Count the number of times you see the phrase "the human condition" in the New York Times Book Review. It is meaningless because it doesn't tell you anything particular or specific. What Nobel prize citation doesn't say that the writer in question "illuminates the human condition"? That's the problem with the word "beauty" also. It either means pretty in the conventional sense, or is pretty much up for grabs. Hence it makes no sense to talk, with Wendy Steiner, about a "return to beauty." Are Kandinksy, Klee, and Shoenberg beatiful? I think so. Pound and H.D. seem very concerned with beauty, "Beauty is a rare thing..." etc... So is Wallace Stevens.

Is this a terminological question? Do artists stop thinking of themselves as being in pursuit of beauty? (because they reject the word, not the concept)? Or, alternatively, do they still think of themselves as in pursuit of beauty, keeping the word, but meaning something different by it? You could make the case for either scenario. Our critical language is just that, the clichés we use to talk about things. As Frank O'Hara pointed out, "The formal qualities to which, for convenience and expediency, we attempt to ascribe the qualities we admire in a poem are, after all, no more than conveniences. It should be understood that they are signs for the qualities, not absolute rules by which the work is judged." He goes on to take to task a reviewer of an early book of Kenneth Koch, who criticized Koch for an absence of "verbal excitement," "tension," "significant detail," and the like.