Mona Lisa's moustache

From The Critics

Mary Settegast's Mona Lisa's Moustache: Making Sense Of A Dissolving World is a fascinating cultural history of the breakdown in art and philosophy of agreed upon absolute and "proper" forms in politics, economics, literature, music, dance, painting, architecture, social codes, moral standards, gender distinctions, and personal relationships. Settegast explores several different ways of looking at the reality of these dissolving social and cultural forms to determine the root causes of this twentieth century phenomena and finding them in the rise of global consumer capitalism, environmental deterioration, millennial time cycles; the evolution of human consciousness; and the widening popularity among the intelligencia of dissolution of form as cause for celebration. Articulate, insightful, iconoclastic, occasionally inspiring, Mona Lisa's Moustache is highly recommended reading for students of popular culture, philosophy, esthetics, art, and ethics.