The end of beauty

Byung-Chul Han presents in this work the transformations that have occurred to the concept of beauty in general, and aesthetics in particular. He sees that consumer culture and the neoliberal economy imposed a certain form of beauty, and added many market traits to it that reinforced its immediacy and accelerated its vanishing. The book relies on the theses of philosophers such as Heidegger, Adorno, Kant, and Hegel in emphasizing the classical meaning of beauty in opposition to this consumptive form; the eternal versus the transient. The author adopts a definition of beauty that makes it an existential experience that penetrates the soul and blends with its terrains, emerging tinted with the shade of existence, similar to eternal truths.