There are several criticisms that can be made of this collection. Most curiously, the

essays are not attributed to their original context, nor are their first dates of

publication given. Thus deracinated, they lose some of their cutting edge, which –

as with all of Pollock’s work – is crucial to a sense of her ‘analytic awareness of

the major concerns of the feminism of [her] time, the Marxism of [her] time, the

art history of [her] time’ (p. 3). For readers like myself who are familiar with

Pollock’s work this is frustrating, and invites a game of ‘check the sources’; for

those unfamiliar with Pollock’s output, it gives no sense of the diversity of her

many interventions into contemporary art criticism and art history. Likewise, the

absence of an index or bibliography makes it hard to track various lines of thought

to their sources – and for a specialist arts publisher, the quality of design,

production and illustration are disappointing indeed!

Rosemary Betterton

references

Harris, J. (2001) The New Art History: a Critical Introduction, London & New York: Routledge.

Pollock, G. (1992) Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History, London:
Thames & Hudson.

Pollock, G. (1996) editor, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings,
London & New York: Routledge.

Pollock, G. and Orton, F. (1996) editors, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, Manchester:
Manchester University Press.

Pollock, G. (1999) Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, London
& New York: Routledge.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400126

Beauty matters

Peg Zeglin Brand (editor); University of Indiana Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000,

out of print (ISBN 0-253-33726-7) HbK, 368 pp, PbK ISBN 0253213754 d12.49

Beauty Matters has received well-earned attention from aestheticians. Peg Brand

has assembled essays that represent both artistic and cultural diversity. In so

doing, she has helped to extend a problem of great importance in philosophical

aesthetics and art criticism to feminist theory and cultural studies. In the early

20th century, the concept of beauty came under fire from various philosophers who

regarded beauty as a philosophical fiction, and from various conceptual artists

who considered beauty a political construct. Art, in this climate, had only social or

book reviews feminist review 75 2003 145



personal significance. This view was to colour the artworld for much of the century,

despite many renegade movements, such as abstract expressionism and formalist

criticism. This tendency has lost its verve over the last 15 years or so as beauty

came to be seen as indispensable if we are to understand human experience in its

complexity.

In Brand’s ‘Introduction’ she discusses the peregrinations of beauty through the history

of philosophy and, especially the 20th century. She suggests that the traditional

standards undergirding our aesthetic responses to artworks and our erotic and affective

reactions to people (both self and other) have been conditioned by the male gaze. This,

of course, is not a novel idea. Brand does, however, offer much that is new in her

introduction and in her very choice of essays. She argues that to acknowledge the

reality of beauty is not to return to a transcendent Platonic ideal or to the romantic

(male) sublime. Beauty, she tells us, is edgy and dangerous, as artists like

Mappelthorpe, Serrano, and Cindy Sherman show us, working as they do at the razor’s

edge of genre, style, and subject matter.

The book offers essays on philosophical aesthetics, body art, ballet, personal beauty,

eroticism in the visual image, representations of disability in art, the use of art to

experience transexuality, the representations of race and ethnicity, and Brand’s

interview with the radical performance artist Orlan. One thing common to all of the

essays, though, is the interest in showing how our reactions to things as beautiful or

ugly are enmeshed in our moral beliefs. Marcia Eaton, in the book’s lead article, her

‘Kantian and Contextual Beauty’ defends the primacy of this ‘contextual’ notion over

the perennially alluring, Kantian, nonethical view of beauty. Each article demonstrates

this thesis from a different perspective.

To look at a few examples, Sally Banes, in her ‘A New Kind of Beauty: From

Classicism to Karole Armitage’s Early Ballets’ brings to light the neo-classical,

Renaissance world view and ideals of feminine beauty presupposed by basic

elements of classical ballet: verticality (political hierarchies, social nobility, and

spiritual uprightness), the turn out of the body (openness to others, to light, to

truth), and pointe work of the female dancer (an equilibrium beyond nature, the

ethereality of feminine beauty). Banes then explains how Armitage’s work

challenges traditional social values by highlighting the eroticism and ironic

potential of the canonical elements and by making ballet, with its strict gender

roles, one of the subjects of her work itself. Dawn Perlmutter’s ‘Miss America:

Whose Ideal?’ reveals the deplorable political assumptions in the selection of the

beauty queen and the cultural havoc these views have wrought. From an Eastern

perspective, Eva Kit Wah Man, in her ‘Female Bodily Aesthetics, Politics, and

Feminine Ideals of Beauty in China’ analyzes the contemporary, communist Chinese

ideal of feminine beauty by tracing the feminine ideal through Confucianism and

Taoism and then exploring the complex moral and aesthetic terrain of the

courtesan in Late Imperial China.

feminist review 75 2003 book reviews146



In ‘From the Cooked Timber of Humanity’ philosopher Anita Silvers considers why we

can find beautiful a representation of disability or anatomical anomaly (e.g.,

Picasso’s ‘Maya With a Doll’) and yet avert our eyes from the same human trait

when we encounter it in life. Silvers argues that disability is the binary opposite

against which the normal is defined. She thus recommends that in our efforts to

broaden our standards of beauty, we view those who are physically different as

deepening our insight into humanity just as a distinctive artwork can deepen our

comprehension of art. Noel Carroll, in his ‘Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity’ focuses

on ugliness, especially in horror and humor, both of which he contends are

‘rhetoric[s] of hatred’ that betray racial and moral prejudices.

As for racial and sexual stereotypes, Paul C. Taylor challenges philosophical

aesthetics arguing that it should focus less on art and more on human bodily

beauty, and that it should be primarily cultural criticism rather than philosophy of

art. Arthur Danto responds to Taylor sympathetically but with a forceful defense of

aesthetics.

The other articles treat various topics: Kathleen Higgins contrasts real beauty of

persons with its imitators, flawlessness and glamour; Susan Bordo discusses beauty

in the image of the male body; Hilary Robinson examines Luce Irigaray’s views;

Kaori Chino explores the haunting photographic self-portraits of Yasumasa

Morimura, a male who impersonates legendary movie actresses.

Brand has put together a varied array of high-quality essays. This excellent

anthology will appeal to specialists in aesthetics, the arts, feminism, and cultural

theory.

Carol S. Gould
doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400119

The Great Arizona orphan abduction

Linda Gordon; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 1999, 480 pp, HbK

ISBN 0-674-36041-9 d21.50

Linda Gordon has achieved that unusual position of writing a highly scholarly book

(winner of the Bancroft and American Historical Association Prizes) which has also

enjoyed success with a general readership. The accessibility of this text is largely

attained through a distinctive narrative strategy, interspersing chapters on the

wider historical context with a detailed narrative of the unfolding crisis over

orphan adoption in a small Arizona Anglo-Mexican mining community. Historical

analysis is interwoven with the drama of a highly emotive confrontation in which

race, gender and class identities play out within the charged atmosphere of

attempted inter-racial adoption.

book reviews feminist review 75 2003 147


	Beauty matters