Steiner

Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile traces the elusive beauty through the female form, the avant-garde, and history. Steiner attempts to answer why beauty dropped out of vogue, so to speak, and why its recent reappearance occurred. Finally, Steiner argues that beauty is important for social and political reasons.

This is the first text written by a woman, and a woman academic whose work usually tries to be accessible. (I've read brief stuff by her in the past, taken, I think from her last book). Steiner assumes a variety of knowledges, though she makes them quite accessible to her reader. Her writing is clearer than most texts we've read, and though she uses an academic register for the most part, I think her book reaches across academic boundaries somewhat. She assumes that her audience cares about art, and knows that beauty has been "exiled," if you will. This audience is likely hoping for beauty's victorious return, though without all the baggage it has carried. Thus, Steiner's book offers hope for those of us who want to give beauty its due.

I'm interested in the focused attention Steiner gives to works of art, performances, and literature. In fact, I saw the literature chapter as a bit out of place -- though I get her point. It was quite refreshing to read some critical analyses of actual pieces, if only because it gave me something concrete to think about (and sometimes look at). As I write this, I wonder why it was important to Steiner to closely read these works, especially since so much has been done that theorize art more abstractly. Is this part of her project, then? (To closely read art objects so that we can better understand them?)

The previous question also leads me to wonder about the form of the book. That is, why have the images as an insert in the middle -- which, at times, I found annoying to have to flip back. Why not have a layout that showed the image next to the text? Surely, this technology could be done at the time, as the book was quite recent. What, then, motivates the choice to include images as peripheral, in a book about art and beauty?

For the sake of argument, I'm interested in what Steiner's version of aesthetics looks like. For me, at least, it was hard to pin down, since it seemed that she was searching more for the elusive beauty, than to craft a theory about aesthetics and what all that means. It's quite difficult, however, to do one without the other. So, what are Steiner's aesthetics? And what's at stake for her?