One of the things I came across during my winter blogging break was a great website named Gilded Birds, which features brief discussions with philosophers, artists, and others on the subject of beauty. The most recent interview, with Stanford University philosopher Joshua Cohen, provides a fitting glimpse of what the site has to offer: GB: Artists in the twentieth century turned against the idea of beauty because of its association with bourgeois ideals. This is man-made beauty that surely anyone would be happy with. JC: [Frederick Law] Olmsted had spent the 1850s working as a journalist, writing about slavery and aristocracy. He thought that the conflict between North and South in the United States was part of a global fight between democratic and aristocratic…