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Articles

Art: Reaching for the Sublime

Peter Benson replies to Colin Radford’s ‘Art: The Demotion Derby’.

In ‘Art: The Demolition Derby’ (Philosophy Now Issue 17) Colin Radford gave a brief account of the history of art, concluding that it had been, in recent centuries, “downhill most of the way; a long descent into artistic chaos”. This, he believes, is due to our progressive abandonment of the Greek ideal of beauty. This ideal had three components: the beauty of the object represented; the beauty of the accuracy of the representation; and the beauty of the painting or sculpture itself. The first component was abandoned when painters began to be fascinated by accurate depictions of ugly people. The second component was abandoned when art became increasingly abstract, and was no longer a representation of anything.

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