The re-turn of beauty

The conference is the finale of our project "About Beauty". It takes up the themes that have been addressed in performances, films, discussions and the exhibition and presents them for discussion. Is beauty a necessary counterbalance to terror in our present age? Does it help us to endure the world and to reconcile ourselves with it? Or is beauty - by offering us consolation - itself a form of violence because it suppresses reality? What do different cultures understand by beauty? Can concepts of beauty be translated from one culture to another? Does globalisation undermine local conceptions of beauty and thereby weaken national and cultural identities?

PROGRAMME

10:00-13.15h

Welcome

Lydia Haustein (House of World Cultures)

Keynote speech: Gayatri Spivak - Why beauty now?

Gayatri Spivak teaches English and Politics of Culture at Columbia University, New York.

Ackbar Abbas: The Deception of Beauty

"Besides an art of the percept that focuses on the sensuous appearance of the world, and an art of the concept which abandons the visual/sensuous, there is a third possibility: an art of the decept that emphasizes the visual/sensuous while turning visuality against itself. Such artworks give us some of the most convincing examples of what this conference is calling 'the re-turn of beauty'; works that demonstrate the persistance of beauty while all the while hinting at the very different conditions under which it can be produced today."

Ackbar Abbas is director of the interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Hong Kong, and curator of Beauty Politics.

Wolfgang Welsch: Schönheitsflut und -ebbe

"Everything is becoming beautiful. But this beauty is shallow. Amidst all this aestheticisation we have lost sight of the concept and indeed the power of beauty. There have always been two types of beauty: the kind that aims to comfort and that which disturbs us. Only the second type is of any value to us today."

Lecture by Wolfgang Welsch, Professor for Philosophy, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena

14:30-18:00h

Giuliana Bruno: Folds of Beauty: Film, Fashion and Architecture

"Re-turning to beauty, this lecture begins by questioning the idea, suggested long ago by Wilhelm Worringer, that beauty might be a vital feeling. Beauty could be something that moves in us. It might also be something that moves in matter, which itself is a projection of our inner activation, our inner motion. But how does an object of material culture move? How does a film, an object of clothing, a piece of architecture move? How does this matter move and moves us? And what moves in us? At stake in the definition of beauty is the motion of an emotion."

Lecture by Giuliana Bruno, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University

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Olu Oguibe: Beauty in African Art (working title)

Olu Oguibe ist Kunsthistoriker und Krititker. Er ist Autor von Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (1999) und The Culture Game (2004).  Oguibe ist außerordentlicher Professor für Kunst und Afro-Amerikanische Studien. Er ist Mitbegründer des Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art und Mitglied der Redaktion von Third Text.

Winfried Menninghaus: Schönheit - Leben - Tod. Perspektiven evolutionstheoretischer Ästhetik

Parallel to the everyday cult of beauty cultivated during the past few decades, research trends within the fields of biology and psychology have been soberly examining the function of physical attraction. The present lecture discusses some of the hypotheses about the life-affirming benefits of beauty and contrasts them with counter-mechanisms that interlink beauty and harmfulness and, in some cases, even beauty and death.

Winfried Menninghaus, Professor of General and Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin.

Moderation: Annemarie Bonnet, Professor for Art History, Universität Bonn

20:00 h

SchönheitsFehler

This Panel of the Zentrum für Literaturforschung (ZFL – Centre for Literary Research) focuses on three aspects:

Excessive beauty

Excess and monstrosity have always exerted an extraordinary fascination on people. The Panel examines the precarious status of excessive beauty: ranging from handicaps to representations of extraordinary strength.

Beauty is the problem

Our desire for beauty shapes our view of things. The orbits of the planets are a good illustration of this: until Kepler, their orbits were assumed to be perfect circles because the circle was considered the most beautiful form.

Beauty as deviation / The beauty of deviance

Presentations of beauty are often generalised. Sometimes, however, it is the deviation from the norm that awakens aesthetic desire. A culturo-theoretical approach enquires into the constituent parameters of objectivity.

With Elaine Scarry, art critic, Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Department of English, Harvard University, and author of the book On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, 1999

Sandra Mühlenberend, historian and art historian, ZFL Berlin

Erik Porath, philosopher and art theoretician, ZFL Berlin

Moderation: Christine Blättler, philosopher, ZfL

Booking:

Petra Stegmann

Haus der Kulturen der Welt

John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10

10557 Berlin

E-Mail: stegmann@hkw.de