Editors: Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder, Lars Spuybroek
With essays and interviews by Thierry Bardini, Caroline van Eck, Gustav Fechner, Mark Frost, George Gessert, Tim Ingold, Arjen Mulder, John Ruskin, Lars Spuybroek, Wendy Steiner and Daniel N. Stern

Vital Beauty
Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle of Technology and Nature

Paperback | Illustrated (colour) | 256 pages | 16 x 23 cm | Design: Joke Brouwer
NAi Publishers in association with V2_Publishers
English edition | ISBN 978-90-5662-856-7 | € 22.50

Symposium Vital Beauty and Book Launch 16 May 2012

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.

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.

"Beauty is the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying."
- Alfred N. Whitehead

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