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February 19, 2004
One reason why the category of the beautiful should be retained in aesthetics:

Geoff Murray, Evening light on dolerite boulders, Mount Mawson. Mount Field National Park, Tasmania
Geoff's photos are published at Leatherwood Online. Check them out. They've only been up a week.
Natural beauty was dropped from the agenda of aesthetics--repressed---in favour of the beauty of the work of art. Adorno writes:
"The price that aesthetics had to pay for repressing the theme of natural beauty was the shift in the nineteenth century towards an ideological 'religion of art', a term coined by Hegel..."
There is a need to step outside of art back to nature. Geoff Murray says:
"Tasmania's wild areas deserve to be cared and nurtured. We have a unique blend of wild and beautiful landscapes here, but it is all too easy to forget just how special it is. To see it through the eyes of visitors is a perfect way to remove our tendency to take it for granted. Some say tourists will "love the place to death" but it would take an awful lot of tourists walking through the bush to equal the damage a log truck does."
If you want to know the connection between the beauty of nature, its destruction and the logging trucks in Tasmania, then read the transcript of the ABC's Four Corners program The Lords of the Forest
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