Metamorphoses of the beautiful in the past and present of the art discourse

Abstract

This analytical survey of art practices past and present takes as its point of departure the view of the beautiful current in Early and Later Hellenistic Age. Reflections of the beautiful in romanticism, symbolism, postmodernism, and the New Age manifest the essentially different ideas of beauty in which the ancient tradition often passes through a radical transformation. Under the dominance of various cultural codes, such as aestheticism, Neo-Academism, kitsch, the New Sacrality, the discourse of the beautiful becomes subject of unexpected and sometimes paradoxical interpretations ranging from a “nostalgia for the beautiful” to its total devaluation, from “abstract beauty” to creative intentions of coming back to the Attic springs of “exalted beauty”.