The Beauty of Choice

On Women, Art, and Freedom

Wendy Steiner

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
14 October 2024

History of Art & Design Styles; Philosophy: aesthetics

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women's taste as the engine of liberal values.

Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer's ""The Wife of Bath's Tale,"" she presents women's sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature-expressions of their taste-and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.

The Beauty of Choice pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shōnagon's defense of pleasure in the Pillow Book; Picasso's and Balthus's sexualization of their models; the redefinition of ""waste"" in postmodern fiction; and interactivity and empathy in the works of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Barbara MacCallum, Kristin Beeler, and Hannah Gadsby. It offers the first critical study of Heroines, a memorial to the twenty thousand women raped in Kosovo during the Serbian genocide. This deeply original book gives taste, beauty, and pleasure central roles in a passionate defense of women's freedom.

By: Wendy Steiner
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231215268
ISBN 10: 0231215266
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 14 October 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Wendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania as well as an opera librettist and multimedia artist. Her many acclaimed books include The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (1995) and Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001).

Reviews for The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom

This ambitious, clear-eyed, and beautifully written book redefines and reinvigorates feminist aesthetic thought. The Beauty of Choice is an exquisite hybrid of art and criticism: it is art as criticism, and criticism as art. It is something that only Wendy Steiner could have written—a crowning achievement. -- James E. Young, author of The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between The Beauty of Choice is a major conceptual achievement by an influential intellectual who is creatively reaching beyond the theoretical boundaries of their previous scholarship. Its style is accessible, its brevity is a virtue, and it is a pleasure to read. -- Whitney Davis, author of Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond A beautifully written work of thrilling originality – and timeliness. With examples ranging from Heian Japan, via Chaucer to #MeToo, Wendy Steiner opens up a vast panorama of women’s empowerment through the beauty of choice and the choice of beauty. -- Simon May, author of Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion What do women most want? This is the beguiling question that sets this deliciously readable feast of a book into motion. Drawing brilliantly upon myth, literature, art, philosophy, opera, biblical stories and even evolutionary biology, Wendy Steiner has woven together centuries of cultural history in lavish answer to this question, in this way illuminating the interconnections between aesthetics and female agency; art, choice and female desire. The Beauty of Choice is a wildly inventive mix of erudition and insight, research and storytelling, a gorgeous and impassioned call to arms written in prose and clear as an alpine lake. At a moment when the cornerstones of humanistic inquiry are under siege, this is a hymn to all who believe in the human artistic impulse. Read this book and marvel. -- Andrea Barnet, author of Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters Changed our World