Small Art and Love and Beauty
-
Published:September 2024
The introduction proposes beauty as a method to trace beauty’s ebb and flow through visions of life-living and projects of power, archives of memory, and resources for possibility. When beauty is promised at the threshold where the desire for the good and the true collides with mechanisms of interference and control in the name of improving life chances, or the quality of existence, the promise of beauty is a proposition and a politics of intervening in history and life itself. Considering that which might hold out clusters of real or ideal formations such as romantic love, spiritual transcendence, economic mobility, or political renewal, this book is a historiography of a concept of beauty as an imperative discourse, one that determines what conditions are necessary to live, what forms of life are worth living, and what actions must follow to preserve, secure, or replicate such life that the beautiful promises us.