





































Is Beauty Still Relevant? Is Art? 
Is Architecture?

Nathaniel Coleman

The Good and the Beautiful

Although notions of  the good and the 
beautiful might seem impossible to discuss in our 
non-foundational age, the continuing relevance 
of  beauty can sit comfortably alongside post-
foundationalist, post-metaphysical, and more 
generally post-modernist thought, no matter how 
much a tendency for slipping back into a structuralist 
mind-set may be evidenced. The relevance of  
beauty and the good are in fact paradoxically 
intensified when thought beyond metaphysics, not 
least when the practical or pragmatic value of  both 
categories is considered. The work the beautiful 
and the good can accomplish in our attempts to 
reimagine professions and their products remains 
vital. For example, all efforts to wrench architects 
and architecture out of  their moribund state might 
well depend on an understanding of  both categories 
for any chance at success.1

The problematic of  what the ‘good architect’ 
is, or might be, in the present epoch arises out of  
disciplinary doubt and reflection on poor results. 
Any discussion of  the figure of  the architect 
must inevitably also include a consideration 
of  what ‘good architecture’ is, or might be. 
Nevertheless, current discourses on both tend to 
be strangely dissociative, as if  architecture could 
be autonomous, or that novelty or a formalist view 
of  architectural aesthetics is enough to preclude 
discussion of  architecture’s social dimension or 
the social obligations of  architects—beyond the 
limiting perspectives of  the marketplace.2 Ideas of  
the ‘good’ in terms of  architectural practice and its 



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results bedevil our capacity to judge as we waiver between ideas of  radical 
subjectivity and absolute ideals. However, when the ethical dimension of  
both the good and the beautiful are recollected, it becomes possible to 
imagine them as bound to the fortunes of  propriety, to appropriateness. 
Doing so is even possible today, albeit as situational, rather than absolute.

The problem of  the good and the beautiful in architecture today 
reveals something of  its intractability and thus also suggests a pathway to 
its solution. In an effort to rescue aesthetics from a street level conception, 
my interest here is the problem of  beauty, more so than the problematic 
of  thinking of  aesthetics in terms of  questions of  beauty as ‘mere beauty.’ 
Such propositions position beauty as if  it were simply a matter of  ‘the look 
of  a particular object,’ or were interchangeable with impulsive ‘liking’; as 
though ideas of  beauty could have no reach beyond formalist aesthetics, 
sensualist proclivities, or radical subjectivity.

Yet, despite its compartmentalization in recent times, the ethical 
dimension of  beauty has persisted at least from the Greek philosopher 
Socrates (died 399 BC), via Plato (died 347 BC), to the Renaissance 
architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), and onward from 
there to nineteenth century social critics John Ruskin (1819-1900) and 
William Morris (1834-1896), and arguably beyond them to architects Le 
Corbusier (1887-1965) and Aldo van Eyck (1918-1999) as well. Each was 
as preoccupied with the aesthetical (as a matter of  beauty) as much as 
the ethical (as also a matter of  beauty). But this only works if  we think 
of  beauty as a sense of  wholeness or at least the striving toward it, as 
Socrates did, summarized by Alberti as ‘that to which nothing may be 
added nor taken away but for the worse’ . Perhaps surprisingly, this 
definition of  beauty turns on an ideal of  comprehensiveness that can 
also accommodate the parts out of  which it is made. It could continue to 
help us to judge works of  architecture, whether radical or conservative, 
postmodern or deconstructive, etc. Indeed, even in an epoch in which no 
syntonic universal ideal of  beauty prevails (in which all master narratives 
are subject to question), the superlative aim of  completeness persists as 
a guide to practice and as a way to judge its results alike. Only in this way 
could Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the same’ 
be credible.3

In order to work through the problem of  beauty, to rescue it from 
claims of  its apparent meagreness, cases for tradition and hermeneutics 
are made. On the one hand, the thinking of  Ananda Kentish 
Coomaraswamy4 is a proponent of  tradition and inheritor of  the lineage 
from Plato to Morris. On the other, Gianni Vattimo,5 is as much intrigued 



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by a hermeneutics of  tradition as by generalized 
communication and a weakening of  the strong 
thought of  western metaphysics, with its attendant 
inescapable propensity for violence. Vattimo and 
Coomaraswamy share a revaluation, or rethinking, 
of  art that rescues beauty from being ‘merely,’ 
and as such, suggests how architects might begin 
to reclaim the richness of  their task, albeit in a 
dispersed way, to act on behalf  of  the beautiful and 
ethics simultaneously, and in so doing, rescue the 
pervasive claims of  architects to be acting on behalf  
of  the people from being little more than empty 
words forming banal slogans primarily conjured up 
to justify simply doing business.

One kind of Art and Shock: Daniel Libeskind, Toronto Crystal



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Art and Shock: Vattimo

In a passage that begins to confound the conventional divide 
between the ethical and aesthetical, Vattimo charts a pathway to enhanced 
encounters with art (including architecture) that do not simply move 
beyond the aesthetic but which are suggestive of  much fuller experiences, 
precisely because the ‘theoretical, moral, and emotional,’ —the ethical—is 
acknowledged: 

True, on the one hand, enjoying the work always implies or in some sense even 
comes to a head with an act of  aesthetic contemplation, in which the work imposes 
itself  by virtue of  its formal perfection, without further referring to anything that 
might disturb the satisfaction or stillness connected with such a state. 

Up to this point, Vattimo outlines a fairly conventional depiction of  
the nature of  aesthetic experience. However, as the paragraph progresses 
he turns from an exclusively aesthetic understanding toward an ethical one 
as well:

On the other hand, it is equally true that the encounter with a great art work 
always represents not only an ‘aesthetic’ but also a theoretical, moral, and 
emotional experience, which engages the person at all levels and leads us to speak 
of  art’s truth, of  its cosmic nature, and of  its ontological meaning. 

The value of  the recognition outlined above lies in liberating art from 
a ‘formalist view of  beauty,’ that limits understandings of  it to an ideal of  
beauty entrapped within the ‘aesthetic sphere’ and thus as removed from 
the real, or the potential of  having any significant impact on it:

Hence, in concrete experience the work resists being confined within the limits 
of  the formalist view of  beauty, it moves out of  the ‘aesthetic sphere’ in which 
it is enclosed and holds its truth appeal, in the broadest and fullest meaning of  
the word.6

Art’s ‘truth appeal’ resides in its opening up of  vistas onto new worlds. 
Or as Vattimo puts it, “the work [of  art] opens a new “epoch” of  being as 
an absolutely originary event, which cannot be reduced to what it already 
was, and it grounds a new order of  relationships within beings, a true 
and actually new world.”7 The newness of  this world, that art founds, 
captivates experiencing subjects of  it by shocking them. Accordingly, for 
Vattimo the term that defines ‘the encounter between the reader and the 
work ... is “Stoss,” shock or quake: the artwork suspends in the reader all 
natural relationships, making strange everything that until that moment 



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had appeared obvious and familiar.’8 It is worth 
noting that the ‘shock’ that occurs in encounters 
with the previously unknown that art opens up, does 
not necessarily have anything to do with so-called 
‘shock art,’ which shocks in its way by referring to 
‘natural relationships,’ rather than suspending them, 
and by intensifying the ‘obvious and familiar,’ rather 
than making either strange. However, it is Vattimo’s 
description of  intense encounters with art as a 
‘shock’ that is of  the greatest interest.

Art and Shock: Coomaraswamy

In his own attempts to challenge an aesthetic 
view of  art Coomaraswamy also found it necessary 
to refer to ‘shock’ to describe an alternative. 
According to him, ‘For the most part, our ‘aesthetic’ 
approach stands between us and the content of  the 
work of  art, of  which only the surface concerns 
us.’9 For Coomaraswamy, the surface, apparent 
beauty, invites attention, but the real experiential 
payoff  (as much emotional as intellectual) resides 
in getting close to the ideas that motivate the object 
and which it makes visible to the senses, which in 
turn moves, or shocks, us during our encounters 
with works of  art. As Coomaraswamy argues, ‘it is 
not only in connection with natural objects (such 

Another kind of Art and Shock: Calatrava’s Quadracci Pavilion

the work [of 
art] opens a new 

“epoch” of being 
as an absolutely 

originary event, 
which cannot be 

reduced to what 
it already was, 

and it grounds 
a new order of 

relationships 
within beings, 

a true and 
actually new 

world.—Vattimo

“

”



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as the dew-drop) or events (such as death) but also in connection with 
works of  art, and in fact whenever or wherever perception [. . .] leads to 
a serious experience, that we are really shaken.’10 Coomaraswamy uses the 
Pali word saṁvega ‘to denote the shock or wonder that may be felt when 
the perception of  a work of  art becomes a serious experience,’ which, of  
course, is quite similar to Vattimo’s description of  such encounters.11

It is perhaps quite difficult for us to experience works of  art in 
the way either Vattimo or Coomaraswamy describe encounters with it. 
As Kuspit suggests, the commodification of  art, and the overabundant 
stimuli available to us through electronic and mechanical production 
and reproduction of  art works, has made it all but impossible for us to 
gain access to the truth of  art, or the shocking nature of  this.12 Even so, 
most of  us have had encounters with works of  art that have left us 
moved, even shaken, and these tend to be the most memorable, because 
the profoundest. If  even one of  these experiences can be recollected, 
Coomaraswamy’s conviction that “Saṁvega [shock, wonder], then, refers to 
the experience that may be felt in the presence of  a work of  art, when we 
are struck by it, ‘as a horse might be struck by a whip’ will have resonance 
for us.”13 More so, such recollection might begin to suggest what the aim 
of  art, its vocation ought to be (and for architecture as well): to make the 
world strange so that we might see it anew, in all its depth and seriousness, 
such that we might believe with Coomaraswamy that, “In the deepest 
experience that can be induced by a work of  art (or other reminder) our 
very being is shaken (saṁvijta) to its roots.”14

What About Architecture?

The conceit of  philosophers is that architecture is, of  course, an art, 
more so one of  the fine arts, even though in practice today it would be hard 
to describe much of  what is built in the name of  architecture as having 
convincingly been conceived or constructed under the sign of  the fine arts 
– to say nothing of  being serious in the ways described by Vattimo and 
Coomaraswamy above. Rather than tangle with this issue here, I would 
like to consider a conception of  architecture advanced by Vattimo that 
could suggests how it might escape from its entrapment within the logic 
of  capitalism (with its habit for destroying communities): 

[W]hat is left to legitimize our projects? Precisely those conditions of  belonging ... 
which are disclosed as we walk around the neighbourhood and notice that there, 
there used to be an old store, that here, there are traces, ruins, histories.15 

[A]ll that is left is to understand legitimation as a form of  the creation of  



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horizons of  validity through dialogue, a dialogue both 
with the tradition to which we belong and others.16

[E]dification has two principal meanings – to build 
and to be morally uplifiting. Both are quite closely tied 
in today’s rather vertiginous coming and going between 
architecture and philosophy... . That is, edification 
must be ethical, entailing communication of  value-
choice. In the present situation of  thought on the one 
hand and architectonic experience on the other ... the 
only possibility of  edifying in the sense of  building is 
to edify in the sense of  ‘rendering ethical,’ that is, to 
encourage an ethical life: to work with the recollection 
of  the past, with the expectations of  meaning for the 
future, since there can no longer be absolute rational 
deductions. There follows then edification as a 
fostering of  emotions, of  ethical presentability, which 
can probably serve as the basis for an architecture 
determined not by the whole but by the parts.17 

saṁvijta at Kahn’s Kimbell Museum



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The idea of  architecture developed by Vattimo above is both more 
humble and more radical than anything coming from within the discipline 
of  architecture, across the whole spectrum, from the most commercial 
practices, to those that are ostensibly avant-garde, to the apparently 
socially engaged as well. It is Vattimo’s conception of  tradition—as a 
common ground of  belonging, dialogue, and invention—that returns 
thinking about architecture to ethics, which holds out the promise of  
a renewed relevance for architecture and beauty alike. One, however, is 
left wondering why architecture in these days seems all but incapable 
of  thinking such thoughts on its own, suggesting also that at its best, 
philosophy could help it to do so.

The Disembodiment of Beauty

The relevance of  beauty for architecture is far from spent. As ‘a vision 
that has been a source of  inspiration to all Western philosophy’, perhaps 
Plato’s definition of  beauty, as developed in the Symposium, remains at the 
essence of  understanding art and life.18 But if  in the present aesthetic 
preoccupations can seem to limit the basic appeal of  art (or architecture) to 
the eye (as it does music to the ear), it is here that Plato, and his commentator, 
Neo-Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) following him, 
cease to provide a way for recuperating the relevance of  beauty in the 
present. Obviously, sight and hearing are less physically engaged than taste, 
smell, or touch, making the first two the obvious preference of  idealists. 
By privileging the senses of  sight and hearing to those of  taste, smell, 
and touch Plato and Ficino severely limit the possibilities of  full-bodied 
experience. In this regard, art critic Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) reminds us 
that all the senses are integral to an appreciation of  both life and art. The 
persisting problem of  Plato for art and architecture is the persistence of  
the idea that the highest ideal of  beauty is an appreciation of  it divorced 
from the sensuous—the body —and taken up by ideas and the mind 
alone. As one commentator summarizes:

From Plato comes the view of  the realm of  ideas set off  from the world of  the 
phenomenal which is but an imperfect copy of  the archetype. This distinction 
corresponds to that between the material and the immaterial. In the Platonic 
tradition the note is persistent that the body is a clog.19

Arguably, Plato’s reification of  ideas transforms them into beauties 
lacking in objects. If  the aim of  creativity is beauty, understood – following 
Plato – as associated with the Good, it is difficult to imagine how any 
notion of  beauty can dispense with the body as its origin. If  beauty 



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originates with notions of  the body, how could a 
philosophy of  beauty that exiles the body actually be 
about beauty (or perhaps even about knowledge)? 
If  self  understanding and understanding of  the 
world begin with the body, evolving into mental 
contents that are transformable into symbols 
that make art possible, then arguably, theories of  
beauty that abolish the body (and with it the world 
of  objects), are of  little use to the invention and 
elaboration of  art. Articulating just this dilemma in 
a critique of  Greek philosophy, philosopher Ortega 
Y. Gasset (1883-1955) elaborates on the relation 
between ideas and things, the mind and the body, 
and thoughts and actions:

When the Greeks discovered that man thought, 
that there existed in the universe that strange reality 
known as thought (until then man had not thought, 
or, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, had done so 
without knowing it), they felt such an enthusiasm for 
ideas that they conferred upon intelligence, upon the 
logos, the supreme rank in the universe. Compared 
with it, everything else seemed to them ancillary and 
contemptible. And as we tend to project into God 
whatever appears to us to be the best, the Greeks with 
Aristotle, reached the point of  maintaining that God 
had no other occupation but to think. And not even 

The experience of the “lesser” senses: tactile experience at Ando’s 
Ft. Worth Modern

By privileging 
the senses 

of sight and 
hearing to 

those of taste, 
smell, and 

touch Plato 
and Ficino 

severely limit 
the possibilities 

of full-bodied 
experience

“

”



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to think about things- that seemed to them, as it were, a debasement of  the 
intellectual process ... .

This doctrine has been given the name ‘intellectualism’; it is idolatry of  the 
intelligence which isolates thought from its setting, from its function in the general 
economy of  human life. As if  man thinks because he thinks, and not because, 
whether he will or not, he has to think in order to maintain himself  among things 
... . We do not live in order to think ... we think in order to succeed in 
subsisting ... [and] surviving.20

Ficino’s famous commentary on Plato helps to situate Gasset’s 
criticism of  ‘intellectualism’.21 For Ficino, the real is unreal, which 
encouraged his attempt to prove that the appreciation of  beauty is 
‘highest’ when incorporeal, even if  language, as reality, makes the dis-
realization of  objects all but impossible: things remain as bodies, material, 
and existent. The indefeasible physicality of  thought and beauty renders 
Ficino’s preference for dis-realization peculiar: 

The eyes see nothing but the light of  the sun, for the shapes and colors of  bodies 
are never seen unless illuminated with light, nor do they come to the eyes with 
their own matter itself  ... in this light, since it is separate from matter, the order 
is completely independent of  body.22 

Above all else, the preceding negates bodily experience. It is a peculiar 
intellectual exercise to imagine that since light is reflected off  objects, we 
do not actually perceive them, as they apparently do not actually exist, 
except as the light the eye perceives. The problem here is that even in 
darkness, a body, an object, even beauty, can be perceived. As a Platonist, 
Ficino is obligated to disregard the senses of  taste, smell, and touch. In 
this regard, philosopher Leon Ebreo (ca. 1465- ca. 1521) described taste, 
smell, and touch as “the three material senses”; on the other hand, he called 
sight and hearing “the spiritual senses”.23 Echoing Plato and Ebreo, Ficino 
writes;

Love is the desire for enjoying beauty, Love is always limited to the [the pleasures 
of] the mind, the eyes, and, the ears. What need is there of  the senses of  smell, 
taste, and touch? Odors, flavor, heat, cold, softness, hardness, and the like 
qualities are the objects of  these senses. None of  these is human beauty, Since 
these qualities are simple, and human beauty of  the body requires a harmony of  
various parts. Love regards as its end the enjoyment of  beauty; beauty pertains 
only to the mind, sight, and hearing. Love, therefore, is limited to these three, but 
desire which rises from the other senses is called, not love, but madness.24



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The Return to Embodiment

Ficino’s idealism (as introduced in the 
preceding section) turns on an impoverishment 
of  experience that if  operative would deprive us 
of  our appreciation of  flowers, food, and love-
making – to say nothing of  buildings and dancing 
– as expressions of  beauty and as pathways toward 
different and deeper understandings of  the world, 
ourselves, and others. Further, as much as beauty 
may derive from a divine sense of  goodness, it also 
comes from an appreciation of  the natural world, 
of  landscape, and the body. A deep appreciation 
of  the beauty of  each of  these things requires the 
senses of  ‘odors, flavor’s, heat, cold, softness, and 
like qualities’, not to mention ‘sight and hearing.’ 
Any conception of  the experience of  beauty, or of  
anything else that rejects the fullness of  the senses 
inevitably permits only a partial experience of  the 
world. In contradistinction, Stokes takes up an 
argument for the body in his work on Michelangelo 
(as elsewhere in his writing): 

It is likely that images of  the body belong to the 
aesthetic relationship with every object; emotive 
conceptions of  physique are ancient in us; awareness 
of  our own identity has always been upon the flesh; 
the outer world of  objects was conceived in the first 
place as an extension of  our bodies. This early view, 

The experience of the body: Peter Zumthor’s Vals Baths



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of  course, bears no resemblance to an adult impression. But art tends to return 
some of  the way back to the sources of  feeling and perception.25

Stokes consistently argues for the corporeality of  art and for an art of  
intensity embodying total outward expression. Well-versed in most aspects 
of  his subject, Stokes also turned his attention to what he believed were 
some of  the questionable aspects of  Platonism, Renaissance theory, and 
Neo-Platonism:

Stress upon mathematics, both in the case of  Alberti; and Piero, by itself  
explains nothing of  their art. Similarly Platonism, Neo-Platonism, was but a 
necessary garment, the cover of  nameless joy in things; paradoxically, since the 
philosophy of  Plato is far from the senses, allowing no more value to the sensible 
world than to the individual, that other God of  Renaissance man.26

Despite Stokes’ observations, it might be reasonable to conclude that 
neither philosophies of  beauty nor objects of  beauty any longer occupy the 
center of  considerations of  art or culture. This modern condition arguably 
begins with the advent of  science as we know it and with the secularization 
of  society. In the West, this new condition parallels the loosening of  the 
Church’s temporal powers and the rise of  industrialization, and began to 
take definitive shape during the late Seventeenth century. 

The separation of  mind and body that persists throughout philosophies 
of  beauty, originates the crisis of  meaning in art and architecture that 
continues to persist. Plato’s model is of  man ascending from earthly 
conceptions to heavenly ones. At a certain moment of  elevation the 
process requires transcendence in the form of  disengagement of  the 
mind from the body, of  ideas from reality, with ideas ultimately taking 
precedence over objects and the experience of  them. Gasset considers 
the modern manifestation of  this tension between ideas and objects as 
follows: 

Under the name Reason, then of  Enlightenment, and finally of  culture, the most 
indiscreet deification of  the intelligence were effected. Among the majority of  the 
thinkers of  the period ... culture [and] thought ... came to fill the vacant office of  
a God who had been put to flight.27

The desire to liberate the mind from the body, in order to free ideas, was 
acceptable, if  filled with foreboding, so long as all-knowing continued to be 
tied a-priori to the body. These ties were both effected and supported by a 
sense of  God, that concept above man, and deriving from us, which once 
promised to keep the human world from descending into chaos. Without 



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such a conception we are on our own. The more 
the emergence of  the Modern World is explored, the 
more the loss of  God has left moderns flailing about 
for something to hold on to, and for something to 
bind us to the earth. God, once perceived as the 
center of  all and the origin of  Love, and therefore 
of  beauty, creativity and human beings, was reason 
enough for virtuousness. Without the comforting 
anchors of  God and religion—which gave purpose 
to art and architecture over and above what the 
state could provide—enlightened moderns are left 
wondering how we could have ever lived with God, 
and simultaneously how it could be possible to 
live without Him (Her), despite the many horrors 
justified in the name of  religion. 

With the advent of  reason and the victory of  
ideas, humans have become ever more estranged 
from those parts of  thought that were once bound 
to love, beauty, goodness, and personal conceptions 
of  God; ties that were, often enough, the source 
and justification for humane character. Reification 
of  ideas, and the deification of  them that followed, 
greatly concerned Gasset, who intuited the extreme 
danger of  such operations, in particular leading to 
the dehumanization of  art: “The idea instead of  
functioning as the means to think an object with, is 

The desire to 
liberate the 

mind from the 
body, in order to 
free ideas, was 

acceptable, 
if filled with 

foreboding, 
so long as 

all-knowing 
continued to be 
tied a-priori to 

the body 

“

”

The body surrogate: Sensual form at Norman Foster’s Sage 
Gateshead 



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itself  made the object and the aim of  thinking.”28

Conclusion

Philosophers of  beauty have often seen beauty as a means to an end 
– the conduit from earthly to divine love. For most, moving from the 
corporeal to the incorporeal must follow one route: from the feet to the 
head. So long as ideas about ideal beauty proceeded along this route, lesser 
sensual forms deriving from the body had a place. The heady—at times 
earthy—sensuality of  the body, and its manifold references could still find 
a place in thoughts about art and beauty, without apparently contradicting 
ancient philosophy. 

However, the dominance of  absolute reason, with its corollaries of  
quantification and abstraction has loosened connections between real and 
idealized beauty. Paradoxically, as thinking and making drift skyward to 
the realm of  pure forms (pure ideas) desire has become dissociated from 
attainable objects (including from the body): a disconnection intensified by 
the increasing dominance of  screen time in everyday life, which inevitably 
atrophies the senses other than seeing and hearing. Mind dissociated from 
body, ideas from reality, and the spirit from the everyday, encourages 
scientistic thought processes disconnected from the sensuous reality of  
persons, and things. Ultimately, recuperating the relevance of  beauty for 
inventing art and architecture, no matter how irrelevant they may appear, 
turns on rekindled awareness, “that memory helped reality to retain the 
things received by the five senses.”29

Although ‘the five senses and memory’ have largely been outsourced 
to virtuality and digital data, Voltaire’s pronouncement in Memory’s 
Adventure is even more relevant today than when first published in 1775. 
Mnemosyne’s admonishment in the story is especially apropos: “Imbeciles 
I forgive you; but this time remember that without the senses there is 
no memory, and without memory there is no mind.”30 The dominion of  
thought processes masquerading as scientific, as if  objective, measurable, 
and uncontaminated by emotion calls out for a rejoinder; recollecting 
beauty and its mirror in the body would be a good place to start. 

ENDNOTES
1. A condition adeptly theorized by Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994), amongst others. 
2. Autonomy is a fallacy I will leave aside for the moment. 
3. Wittgenstein, L. [1921] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Abdingdon: Routledge, 

2001. §6.421, p. 86.
4. Coomaraswamy was born 1877, Columbo, Ceylon – died 1946, Needham, 



Massachusetts
5. Vattimo was born 1936, Palermo, Italy
6. Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth (New York: Columbia, 2008), p. 158.
7. Ibid., p. 152.
8. Ibid.
9. A. K. Commaraswamy, ‘Saṁvega, “Aesthetic Shock,”’ Harvard Journal of  Aesthetic 

Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1943), n. 2, p. 174.
10. Ibid., p. 176.
11. Ibid., p. 174.
12. Donald Kuspit, ‘Secrets of  Success: Paradoxes and Problems of  the Reproduction 

and Commodification of  Art in the Age of  the Capitalist Spectacle,’ Available 
online at: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/art-and-capitalist-
spectacle2-8-11.asp (Accessed 09 May 2012).

13. A. K. Commaraswamy, ‘Saṁvega, “Aesthetic Shock,”’ Harvard Journal of  Aesthetic 
Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1943), p. 178.

14. Ibid.
15. Gianni Vattimo, ‘Project and Legitimization I,’ Lotus International 48/49 (1986), 

p. 121-122.
16. Ibid., p. 124.
17. Ibid., p. 125.
18. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of  Art and Beauty (Chicago: 

University of  Chicago Press, 1976), p. 68.
19. Roland H. Bainton, Early Christianity (New york, Toronto and London: Van 

Nostrand, 1960), pp. 12-13.
20. Ortega Y Gasset, ‘The Self  and the other’ [1952], in The Dehumanization of  Art 

and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1968), 
pp. 194, 195, 196.

21. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium (de Amore), 1475, in 
Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, eds. A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (Chicago: University 
of  Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 204-238.

22. Marsilio Ficino, de Amore, in Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, p. 222.
23. Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: Architects of  the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 

MA: MIT Press, [1983] 1991), p. 13.
24. Ficino, de Amore, in Philosophies of  Art and Beauty, pp. 207-208.
25. Adrian Stokes, Michelangelo [1958], in The Critical Writings of  Adrian Stokes, Vol. III 

(Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 33.
26. Adrian Stokes, Art and Science [1949], in The Critical Writings of  Adrian Stokes, Vol. 

II (Great Britain: Thames and Hudson, 1978), p. 194.
27. Gasset, ‘The Self  and the other’, p. 197.
28. Gasset, ‘The Dehumanization of  Art’ [1925], in The Dehumanization of  Art and 

Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 18.
29. Voltaire, Memory’s Adventure [1775], in Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Trans. 

Donald A. Frame (New york and Toronto: Signet Classic: New American Library, 
1961), pp.325-326.

30. Ibid., p. 328.


