From Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes to conceptual art, performance art, and installation art, art in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries has, it seems, turned against the pursuit of beauty at least in advanced gallery and museum circles. Criticism,  thought, provocation, and meaning matter more than aesthetic pleasure, if it even matters at all. Building on these developments, Arthur Danto has developed a theory of art as embodied meaning. “I have,” Danto writes, “what I think is a strong argument that accidentalizes the aesthetic. It’s all right if it is there, but it is all right if it is not.”

But is all this right? Are beauty and aesthetic pleasure no longer central values in the practices of making and responding to art? By criticizing Danto’s argument and by considering a range of examples from avant-garde art, I will argue that the answer is no: beauty and the aesthetic still matter.

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