Beholder @ Talbot Rice

The show’s premise is bold: a diverse group of artists, institutions and academics are invited to nominate an artwork that explores contemporary notions of beauty. The result is an eclectic display of disparate works in a variety of media, including painting, video, text work, slide shows and lacework.

The exhibition tells us that beauty is a contentious subject – that no one individual would try and reduce the term to a concrete description, or dare hold up a work and suggest it represents a culture’s shared notion of what it is to be beautiful. Not these days, anyway, and instead Talbot Rice offers a distinctly plural approach.

There are the distinctly attractive works, such as the fine, Italian lacework in its museum display case, Yoko Ono’s A Hole to See the Sky Through, and Sir Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral.

Other selections are a little trickier. Exploiting beauty’s dubious foundations, some participants attempt to isolate beauty by showing us its antithesis. This dialectical approach, which suggests that beauty is as much defined by its opposite as it is by any positive manifestation of its supposed attributes, is a way of skipping over contested ground.

Michael White’s two digital prints are gauche. Like much of his work, they are deliberate affronts on good taste that consequently have little impact on our notion of beauty. Djordje Ozbolt’s crude portrait of someone slavering, however, is a sinister joy, cleverly hung out of sight.

The generous collection of video art is equally diverse – but no less a treat. Last Riot by collective AES + F is a mesmerising stop-motion animation that sees models in military fatigues attack each other with samurai swords and baseball bats. It’s like a slowed-down music video about a country’s sexed-up military-industrial complex. [Andrew Cattanach]