The IAI exists, according to its manifesto, "to promote all forms of creative expression", and it does this from its home at the Globe, a converted church in Hay on Wye. Last weekend saw such questions debated at Crunch, the contemporary art festival and discussion forum organised by the Institute of Art and Ideas. If the art in which we see beauty has only a short life, doesn't this compromise the experience? Could it not, in fact, be seen as evidence that we have lost the ability to deal properly with this important dimension of human existence? Ondák tells us that the title refers to the changed significance of the queue in his country following the collapse of communism, but he, like everyone else, is aware that the work may well be overlooked and go unnoticed by many visitors to the gallery. Tate Modern, for example, has recently acquired Good Feelings for Good Times, a work by the Czech artist Roman Ondák that is a queue of people. This conflict between transience and persistence seems especially acute when we look at some of the work being made today that is itself so apparently short-lived. The difficulty we have when thinking about this – and it is a perennial difficulty – is that we are forced to deal with two ostensibly conflicting realities: wherever we find it, beauty is recognisable as a transient, unfixable quality, and yet when we experience it we also want to insist that its significance, both to ourselves and to everyone else, persists long beyond that fleeting moment. Matthew Collings has given us his own rules of beauty, Sue Perkins has traced the boundaries between our public and private enjoyment of it, tonight Gus Casely-Hayford is investigating what artists are doing today, and this weekend Waldemar Januszczak is set to persuade us that, despite what the more sceptical among us might maintain, there really is beauty in contemporary art. BBC4's series, Modern Beauty, is looking hard at contemporary art in an effort to establish the continuing relevance of this timeless quality to today's artistic endeavour. ![]() B eauty – the idea of it, the experience of it, the importance of it – is under the microscope again.
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