BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

In her latest book, The Wounds of Beauty, Princeton Theological Seminary Professor Margarita Mooney Clayton (then publishing as Margarita Mooney Suarez) has convened a cadre of intellectuals who, despite their wide-ranging areas of expertise (among them cheese-making and iconography), share a fervent belief that Beauty is essential both for ultimate happiness and for present flourishing. To some, their enthusiasm may seem a bit extreme. But for Mooney Clayton and her interlocutors, Beauty is not so much a pretty picture as a fierce metaphysical poke. 

"Beauty," notes poet Dana Gioia, "has almost nothing to do with being decorous or pleasant." For him, Beauty is "an experience, a perception through some natural or artistic lens of the underlying order of the universe." 

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