Resumen de On beauty : tradition, negation, change
This text focuses on the changing role played by Beauty in the long course ofWestern aesthetic thought, and on the heavy consequences of this mutation on the European aesthetic taste from post-Renaissance time onwards. Shakespeare's prediction voiced in the opening scene of Macbeth by the enigmatic litany of the three witches: «Fair is foul, and foul is fair> was bound to take concrete shape as soon as «Le laid c'est le beau» in Hugo's Préface à Cromwell (1827) became almost a watchword announcing the irreversible colliquation ofthe principie of beauty. Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetics ofthe Ugly (1853) was the gospel ofa coming era when, according to Flaubert, «art will eventually be scientific and science will become arti stic». The future Flaubert presaged is now this fleeting present where «change» in art and society is the sovereign ruler, and «tradition» has turned an empty word.
