Beauty and photography means fashion and glamour doesn't it. Beauty used to be the supreme purpose of art in the nineteenth century, now it has been dethroned to the extent that there is almost a critical taboo against beauty.

There is a simple reason for the dethronment of beauty: good art need/may not be beautiful. Beauty is now associated with skincare and/or plastic and cosmetic surgery.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Beachport, 2006

Maybe we should giove more consideration to the "embodied meanings" of art works and images? Isn't there a role for the critic of trying to say what a given work means, and how that meaning is embodied in the material object which carries it?

Justin Goode over at Design Observer has a post on beauty, where it is said:

The modernist way to account for the objective basis of beauty — to the extent that it has any objectivity — is the design philosophy of functionalism. "Form follows function" means beauty is a quality that indicates a utility or efficiency of the form as a means to an end. Functionality is enhanced by maximizing efficiency. That is why the enemy of functionalism is ornamentation. Functionalism is the aesthetic of the tool and of the machine.

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