Is beauty real?
“‘The peacock’s tail makes me sick!’ said Charles Darwin. That’s because the theory of evolution can’t explain why nature is so beautiful… Taking inspiration from Darwin’s observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation of beauty” (back cover blurb on his 2012 book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution). Our innate appreciation of beauty has led humans (and some animals) to create beautiful art for many centuries – until the 20th century. In modernist and postmodern art and philosophy, the very concept of beauty has been denied and disparaged. Artists, in all the arts, now very often deliberately create ugliness, carefully avoiding any manifestation of beauty (of course, if [...]