On Beauty

"There's no accounting for taste," it is said. Actually there is every kind of accounting for taste, but there's no accounting for beauty. Beauty sails past the office in the brain where accounts are kept--and where failed beauty accumulates...

These works lack sufficient capital investment in the coin of meaning. They are glamorous rather than beautiful: hedonistic and only too confident of pleasing, like people who pride themselves on being irresistible. Beauty isn't beauty if it doesn't inspire awe for a specific proposition about reality. Beauty makes a case for the sacredness of something--winning the case suddenly and irrationally. It is always too late to argue with beauty."

Peter Schjeldahl, "Beauty"
The New Yorker