On Beauty: Tradition, Negation,Change

Abstract

This text focuses on the changing role played by Beauty in the long course of Western aesthetic thought, and on the heavy consequences of this mutation on the European aesthetic taste from post-Renaissance time onwards. Shakespeare’s prediction voiced in the opening scene of Macbeth by the enigmatic litany of the three witches: «Fair is foul, and foul is fair» was bound to take concrete shape as soon as «Le laid c’est le beau» in Hugo’s Préface à Cromwell (1827) became almost a watchword announcing the irreversible colliquation of the principle of beauty. Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of the Ugly (1853) was the gospel of a coming era when, according to Flaubert, «art will eventually be scientific and science will become artistic». The future Flaubert presaged is now this fleeting present where «change» in art and society is the sovereign ruler, and «tradition» has turned an empty word.