BOOKS
145
How Values Shape Human Progress
(2000)
get it right, as does Peg
Zeglin Brand in
Beauty Matters
(2000).
I happened on
Culture Matters
and
Beauty Matters
lying jowl by
cheek on a stack of books submitted to
Partisan Review
for possible
notice.
Culture Matters
presents the results of a symposium in which
luminaries such as Jeffrey Sachs, Francis Fukuyama, Seymour Martin
Lipset, Richard Shweder, Orlando Patterson, Nathan Glazer, and
Lucian Pye ponder Samuel Huntington's thesis that some nations
develop economically while others stagnate because of underlying cul–
tural reasons .
Beauty Matters
gathers essays from sundry sources to offer half–
hearted feminist and gay cheers for good looks. In her foreword to the
book Eleanor Heartney, contributing editor to
Art in America,
explains:
Why does beauty matter? Beauty flies in the face of a puritanical
utilitarianism. It defies the reductiveness of both the political left
and the political right in their efforts to bend it to a mission. Beauty
subverts dogma by activating the realm of fantasy and imagination.
Beauty is a contested category today because we both long for and
fear its seductions.
Heartney's writing has the grace of a tractor mired in mud. Finding a
reason to praise beauty has never seemed so unpleasant. Like most of the
writers in the volume, she fears that lest we fall victim to patriarchy's insid–
ious impulse to objectify, we must be on guard. And
en garde
is exactly
what words like "reductiveness," "subverts," and "contested" hiss.
Aestheticism is nothing new. A century or so ago writers such as
Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater also praised beautiful things for tran–
scending the humdrum world, but their conceit was to make their sim–
ple point through writing that itself demonstrated some aesthetic
accomplishment. The writers of
Beauty Matters
take the opposite
approach as though vying over who can find the ugliest, most theoreti–
cally-clotted and grotesque defense of beauty.
But I do not mean to stray too far beyond the title pages of these
books, for each time I see a title such as
Culture, Beauty, Race, Spirit,
Mud Matters,
my heart sinks. Perhaps overuse has stilled the charm of
Mr. West's original trope. To be sure, the
something matters
title formula
had been used before Mr. West's book appeared in
1993,
but seemingly
never in a prominent book.
Race Matters
forced the word play to pub–
lic attention and it has proved as ubiquitous-and as annoying-as an
