Book launch Vital Beauty, May 16
V2_'s new publication Vital Beauty will be released during the Symposium, May 16 in Amsterdam.
This is a book about a 21st century notion of beauty – not the Prince Charles and Roger Scruton version of it, and neither the “that’s a matter of personal taste” approach, but a strategic one that aims, after a century of overheated adoration of the sublime in modernist arts and achitecture, for a beauty that is imperfect and impure. Some 150 years ago the English art critic John Ruskin came up with the idea of vital beauty, a concept that does justice to the fact that we live in a world of flows and forces as well as the fact that these forces tend to focus and produce things. Vital Beauty might be a great candidate to combine both the vitality of selforganising material and informational flows, and the beautiful forms that result from it. Close to Ruskin’s concept of vital beauty we find Whitehead’s paradigm “the teleology of the universe is directed to the production of beauty” which has been appropriated by process theologists, but we think it belongs in the hands of artists and philosophers first. In Vital Beauty a number of leading philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists will explore the potential of the concept in their respective fields, in an effort to redefine both beauty and design practices, including art.
Authors: Timothy Ingold, Thierry Bardini, Steven Shaviro, Daniel N. Stern, Arjen Mulder, Wendy Steiner, Mark Frost, Lars Spuybroek, George Gessert, John Ruskin, Gustav Fechner, Philip Beesley.
Editors: Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder en Lars Spuybroek.
ISBN: 978-90-5662-856-7
During the festival Vital Beauty is available at the main exhibition. Price: € 22.50
