What do we mean when we speak of "beauty"? What do we experience? Beauty is no longer the human experience of the harmonious object; today an aesthetics of difference has revolutionised our ways of seeing the beautiful. Now, we live in a time of "extreme beauty." Extreme Beauty explores art, literature, politics, and philosophy in order to illuminate how the concept and experience of beauty has changed. The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, fascism and the consumption of the flesh, postcolonialism and imagination to Derrida and the glory and gift of death.

Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 6 December 2001 - 3 March 2002.

Approximately one hundred prints explore cultural attitudes toward female beauty, appearance, and self-expression by such notable photographers as Edward Steichen, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, and Helmut Newtown.

A retrospective of one of the leading Canadian artists of the last three decades, featuring her photography, montages and installationsShortly after graduating from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Vikky Alexander made her 1983 entry into the international art world while living in New York by participating in photo historian Abigail Solomon Godeau's exhibition The Stolen Image and its Uses. For over a decade she was active in a circle of New York artists that merged the critical ideas of Minimalism and Conceptual Art with photography, and came to be known as the Pictures Generation. Since then she has continued to explore the appropriated image through her own photography, especially in relation to iconic representations of nature as well as the spaces of consumerism - two subjects that remain significant in today's cultural discourses.This book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, is a beautifully illustrated retrospective of nearly four decades of Alexander's work. Since the 1980s, Alexander has made numerous series of photographs, montages, sculptures, collages and installations, all working to hone a vision that captures the spectacle and inherent falseness of certain public and private spaces. From the exaggerated architecture of Versailles, Disneyland and the West Edmonton Mall, to the use of idyllic "natural" settings and the skin-deep beauty of fashion models, she unravels the mechanisms of display that shape meaning and desire in our culture.

The author presents research and her perspectives on how the teachings of the Catholic Church both liberate and dignify women.

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's worldThe demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough-not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist.If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices-and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

“[Beauty Sick] will blow the top off the body image movement…provocative and necessary.” — Rebellious Magazine An award-winning psychology professor reveals how the cultural obsession with women's appearance is an epidemic that harms women's ability to get ahead and to live happy, meaningful lives, in this powerful, eye-opening work in the vein of Peggy Orenstein and Sheryl Sandberg. Today’s young women face a bewildering set of contradictions when it comes to beauty. They don’t want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women but hungrily consume the outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture’s absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a "skinny arm." They understand that what they see isn’t real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Yet these same young women are fierce fighters for the issues they care about. They are ready to fight back against their beauty-sick culture and create a different world for themselves, but they need a way forward. In Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. Combining scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages, she makes clear that to truly fulfill their potential, we must break free from cultural forces that feed destructive desires, attitudes, and words—from fat-shaming to denigrating commentary about other women. She provides inspiration and workable solutions to help girls and women overcome negative attitudes and embrace their whole selves, to transform their lives, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change their world.