WELCOME TO ISSUE 2. B E A U T Y  I S  T H E  N E W. FEATURING.

DEREK HENDERSON
GREGORY VINCENT ST. THOMASINO
JADON REMPEL
KANE X. FAUCHER + JOHN MOORE WILLIAMS
KIMBERLY GREY
MATTHEW MULLANE
MEDEINĖ TRIBINEVIČIUS
SZIDÓNIA SZÉP
TRAVIS CEBULA

Beauty is contentious. Take Plato’s Phaedrus. A man beholds a beautiful boy and starts spinning uncontrollably, grovelling in worship, and literally grows feathers along his shoulder blades in reaction. Dante doesn’t fare much better when merely at the sight of Beatrice is he gripped by an uncontrollable trembling in Vita Nuovo. Beauty is ascribed the power to profoundly, almost grotesquely, transform. Yet at the very height of its power, it is stripped of it. Enter Immanuel Kant, who seizes beauty and pits it against the sublime to declare it the inferior, an accusation so famous it still resounds 2 centuries later. The beautiful is suddenly regarded askance, aligned with the decorative, accused of falsity and why not? It is a bobble once adored now quaint, relegated to storage. The so-called ‘era of taste’ is superceded by the ‘era of meaning,’ reaching its apex in the modernist readymade – it is finally left to Marineti to announce in his 1905 Futurist Manifesto that “except in struggle, there is no more beauty.”

Turn the calendar year. As if after a 2-century-long-sleep, something begins to stirr. Saul Ostrow entitles an essay "The Eternal Problem of Beauty's Return" while Arthur C. Danto publishes a full-length work on The Abuse of Beauty. It is perhaps Craig Dworkin who sums it up best when he writes, "' My darling, your beauty is replacing irony'" in "The Restlessness of Language," or the musician Joan as Policewoman, who boldly publishes on her myspace page: “beauty is the new punk rock.” Well,

issue 2 of Dear Sir, has been curated around a beauty re-awakened, slightly tousled, hungry and fresh to the fray. Punk? Beauty's been called worse. Here are pieces ranging from the more traditional to the avant-garde, where the dissonant, the stuttering, the frenetic and the flawed are not held as qualities against which beauty wilts but rather included in its re-awakened, even strengthened, form. For a beauty in danger, as Warhol once told us, is simply more beautiful. Think the word breath-taking. And bon appétit.