beautiful creatures

[gurdonark]

"For a start, we must stop treating beauty as a thing or quality, and see it instead as a kind of communication. We often speak of beauty as a property of objects. Some people or artworks "have it", and some do not. But pace Kant or Burke, the judgment of beauty in an artwork or person varies from one person to the next, and in the course of time, even within the same person. These shifts and differences are meaningful and valid, and not "fallings away" from some "truth" or "higher state". Beauty is an unstable property, because it is not a property at all".--
Wendy Steiner



At my high school, the cafeteria and gymnasium walls always seemed to be made of cinderblock. I imagine deep grooves, like the grooves in a cinderblock wall, cut into the backs of wallflowers everywhere. I write to suggest that the grooves are illusory.

I find some people more beautiful than others, but much of the time, I don't find the people beautiful that the media makers suggest I should find beautiful. Some celebrities, by contrast, I find extraordinarily beautiful. I don't think that the way to "fix" the problem with the superficiality of appearance obsession is to exterminate beauty in some 60s feminist dialectic way.

I believe that looks become an obsession. Physical attraction becomes an obession. I do not want to minimize the wonders of the physical life. But I cannot help but feel that beauty is about more than finding superficially eligible inamoratas.

I like to think about life as neither needing to be puritanical nor obsessed with one marketed mode of "stylish beauty". I love to secede from this media-saturated way of seeing the world as "those who look good" and "those who do not", and live in a world in which magazines do not dictate what I find beautiful in life.

Of course, "life" is one darn big construct, and the real story is about how I will choose to live mine. I think I want to choose a world in which I don't feel cheated by things that don't matter. I'm an ordinary person, by the standards of this world. I don't "rate" in any sweepstakes, any of the various LJ "am I hot" communities would place me in the "not" category. I remember that old game "Mystery Date", when the object of the game was to open a front door and determine that one either had a "dream date" or a "dud". I always liked one of the duds on the commercial, whom I imagined had come from a busy day at the auto repair shop, and who was a bit overweight, no doubt from eating home-made German food his mother cooked.

I think that when life is marketed to convince people to buy products, one key ingredient is the sense of lack. One lacks a Snickers bar, and needs to buy it. Hollywood is more subtle. One is neither Uma Thurman nor Ethan Hawke, so one should buy more escapist film tickets. I like what little the media tells me about Ms. Thurman and Mr. Hawke. But do they truly live superior lives because they are "beautiful"? I don't think so.

Currency--it's all about currency. Money is a currency. Looks are a currency. Power is the best currency. While I am all for looks, money, and power in appropriate moderation, the sheer "acquisitiveness" of it all bothers me sometimes. So, I secede.

I secede from a world in which a magazine about a musician requires me to wade through pages of product ads interspersed with twentysomething shapely women. I secede from a world in which product commercials feature characters from movies. I secede from a world in some matter, and some do not. Indeed, the world I wish to live in is a world in which, as Ford Madox Ford put it, Some Do Not indeed. Some don't buy the gaudy new times, but instead clings to what matters.

I'd like to reclaim beauty for smiles, and hackberry butterflies in April, and Brian Eno holding forth on the glorious beauty of accidental music making. I don't want us all to join hands and sing "everything is beautiful,in its own way", but I do want to make my judgments based on my experience, and not based on Channel 8, people magazine, and large label recording artists.

I'd like to break through the negativity which both commercial culture and counterculture impose upon beauty. I want to make beauty less of a platitude,and more of an appreciation. I'm not sure how to do it, yet, but I"m sure I want to try.

Comments

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Wendy Steiner is a humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book called "Venue in Exile", about the banishment of female beauty by modernist and post-modernist art.
I'm not sure I accept all of her thesis, but I do like this quote.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I'm probably not explaining her very well, but her concern is that the concept of "beauty" was lost in modernism, and should be regained.

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

raht on! raht on! raht on!
or as Buddy Holly said,
Rave On!
~wps

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thank ye, sir! Love that naval photo!

Re:

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

yeah
that was when i was young and dumb
and full of(well, you know the rest)
probably the best physical condition i was EVER in! for about five minutes
then i started abusing myself(no, not like that!)
now i'm going down the long, piney road to dieting
as Ed Sanders would say
my mom always loved that picture too
i have my own opinion
~paul

[sortofkindof.livejournal.com]

If this was a petition, I'd sign up.

(though I do like the trashy beauty magazines even as they make me discontent on my Sunday afternoons)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I don't think we should ban Glamour or Cosmo, or even those odd new "lite" men's magazines. I don't find the Dworkin solutions any more palatable than the culture they criticize. I just want 13 year olds not to think that high fashion mags define beauty, or that beauty requires a model's look to achieve.

[theodicy.livejournal.com]

A random factoid: Andrea Dworkin and Kathleen Norris have been friends since college. Bizarre, eh?

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

Beauty's where you find it. But I don't think that necessarily negates some notion of beauty as an absolute. Or does it? I'm so confused. But I do think that a lot of contemporary art is anti-beauty. But in a way, it asserts the existence of beauty by relying so heavily on it's antithesis. By showing us what it is not, we then understand what it is. Or something like that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my reliance on the "absolutes" and how that's really a recipe for disaster. But I can't let go. I loathe relativism. You know the Golden Mean? I think there's something to that. Like those scientific studies on beauty where people are asked to judge a wide array of faces. The ones rated "beautiful" all shared symmetry and a very specific set of proportions. And, of course, it all goes back to genetics. But I think that's different than finding beauty out in the world. We all bring a certain set of assumptions to everything we see. I think a notion of beauty is tied up with memory.

So, we've got biology and psychology. Who needs aesthetics?!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I think that the idea of beauty is an absolute, and I'm all into absolutes. But "beauty" itself? Clearly, a relativistic thing--culture by culture by culture. Perhaps there is some "species consciousness" from which one could derive ground rules like symmetry. But I think that beauty is the striving to see, not necessarily the object itself. I suppose someday someone will purport to have biology and psychology explain all aesthetics, but I'm still holding out for a soul. Thanks for commenting!

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

But those scientific studies I mentioned...they seem to negate the culture by culture relativism. At least where physical beauty is concerned. They purposely included faces from a variety of cultures...symmetry and the golden mean of proportions were judged "beautiful" every time.

I like that "striving to see" notion.

i "see" you

[nancyjane.livejournal.com]

beauty is the striving to see, not necessarily the object itself...

yup. the objects no more possess the beauty than i do by collecting them.

obviously your topics have been inspiring me to write my own posts, think about things a little further... this is what i was trying to say i think, i just have a roundabout way of saying it lolol. the striving is a major major part, of the experience, but it's not simply a game of acquisition either.

when i sad its the sun and i dont look directly at it... i think it's not as much because i don't want to as it is so much that i just can't, not for any significant amount of time. too much to process, but i know its there you know? i think striving to possess it is some sort of exercise in frustration really, whether or not we know it at the time, because its capture can never be sustained.

striving to see.. simple words, very well chosen i think.

[hlee.livejournal.com]

I've spent a fair amount of time looking at 19th century salon art. I've read some of Twain's horrified tirades about the Titian at the Louvre and Walter Pater's narrative fantasy in homage to the Mona Lisa. I don't think modernism or 60's feminism changed things all that much. I agree that what has changed is that Beauty is no longer available in restricted quantities and controlled settings. Since no one needs to make a pilgrimage to find it, there's no opportunity to make the shift in state of mind that makes for communion or communication.

In 19th century America, part of the reasoning behind permitting public access to newly created museums was that exposure to art would act as a form of civic hygiene. Let the common folk pay to see Beauty and we'll want to take baths and wash our hands and clothes more often. I'm not speaking in metaphor, this was part of the deliberation on access. And now that we've gotten the bath stuff pretty much down pat, we get to watch attractive folks take showers to make sure we buy the right kinds of soap.

I'm not sure there is a wholesale way out of this situation. I don't read or buy magazines or watch television anymore. For the most part that's been sufficient to keep Beauty beautiful. But only on a personal level. I don't think it's available on any other level anymore. If Beauty regains it's status as a form of privileged experience I'm not certain I'd be included in those permitted access.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Excellent points. The museum notion, the sense that there is an uplifting set of things, for which the proletarian may pay, does give me pause. It's a tough call, because when I go to the Kimball Museum, I do see things I think are very beautiful. But the idea that "beauty" resides in classic works of art or in movie stars or whereever is a bit like watching false messiahs spring up-'go here, go there', but none of them really offer salvation. I think you're right--it's communion or communication that's what's needed. I think that it's not so elusive, after all, but it merely requires the conscious effort to see. I don't know that I need to reject TV or the art gallery, so much as accept that the picture is much larger than what they show me. Thanks for commenting!

[hlee.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the welcome. I live in Ft. Worth and think the Kimbell and the other fine arts museums here are wonderful.

Seceded and Didn't Know It

[gregwest98.livejournal.com]

I guess I've seceded too but without any conscious decision. I quit watching TV with any regularity many years ago - before I got married in fact. I don't read any of the magazines you mention either - and I realize that you did simply because there wasn't any alternative at the time.

My reasons were somewhat different about giving up TV - I just thought it was a terrible waste of time.

Now I live much like my Dad did: I do what interests me with little consideration given to what anybody else may be doing. My mailbox is full of tool catalogues. Not one "babe" in that bunch I can tell you. I only give thought to what I wear when I play golf and go to church (and that's pretty simple).

Hmmm... are you a rebel if you don't make any conscious effort to be? I think not. Eccentric perhaps.

[theodicy.livejournal.com]

Eccentricity seems to me to be more graceful - and more beautiful - than rebellion - and more organic.

I wish I had something cleverer to say, but God knows I agree with you all.

[coollibrarian.livejournal.com]

hear! hear!