The Human Universal Beautiful

In the fall of 1984, I was sitting in a darkened lecture hall at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, watching slides click through a Kodak Carousel projector. Greek marble. Benin bronze. Mughal miniature. Japanese woodblock. The professor's argument was plain: these works endured because they were beautiful, and beauty was the thread that connected every person in that room to every person who had ever stood before the original object. Down the hall, in a different semester, a film professor made a different case. Beauty, he said, was larger than prettiness. The ugly, the reprehensible, the fantastic, the comic: all of these were forms of beauty because all of them enchanted and instructed. A movie theater was a secular chapel. We watch together because beauty is a collective event. Both professors were right. Both were incomplete. And the question that has taken me forty years to formulate is the question my new book, The Human Universal Beautiful, attempts to answer: if beauty connects and instructs, who controls the connection? Who writes the lesson plan?