The enigma of beauty. (editorial)

BN0010

MANY thinkers have sought universally acceptable principles of beauty and aesthetic value but their quarry has proved elusive. "The trouble about beauty," Sir Ernst Gombrich has written, is that tastes and standards of what is beautiful differ so much." The French poet Paul Valery gracefully side-stepped the issue when he said that the beautiful is that which drives us to despair.

The modern world has largely abandoned this quest. Here as in other fields the spirit of relativism has triumphed, swept away authoritarian concepts, and frustrated attempts to …