In Vital Beauty, leading philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to the design practice and art. The book focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century. Vital Beauty is launched on 16 May at the international symposium "Vital Beauty" at De Balie Amsterdam as part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) 2012.

Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the
question of how we should design our environments, our objects and even our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.

In Vital Beauty, leading philosophers, anthropologists, political thinkers and artists take a closer look at what the idea of beauty can mean to their disciplines, in an effort to redefine what beauty is and what it means to the design practice and art. The book focuses on the question of how the age-old notion of beauty can regain an importance appropriate to the 21st century. Vital Beauty is launched on 16 May at the international symposium "Vital Beauty" at De Balie Amsterdam as part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) 2012.

Our need for beauty has not diminished, as hard as modernism tried to erase it from art and life and supplant it with the sublime. It was a sublime that increasingly associated itself with negation and deconstruction. In contrast, vital beauty, as defined by John Ruskin more than 150 years ago, is a beauty of sympathies and affinities with life forms. Yet vital beauty must be reinvented, since life forms today can be technological as well as natural. The concept of vital beauty raises the
question of how we should design our environments, our objects and even our lives, and of how we might one day invent a politics of beauty.