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I hope this ends up relating to what you're talking about...

What I've been thinking about is the relationship between "beauty" as we would define it, (something beautiful is usually something one of our senses reacts to, like in On Beauty, a Rembrandt painting or Victoria), and a kind of inner beauty. I think by trying to deconstruct visual beauty academically, as Howard does with Rembrandt, it takes away from his sort of inner-beauty. This is really hard to explain, but think of it this way...in one of Prof Dalke's Thursday sessions we were talking about what characters Smith sympathizes with most, and we agreed that she liked Kiki more than she liked Howard, and that she generally liked the non-academic characters more than the academic characters. Could this then be a way of seeing Beauty? 

I think another interesting thing to look at is Claire. She is thought of as generally being very beautiful outside, but she is also sort of beautiful inside in a non-academic way because she dislikes having academic discussions with her students. She is an artist. In fact, she wrote the poem "On Beauty" in the book. I think the poem itself, calling the beautiful "the damned", can even touch on this. Also, the way that Claire thinks about Kiki is also very very interesting. Claire definitely isn't the ideal version of Beauty...I guess I just think she understands more than the other characters what Beauty is. She has a lot of issues, but what I find most interesting is that she thinks that Kiki is this "new kind of woman". Is that what Smith thinks Beauty is? Does Kiki represent Beauty?