Category Archives: beauty

The Secret of Beauty

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Math.

That’s right, math is the secret of beauty. Or a least of beautiful design as it relates to architecture, furniture and other decorative arts. Horace Brock claims to have discovered that the secret of beautiful design is “themes” (motifs such as a curve or line) and “transformations” (changes in the motif, such as size, rotations). People find only a middling amount of complexity beautiful, so if there are many themes, there should be few transformations, and vice-versa.

Brock claims his theory goes beyond Fibonacci, and other calssic models of beautiful form.

It sounds simplistic, to say the least, and even more like a vague description of how objects physically must appear. Brock, based on this Boston Globe article, seems to have an interesting personality, if only for calling aesthetic philosophers Kant, Schiller, and Hume “fuzzy wuzzy.” He gets extra credit for saying about art’s effect on him, “it’s all a variation on an orgasm, isn’t it?”

I’m not arguing that form, whether you classify it as themes or motifs, is unimportant. I would argue that it is not the secret of beauty, only a component. N’cest ce pas?

“Beauty and the Best” and a Boyfriend

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“Artists should be separated from people who do creative things” was my boyfriend’s response to my description of Theodore Dalrymple’s article in The New English Review, mentioned previously here.

By that, he meant that saying a chef was an artiste was hyperbolic, only meaning he cooked very well. He also meant that more conceptual and non-traditional works of contemporary art, such as rings of circles in duct tape or performances where a person sits on a box for days or even Pippilotti Rist’s video and sound installation in the atrium at MoMA, are cool, are visual, and are creative but that they are not art.

Dalrymple’s trenchant article has stayed in my mind, but all my conclusions from it seem to be drawing lines in the sand, much as my boyfriend’s statement does. “This is Art; this is not.” As if there were a right and wrong, and a good and bad when it comes to art.

But in fact, isn’t there? Art requires a set of aesthetic values to be judged by, if we are to make judgments at all. Life and art, or at least my life and art, are more than a series of perceptions. They have meaning to me, and they do because I assign to all things value. This is no formal declaration of organizing principles either for myself or of culture in general. But as my life has meaning, and art has meaning to me, and I think some organizing principle guides my perceptions of art.

Dalrymple’s article feels true to my experiences. He considers popular contemporary art to be shallow and created by egoists who are too afraid to create something beautiful, not to mention lacking the technical means and knowledge of an artistic heritage to do so. Think of Jeff Koons, who he mentions, or Damian Hirst or Murakami. To strive for beauty seems too earnest, almost gauche today.

So perhaps my boyfriend and Dalrymple are saying similar things. One feels it is not art, the other that it is bad art. Perhaps I agree. My amusement and interest with much of contemporary art is just that; and those feelings are different than a reaction to something beautiful. People who look can find beauty and an expression of the human condition in a falling leaf or the texture of a wall. A beautiful work of art makes those qualities apparent to those who weren’t looking.

Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

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“It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: “a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife.” As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses ‘ugliness’ as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show “Ugly Betty” to Umberto Eco’s art history tome On Ugliness, which I’ve recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton’s Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:



In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I’ve pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty’s is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It’s Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it’s more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.