Vital Beauty

Title: Vital Beauty
Authors: Various
Editors: Arjen Mulder, Joke Brouwer, Lars Spuybroek
Issued: 2012
Genre: Interdisciplinary theory book
Language: English
Type: Paperback, illustrated, full color
Pages: 256
Dimensions: 16 x 23 cm
ISBN/EAN: 978-90-5662-856-7

Design: Joke Brouwer

With: Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Timothy Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John Ruskin, Lars Spuybroek, Wendy Steiner, Daniel N. Stern

"Vital Beauty: Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature" focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can have a meaning fit for the 21st century.

How can the age-old notion of beauty regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century? Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the question of how we should design our environments, our objects and our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.

The publication was released during the Vital Beauty Symposium at May 16, 2012 in de Balie, Amsterdam.