Abstract

Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty was a significant contribution to the acclaimed return of beauty that had been taking place since Dave Hickey's 1993 manifesto announced that beauty would be the defining problem of the next decade. One of the most original and important aspects of Danto's look at beauty is that he thought about it as a contribution to art criticism. External aesthetic qualities would be as meaningless as natural beauty intended to play role in conveying a work 's meaning, constitute the aesthetic dimension of the work. For Danto, elegiac beauty can provide political role for the aesthetic quality, but the impossibility of what could be termed an “angry beauty,” capable of outraging people, seriously limits the option of beauty in “angrily political” contemporary art. Danto thought that activist art will try to inflect works with an angry mood in order to turn people against what they are about.