beauty - the chronicle review

Whenever we say the word "beautiful" in front of others, [Dave Hickey] argues, our feelings are transformed from private experiences into actions with public consequences, taking us into the political arena of give and take—what he calls "wrangling" over ideas that, in essence, resembles the disputes over the value of physical things in the capitalist marketplace. We utter the word "beauty," Hickey contends, at least in part "because we are good democrats, who aspire to transparency and consensus."