Are there really only seven different types of beauty?

Extravagant, transgressive, elemental ... the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York has taxonomised the indefinable – beauty. Is this wrong-headed scientific precision or the brave tackling of a taboo?

So now we know. Humanity’s Keatsian quest for the true meaning of beauty is effectively over, the subject sussed once and for all. It’s fully understood, in the same way particle physics fell into place when the Higgs boson was proven to exist. What makes you beautiful, asked the boy band. New York’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum not only knows the answer but, like a medieval scholar identifying seven kinds of angel, has specified beauty’s seven varieties.

To be fair to the Cooper Hewitt, it has done something brave here. The museum’s newly opened Design Triennial takes the elusive idea of “beauty” as its theme – a topic contemporary criticism too often shies away from. The celebration of beauty is seen as bourgeois, safe or – when it comes to human society – oppressive, in its association with rigid norms few of us can live up to. In art, it can be seen as premodern and regressive. Today’s art often aspires to be something more than beautiful – serious, critical, radical or “disturbing”.

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