Beauty Reinstated

Beauty has been displaced as the essential quality of art. Kant led the way by elevating the sublime as an independent and equal aspect of art. With the advent of Romanticism, the sublime came to replace beauty as the stronger of the two. Moreover, the banishing of beauty from the humanities in the last two decades has been carried out by a set of political complaints. One of them holds that beauty simply distracts us from attending to social ills. The second critique is based on the notion that a gaze is inherently asymmetrical.
Recently, it seems, beauty has been recovering from the stigma of being politically incorrect and is making something of a comeback in writings on art and culture. In this context, the ancient Greek conception of beauty may help to show how beauty, suitably understood and delimited, can cohabit with other, equally important aesthetic values. In aesthetics, there is room for beauty, as a feature of art (Konstan, 2014).