Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (Aesthetics Today)

Esteemed critic, painter, and writer Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe offers a provocative critique of beauty in relation to the contemporary notion of the sublime, which is now found in technology and a high-powered economy rather than in nature. Refuting established views, this book questions today's ideas of beauty, including those applied to contemporary art, and proposes a secular theory of beauty as glamorous rather than good, frivolous rather than serious. An illuminating read, this book provides excellent course material for classes in philosophy, cultural studies, art history, and aesthetics.

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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe is a critic, painter, and author of several books, including "Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993" and "Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic Device." He has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in painting and criticism as well as a Guggenheim fellowship in painting, and was presented the 1998 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism by the College Art Association. He teaches in the graduate program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.