Title: Diappointing
Product review: This is certainly an impassioned defence of beauty, and a 'feel-good' book, but it is so lacking in substance is barely counts as a contribution to the debate. It's incoherent at many levels, most notably concerning the switch from the accepted idea in part one that beauty is always particular, to the claims in part two that it is a function of certain qualities, especially symmetry. Asthetic symmetry promotes ethical justice? The idea of beauty as enlivening is also too simple. This is not good enough as a theory of the link between aesthetics and ethics. The account of the so called 'political complaints' against beauty is a set of caricatures. There is also a very weak accounts of Matisse, whose Nice paintings are regarded by Scarry as stand ins for real windows and real palm trees; some sense of what modernist art has done to the concept of beauty and why is needed here. There are many better books on the topic.
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