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Cutting
Two ways with Beauty
ELEANOR HEARTNEY
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Recently, the New York Times ran an article reporting
that supermodels are falling out of favor as magazine cover girls,
and that their coveted slots are being filled instead by
celebrities. This prompted one modeling agent to bemoan
despairingly, "Where is the next generation of Linda
Evange-listas going to come from?"
For the mere mortals who must view these unearthly
creatures from the wrong side of the magazine racks, the news was
unexpectedly cheering. Was it not a signal that our culture's
relentless quest for physical perfection is faltering a bit?
However, realism quickly set in. After all, celebrities, for the
most part, are also impossibly beautiful. Still, the change did
seem slightly positive - indicating a general desire to leaven
beauty with a bit of
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content. " |
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Will we ever be at peace with beauty? Or must we always maintain an
actively contradictory relationship to it, like my friend who proudly
refuses to have the breast she lost in a mastectomy reconstructed, but
who recently had a face lift?
Our present ambivalence about beauty has a variety of
sources - social, psychological, political, even biological. From a
philosophical point of view, it might be traced to contemporary
society's discomfort with the utopian blandishments of the Platonic
triad. The frightening consequences of the Aryan ideal, the
obvious ethnocentrism of"universal" standards of beauty,
and the absurdity of the notion of a beautocracy make it clear
that the good, the true, and the beautiful are anything but
kindred souls. In a pinch, we are more likely to agree with
AdolfLoos's dictum, "Ornament is crime," than with
Keats's ecstatic proclamation that the union of Beauty and Truth
are "all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." |
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But in another sense, we have simply inverted the
relationship between the beautiful and the good-substituting
beauty's opposite to create a new triad consisting of the good,
the true, and the ugly. Hence our fondness for the ideas that
truth must be unvarnished and that the good must be without
illusions. In discussions of art, "too beautiful" has
become a pejorative, while within the intellectual community at
least, too much attention to personal appearance is considered a
character flaw.
Thus, while the terms may have flipped, discussions
of beauty remain deeply
enmeshed in questions of morality. We are forever
interrogating the guilty pleasures we derive from beauty with such
questions as, Is beauty a form of tyranny? Is it exploitative? Is
our response to beauty a moral choice, or is it externally
determined-a matter of social conditioning, or a function of
inalterable biological, physiological, or evolutionary factors? Is
the embrace of beauty politically incorrect?
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When the
focus is turned specifically to physical beauty, the level of
discomfort intensifies. Does our enjoyment of beauty reveal biases
of class and race? What are implications of studies that find that
attractive people are more trusted and successful than
unattractive ones? In an era of wide-spread plastic surgery, what
has become of Orwell's dictum: "After fifty, everyone has the
face he deserves?" Does beauty undermine the egalitarian
ideal?
But maybe its time to cut beauty some slack. Perhaps
it's not necessary to turn all questions of pleasure into
questions of morality. Perhaps its possible to be feminist and
fashionable, for instance. Perhaps its possible to loosen
beauty's-or anti-beauty's-attachment to the good and the true.
Perhaps the political
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danger inherent in the identification of
beauty and morality is matched by the aesthetic danger of their
opposition. (I'm think-ing here of the flood of politically
correct, aesthetically bereft artworks which washed through the
art worlds of the 1980s and 1990s.)
Beauty seems in need of rehabilitation today as an
impulse that can be as liberating as it has been deemed enslaving.
Confident young women today pack their closets with miniskirts and
sensible suits. Young female artists toy with feminine stereotypes
in ways that make their feminist elders uncomfortable. They
recognize that, like pornography, beauty can be a double-edged
sword-as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and
restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing them.
Why does beauty matter? Beauty flies in the face of a
puritanical utilitarianism. It defies the reductiveness of both
the political left and the political right in their efforts to
bend it to a mission. Beauty subverts dogma by activating the
realm of fantasy and imagination. It reminds us that the enjoyment
of "mere" pleasure is an important element of our
humanity. And it knits the mind and body together at a time when
they seem all too easily divided.
Beauty is a contested category today because we both
long for and fear its seductions. The essays in this volume
interrogate beauty in all its complexity. But whether they
construe it as friend or foe, they make it clear that beauty, and
our preoccupation with it, cannot be wished away. Deeply embedded
in that inchoate matter from which our judgments ofvalue are
formed, beauty is inseparable from all that is best and worst in
human experience.
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