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I hoped Scarry would bring to a boiling point the quarrels somewhat tepidly inaugurated by art critics Danto and Hickey. In her book, professor Scarry mounts a defense of the idea of beauty, which, she says, has "been banished or driven underground in the humanities for the last two decades." She tries to prove that, contrary to what the anti-aesthetes in the academy have written, promoting beauty in art is not an inherently elitist activity, nor is it harmful, as some feminist critics believe. (Scarry doesn't buy the feminist argument that the "male gaze" objectifies women.)

Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington October 7, 1999- January 17, 2000

In the end, though, Scarry's book is a stale concoction. To those who attack beauty on political grounds, she replies with a similarly political defense -- that beauty leads to social equality; that beauty is democratic. Reading her book, I got the sense that her admirable liberal principles wouldn't let her deal with the truth: Beauty is elitist. Creating beautiful artworks or advancing their cause both entail recognizing excellence, establishing hierarchies, refining taste. However, the most annoying thing about "On Beauty and Being Just" is what Scarry chooses to leave out. She ducks telling us who exactly has been attacking beauty for the last two decades, she doesn't include any quotes from the anti-beauty crowd, nor does she refer to or reproduce any contemporary art, thereby depriving the reader of examples of what she's talking about.

Luckily, the curators of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington have organized an ambitious exhibition called "Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century," which addresses many of the recent arguments about beauty with an assortment of artworks by 36 artists from the last 40 years. As the double meaning of its title indicates, the show entails a two-part proposition -- regarding beauty in the sense of being about beauty and in the sense of looking at art that aims for beauty. It is a show crowded with words -- wall texts, quotes stenciled throughout the exhibition and long catalog essays. At times, all this curatorial verbiage gets in the way of the art itself, which ranges all over the scale of quality, media and age, from Picasso, dead for 26 years, to the American mulitmedia artist Matthew Barney, who turned 32 in 1999. The show is divided under two broad rubrics, "Beauty Objectified," which focuses on "the figure and changing ideals of physical beauty," and "Intangible Beauty," which "examines the subjective realm of perception."

For anyone expecting a break from the overdetermined messages of conceptual art, the show's first several rooms will be a trial. The first piece, an untitled installation presenting a doorway blocked by "fragments of reproductions of Classical and Renaissance sculpture and slabs of broken marble" by Jannis Kounellis, has all the sensuality and intellectual resonance of an art-school project. The pieces nearby dish up more of the same dry conceptual, all of which appropriated or speak to notions of classical beauty: a plaster-cast Venus facing a mound of rags by the Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto; two reproductions of the "Medici Venus" facing each other in a work called "Mimesis" by Giulio Paolini.

Among the initial offerings by European art stars are pieces by the expected home-grown celebrities. Cindy Sherman's ubiquitous "History Portraits," in which the artist photographs herself costumed and posed in the manner of famous paintings such as Carravaggio's "Bacchus" and da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," thankfully inject some comedy into the first series of rooms. The Bahamian superstar Janine Antoni fastens on to "issues of the body's public presentation" in "Lick and Lather" (1993-'94), with its two rows of busts -- one in chocolate, one in soap -- in which the artist has licked or lathered away details from each of the faces. Some of these busts are already deteriorating, so if you don't find them appealing, you can take comfort in the fact that they won't be around much longer. On the other hand, what are they doing here in the first place?

When the opponents of beauty (named in the show's catalog as, among others, theorists Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Douglas Crimp) point to artists who oppose purely aesthetic art with issues-based work, people like Sherman and Antoni are the very ones they champion. I can only suppose that their works and many of the other conceptual pieces included in the show are there because they critique the concept of beauty. They may not strike the eye, but they're about beauty. Still, if I'd wanted messages, I could have stayed home and watched public service announcements on TV. I hoped to find aesthetically gratifying art at the Hirshhorn, not a bunch of installations assembled by studio assistants for artists with something to "say." Luckily, the curators saved the meat for the middle.

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