How does the concept of Beauty keep surviving in the wake of the repeated proclamations of its demise? Quite often at odds with many currents in literary and art criticism as well as artists' visions of art, it offers itself as a very controversial subject in a number of works, most recently Wendy Steiner's Venus in Exile, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, and Geremy Gilbert-Rolfe's Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. The ensuing debate raises numerous questions: How do we approach a work of art? What criteria do we devise and how do we respond to art? How have approaches to aesthetics changed over time and what are the determining factors for these changes? How do social and political institutions generate aesthetic theories? In what way can aesthetic theories resist/change social paradigms? In this two day event we will revisit the debate over Beauty in different historical periods. Expecting submissions from students in a variety of fields (art history, literature, philosophy, music, film, architecture), the list of subjects is open: