Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 15, 2002

Volume 30, Number 22

Two-Week Issue

Conference will examine the
changing notions of beauty

Poets and scholars will meet to ponder the ways in which beauty can be judged and described at a conference to be held Friday-Saturday, March 29-30, at the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St.

Titled "The Future of the Aesthetic," the conference will focus on how the concept of the aesthetic has been interpreted in recent decades and how it is likely to be regarded among intellectuals and educators in years to come.

The notion that beauty is an inherent quality, not an artificial construct, has had more critics than defenders in recent years, explains conference organizer Paul H. Fry, the William Lampson Professor of English.

The long prevailing concept of "aesthetic disinterestedness," the capacity for judging beauty objectively with a separate faculty of the mind, came increasingly under fire from academics and artists themselves during the last century, when aesthetic judgment came to be widely suspected of harboring hidden political or moral agendas and biases, says Fry.

"Nonetheless," he notes, "the aesthetic has had a few emerging champions in recent years, several of whom will be here alongside those who still skeptically resist the siren call of beauty."

The conference will be divided into four separate panel discussions over two days: "Aesthetics and Politics," "Aesthetics and Ethics," "Aesthetic Education" and "The Aesthetic Impulse."

Among the participants will be former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Harvard University philosopher Elaine Scarry, poet Susan Stewart, poet Frank Bidart and English professor at Johns Hopkins University Frances Ferguson.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 2:45 p.m on Friday and conclude at 6 p.m. on Saturday. For more information, contact Manana Sikic at (203) 432-0673.

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