beauty

Australian Beauty

Author: Ms Margot Osborne, feature

Beauty is problematic for contemporary art theory at least in part because it affords a pleasurable, life-affirming, yet ineffable experience. Yet Margot Osborne finds many examples to show that it has never really gone away.
As Peter Schjeldahl observed in 1996: 'Beauty will be what it has always been and, despite everything, is now in furtive and inarticulate ways: an irrepressible, anarchic, healing human response without which life is a mistake.'
Osborne writes: 'Embodiment, the synthesis of sensibility, skill and material form, is at the heart of beauty...The perception of beauty is an integrative sensual and cerebral experience, dissolving dualities of mind/body and repudiating outmoded art form hierarchies.'



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