BEAUTY

BEAUTY

David Lance Goines

Version of November 15, 1995(Begun on September 23, 1989)

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty;"
that is all Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.

- John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn (29)

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. - Plato (c 428-c 348 BC) Dialogues, Symposium 211 (30)

MAYBE THIS IS JUST A BAD TRANSLATION. Though the impenetrable load of double talk that Plato has here shoveled out sounds nice (especially if you don't really think about it but just let the words wash over you like warm honey, and don't actually have to go out and do something with them), it isn't good for much. When you try to figure out how you can actually use Plato's ideas to make something beautiful, or evaluate something to discover whether it is beautiful or not, you find that this sort of philosophical lumber lets you down rather badly.

So to begin with, let's just forget about totalitarian anti-art Plato and his incomprehensible ideal forms and the other-worldly mystic Saint Thomas Aquinas, nasty lunatic John Ruskin and that sausage-gobbling Kraut Hegel and all those old frauds and their transcendent hogwash.

Beauty is real. Beauty is the expression through art of wealth and power. The vehicle by which beauty comes into the world is art; anticipating the ideals of wealth and power, art gives form to the standards by which society judges itself.

Art creates beauty. Art is the vanguard of taste, trumpeting fashion before it actually exists.

Art, like science, goes where the money is. If you follow the history of art, you also follow the history of political power. Where is the nexus of culture? Why, it is always where the most impressive military and economic society of the day holds sway. Babylonia, Egypt, Athens, Rome, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo. These are, or have been, centers of beauty, taste and art. Not coincidentally, these also are or were centers of political and financial power. Artists are paid to tell everybody what beauty is, and to display that beauty for the glorification of their patrons.

Beauty is an index of leisure, which is itself an index of wealth, which is an index of power. Flower arranging, for example, takes a long time to learn and a long time to learn to appreciate. Poor people do not acquire these refined tastes. For the poor, these tastes do not exist. The subtleties of such things are totally lost on the poor. The poor do not much like the art of Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Klee, Arp or Pollock. If they think of them at all, they think they're silly. Let's face it: only the rich can afford aesthetics. When the poor want to become like the rich they emulate the tastes of the rich.

About the only thing that is constant in beauty is that it is the opposite of ugly. (31) Ugly, too is a constant. It is whatever the rich, healthy, youthful, strong and powerful are not doing.

Beauty is constantly changing, and culture-bound. What one person at one time finds beautiful, another person from another culture will often finds ludicrous, incomprehensible and ugly. So few of our young women wear brass hoops that stretch the neck, plates in their lips and heavy facial or body tattooing. Hardly any men on the streets of New York sport a penis sheath. We do not dye ourselves blue.

"Clothes maketh the man." - Mark Twain (attributed)

As an example of beauty in small, let us examine the infinitely fascinating arena of clothing fashions.

First, what was fashionable (beautiful) yesterday is absurdly unfashionable (ugly) today. We can tolerate outdated fashion in specific contexts, such as period costume in a play or film (though indeed it is usually heavily modified to suit the modern aesthetic), but in real life outdated fashion is not attractive. The more outdated it gets, the more ugly it becomes.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century fashion makes much of the conspicuous, even lavishly wasteful, use of fabric. Fabric, especially fancy fabric, was expensive, and since everything was made by hand, clothing was even more so. Common people had few clothes. Rich people had many clothes of relatively sumptuous make. Rich people kept up with fashion, and poor people mostly didn't. What rich people wore was, by definition, beautiful. What poor people wore was, by definition, not. Rich people had window curtains, and the poor who emulated them, such as my "lace-curtain Irish," forebears, strove to work the sympathetic magic and get rich by copying the rich.

In the latter part of our own dangerous century, we see little in the way of obvious contrast between the clothing of rich and poor. We have adopted as our models the class of performing artists (rock stars, movie stars) whose clothing is more a product of the imagination (Flashdance, Saturday Night Fever) than a concession to either the elements or outward signs of wealth. We have put most of our effort into the body itself, neglecting the outer integument. The poor have as little ability to be "body fashionable" now as they did to be "clothing fashionable" in the 19th century. Rich people jog and have a membership in a gym; they watch their diets and are concerned with cholesterol; they do not smoke; they do not drink to excess ("Just Perrier, please"); they do not take drugs; they practice safe sex; they wear their seatbelts. Poor people don't do any of this stuff.

Throughout most of the world's history, fatness was admired as a sign of wealth, health and fertility; thinness was a sign of poverty, disease and barrenness. In the case of fatness in a time of general food shortage, the wealthy person is beautiful because he doesn't look poor. In the case of thinness in a time of plenty, the wealthy person is slender and athletic by way of contrast to those who have little leisure for sport and health maintenance.