Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Books

Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han

Lillian Wilde asks: is it beauty that needs saving, or is it us?

Saving Beauty (2017) is a thrilling discussion of the concept of beauty in today’s consumer culture. Hyperbolic and discursive, it is a gripping read that doesn’t really set out to achieve what the title proposes. Rather, it leaves the reader with a sense of urgency that beauty has yet to be saved. Or is it in fact we who need saving?

Byung-Chul Han is a cultural theorist and lecturer at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Taking up many of the themes with which he has juggled in earlier publications – capitalism, digitization, consumerism, and more – here he paints a dystopian picture of our society and how it lost track of beauty.

…