beer good
Well-Known Member
Umberto Eco: On Beauty (Storia della bellezza, 2004)
It's an interesting topic: what is beauty? It might seem like a trivial question, but think about it: esthetics run through everything we do. Everything we read, watch, listen to, right down to the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the cans we buy food in are made to correspond to some standard of beauty. Where does all that come from? What makes us think a Rolls looks better than a Datsun? What makes Dickens a better writer than Stephenie Meyer? Why did medieaval Christ figures look triumphant and baroque ones suffering? Why is Kate Moss a supermodel and Roseanne Barr not? Can something tragic be beautiful?
If you've read Eco before you know he's good at picking up patterns, memes, ideas and how they mutate with time and context. So this is Eco the non-fiction writer tracing society's concept of beauty from pre-historic time to the 21st century, richly illustrated with artworks and architecture and quotes from poets, philosophers and novelists ranging from Plato to Wilde. Venus of Willendorf and Naomi Campbell, Apollo and George Clooney, Warhol and Tizian, Thomas Aquinus and Kafka, they're all in here. Inevitably, even at 400 pages, it becomes a bit of a coffee table book; it's a huge topic, and he doesn't really have time to cover everything (plus, it's all pretty Eurocentric, of course). But being Eco, what he does cover is covered in-depth, giving you a great understanding of how and why standards change and how they relate to changes in the world - the relationships between religion and art, between revolution and poetry, technology and design. Rather brilliant.
Plus, obviously, the book itself is beautiful.
Now I'm even more intrigued by the sequel On Ugliness; Eco has said that after writing the first book, he realised he'd been writing about standards, about conformity. What about the things that don't conform to the traditional standards? That's another doorstopper.
It's an interesting topic: what is beauty? It might seem like a trivial question, but think about it: esthetics run through everything we do. Everything we read, watch, listen to, right down to the houses we live in, the cars we drive, the cans we buy food in are made to correspond to some standard of beauty. Where does all that come from? What makes us think a Rolls looks better than a Datsun? What makes Dickens a better writer than Stephenie Meyer? Why did medieaval Christ figures look triumphant and baroque ones suffering? Why is Kate Moss a supermodel and Roseanne Barr not? Can something tragic be beautiful?
If you've read Eco before you know he's good at picking up patterns, memes, ideas and how they mutate with time and context. So this is Eco the non-fiction writer tracing society's concept of beauty from pre-historic time to the 21st century, richly illustrated with artworks and architecture and quotes from poets, philosophers and novelists ranging from Plato to Wilde. Venus of Willendorf and Naomi Campbell, Apollo and George Clooney, Warhol and Tizian, Thomas Aquinus and Kafka, they're all in here. Inevitably, even at 400 pages, it becomes a bit of a coffee table book; it's a huge topic, and he doesn't really have time to cover everything (plus, it's all pretty Eurocentric, of course). But being Eco, what he does cover is covered in-depth, giving you a great understanding of how and why standards change and how they relate to changes in the world - the relationships between religion and art, between revolution and poetry, technology and design. Rather brilliant.
Plus, obviously, the book itself is beautiful.
Now I'm even more intrigued by the sequel On Ugliness; Eco has said that after writing the first book, he realised he'd been writing about standards, about conformity. What about the things that don't conform to the traditional standards? That's another doorstopper.