Inner Beauty until 31 March 2020

Deadline: 31 March 2020. From the Classical Beauty of the Greeks, to the Modernists arguments of Beauty being superficial and the effort to find its place in today’s Contemporary Art world, one thing is for sure: As Jonathan Jones once stated: “Beauty is the most dangerous idea in art. It’s the most dangerous idea in life, too”.

Wolfgang Huemer and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran state in, “The Place of Beauty in Contemporary Aesthetics that several philosophers have pointed out that we should not expect to find a simple and unified definition of beauty as the range of object to which one can ascribe the relevant properties- or which justify the relevant judgments or arouse the relevant reactions in the spectator – are multifarious. Since we employ the term “beauty” to characterize different objects, beauty is as Levinson puts it – “no one” and we should consider different types of beauty concerning natural, artistic, and physical beauty.”

They also reference Lisa Schmalzried’s paper, “The Virtue Analysis of Inner Beauty: Inner Beauty as Moral, Eudemonistic, or Relational Virtueness”, devoted to inner beauty. She discusses the moral virtue-analysis according to which inner beauty only depends on morally desirable character traits, the eudemonistic virtue-analysis which explains inner beauty in terms of Aristotelian virtuousness and, finally, the relational virtue-analysis according to which inner beauty is explained as relational virtuousness.

Arthur Danto raises significant questions in “Beauty for Ashes”: Is a return to beauty (then) an acknowledgment of art’s limitations when it comes to social change? Or, have artists come to a sense of desolation to which they themselves have contributed – mere ashes – given the lingering hope for beauty?” Is a return to beauty a gesture of reconciliation with a world desperately in need of it after what it has been through in the intervening decades – a kind of aesthetic amnesty? Or finally is the return a concession that in a futile effort to modify social awareness, art has sacrificed precisely that which gives it its deepest meaning?

Corinth Exposed Photography Festival 2020 invites photographers from around the world to join this ongoing discourse.

References:
• Wolfgang Huemer and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran: The Place of Beauty in Contemporary Aesthetics.
• Jonathan Jones, “When did modern art become so reluctant to embrace beauty?”, The Guardian.
• Arthur Danto “Beauty for Ashes” in Neal Benezra and Olga M. Viso “Regarding Beauty: a View of the Late Twentieth Century”.

Prizes:

The 20 winning photographs selected by the jury will be exposed at one of the most beautiful museums in Greece.

Photo Contest Website: http://www.corinthexposed.gr/