Byung-Chul Han’s “Saving Beauty”

Saving Beauty (La Salvezza del Bello in Italian) is a short philosophical book (original German title: Schönheit retten) by cultural theorist Byung‑Chul Han, and it focuses on a critique of contemporary, consumerist notions of beauty, delving of course with the impact of digital technologies on our notion and approach to beauty and meaning.

More organic and less choppy than other writings, it turned out to be an essay in aesthetics through the lenses of what’s considered smooth and rough, pornographic or erotic, digital and physical, and I read it for a lecture I had to give a bunch of architects. I must say they reacted well to the notion that information is pornography.

Han diagnoses a shift from a transcendent, unsettling experience of beauty to a smooth, consumable, body‑centred “pornography” of beauty tied to late‑capitalist aesthetics and social‑media likes, and he’s as sharp as ever in contrasting glossy, commodified forms (from pop art and smartphones to grooming trends) with classical, difficult, even dangerous forms of beauty that reveal truth, negativity, and ethical depth. It reconnects aesthetics with political and ethical concerns, arguing that reclaiming a less commodified beauty matters for how we live together under digital capitalism, and it ultimately ties up with education, marking a significant difference between knowledge (hard, time-consuming) and information (easier and more commodified by the minute). This ties neatly with another booklet by the same author, In The Swarm, and I talked about it here.