ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a speculative account of beauty in dialogue with the sculptor Douglas White and Gregory Bateson's notion of grace in art. Beauty has had a long and distinguished history within the philosophical, religious and political thought of the West; an embodiment of value making a place for itself alongside the less tangible Good, Truth and Justice; a muse stirring trouble in the relations between material form and experience. The refined beauty at home in the Academies, salons and museums was rejected in the birth pangs of a Modern art and its embrace of the Primitive. Beauty – as a rip in the fabric of experiential life – is less a concept than a small opening in thought that allows us to follow its transformative ripples as it is ingested and digested within our habitual modes of relating – as persons, as bodies, as metabolism.
