Does Beauty Exist in the 21st Century?
When is the last time an object destroyed you? Where the marvelousness of a piece of art, a place in nature or an alluring body cut you down to gawking, bleary-eyed befuddlement?
For most of us in the 21st century, this is a rarity.
Once, at about 10 years old, whilst watching waves crash onto rocks on the Australian coast, I suddenly felt the kinetic rhythm of the water throughout my body, a sudden realisation that nature followed sheet music and that in that moment I was privileged to be able to hear the beat and tap along.
Another time, drunkenly wandering the streets of Paris at night in my early 20s, I looked up to see the Eiffel Tower light up for the first time – “this is what it meant to be young”, I thought, not in the selfish hedonistic sense of a consumer of experiences, but the opportunity to be genuinely taken aback by the new. It was truly beautiful.
That experiences of beauty are few and far between in modern times, is no accident. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes in his work “Saving Beauty”: “Only, in the aesthetics of modern times [have] the beautiful and the sublime become separated.”
This was not always the case, up until the mid-20th century experiences with self-shattering beautiful images were seen as part and parcel with the human condition. Take an encounter with Greek sculpture described in the poem Archaic Torso of Apollo by Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926):
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Our modern visual culture is often ‘slick’ sometimes ‘cute’, ‘hot’ or ‘cool’ but rarely if ever is it ‘beautiful’ – certainly not the kind of violent beauty which pushed Rilke into personal crisis in his encounters with marble.
“Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul” noted philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943), a sentiment which seems sadly foreign.
For most prominent artists of the 21st century, from Jeff Koons and his kitschy balloon animals to Damien Hirst and his sanitised taxidermy, producing something beautiful is not the goal of art, nor are audiences scrambling to see beautiful imagery.
Why have we lost the palate for the beautiful?
Byung-Chul Han blames our modern “achievement-society” of cultivated personal branding, a consequence of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to the tyranny of the “smooth”:
The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing. Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure.
The truly beautiful is not kind, it doesn’t flatter the Ego, it demands your attention whether you’d like it or not. In this sense the beautiful requires an appreciation for roughness and mystique, the complete opposite of the slick, smooth aesthetics of modern techno-capitalism.
Indeed, contemporary conversations regarding aesthetics have little recourse to beauty. Take the insufferable discourse around “selfies” – our approach to self-portraiture.
The selfie (of course) is the “smooth” impetus par excellence. App filters are designed to chip away all “imperfections” in the appearance as individuals manufacture a false self-image. What we are left with is a “pretty” image, sure, but certainly not a beautiful one.
Reacting to the inauthenticity of the filtered selfie, we get an equally flawed movement of self-disclosure around the unfiltered body – where flaws are the focal point, everything is revealed for all to see. This too fails to capture “beauty” because aesthetics has been co-opted for a political purpose which relies on transparency. As Byung-Chul Han explains:
Beauty is a hideout. Concealment is essential to beauty. Transparency and beauty do not go together. Transparent beauty is oxymoronic.
These tendencies of course, don’t occur in a vacuum. Women have been subjected to an oppressive visual culture of two (non-beautifying) tendencies: that of being reduced to a sex object or being dismissed as an ugly monstrosity. Unfortunately, this has led beauty to be framed – particularly by feminist commentators – as a threat, as a weapon which keeps women down.
However, as social theorist Jean Baudrillard noted in his pioneering work Seduction, the capacity for women to embody the self-shatteringly beautiful, is a great testament to limits of patriarchal power:
Woman is man's dream- God, moreover, drew her from man when he was asleep. She therefore has all the traits of a dream, and in her, one might say, the diurnal scraps of the real combine to form a mirage.
The interplay of womanhood and hidden depths, is why classicist accounts of female beauty carry with them a hint of violence, such as Pseudo-Longinus’ description of a beautiful women as “torments for eyes”.
An appreciation for male beauty too, which was once a source of inspiration in Ancient culture, is now lost to the modern gaze.
Contemporary cults of the male physique, such as within bodybuilding, rarely appreciate male beauty for itself – often seeing it as a form of self-aggrandisement or as a sign of sexual competitiveness.
Both narcissism and politicisation signal the death of beautiful aesthetics.
Modern film-making, photography and painting – caught as they are in “sending a message”- can only hint at the “sexy”, “ostentatious” and “transgressive” never the beautiful.
Queer aesthetics, with its odd combination of shock value, self-deprecating humour and political earnestness are a perfect microcosm of anti-beautiful 21st century visual culture. The drag queen can entertain, she can shock, she can teach, but she can’t embody the sublime.
Japanese author and “aesthetic terrorist” Yukio Mishima was correct to identify the beautiful in reserved simplicity: “The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary”.
Seeing the beautiful all around us requires the ability to truly experience, without objectification or consumption.
In Plato’s Symposium, the great philosopher outlines the teaching of Diotima and his “Ladder of Love” in relation to beauty.
At first one loves a particular beautiful body, understanding the power of beauty firsthand. Then one extends this intellectual exercise upwards to discover beauty in other bodies, then in beautiful minds, beautiful laws, beautiful knowledge and finally the beauty of love itself.
From this teaching we can understand that the appreciation of beauty is not a given, it is an intellectual quality to be cultivated by developing different, increasingly sophisticated, ways of seeing.
If our contemporary culture is against beauty, the task of seeing the beautiful is increasingly difficult. It requires moving beyond the current visual spectacle to find glimpses of beauty that shine through.
Yet an encounter with the beautiful is always worth the effort. Experiencing the self-shattering potential of beauty is the very definition of a life worth living. As Charles Baudelaire captured in his “Hymn to Beauty” within Les Fleurs du Mal (1857):
O Beauty! do you visit from the sky
Or the abyss? infernal and divine,
Your gaze bestows both kindnesses and crimes,
So it is said you act on us like wine.
Your eye contains the evening and the dawn;
You pour out odours like an evening storm;
Your kiss is potion from an ancient jar,
That can make heroes cold and children warm.
Are you of heaven or the nether world?
Charmed Destiny, your pet, attends your walk;
You scatter joys and sorrows at your whim,
And govern all, and answer no man's call.
Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;
Horror is charming as your other gems,
And Murder is a trinket dancing there
Lovingly on your naked belly's skin.
You are a candle where the mayfly dies
In flames, blessing this fire's deadly bloom.
The panting lover bending to his love
Looks like a dying man who strokes his tomb.
What difference, then, from heaven or from hell,
O Beauty, monstrous in simplicity?
If eye, smile, step can open me the way
To find unknown, sublime infinity?
Angel or siren, spirit, I don't care,
As long as velvet eyes and perfumed head
And glimmering motions, o my queen, can make
The world less dreadful, and the time less dead.