Beautiful People

Beautiful people

I've often wondered how 'a group of people' can decide what is ugly or beautiful. In art for example we are many times sort of expected to think a certain work of art is beautiful, or very good! Why?

Dictate what we should wear, how our body's are suppose to look... Shouldn't we individually be able do this deciding without feeling, strange, dumb or generally an idiot for speaking our minds, dress in what we like and risk being or looking 'different'?

Maybe our perceptions of beauty are changing. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', we say but do we really think so? Looking at society we don't. Can we look in the mirror every day and be satisfied with what we see, with being who and what we are without the the need, the help to be more perfect in our looks/work, in our daily life's?

There seems to be a search going on... For beauty, perfection for happiness. For some reason we feel the need to define ourselves over again and again. The remake of the self in excess. The problem with that of course is that beauty and perfection are relative and annoyingly fast moving targets. Very unstable, very unlikely if not impossible to attain. We grow older, we keep changing like the world keeps changing around us. So yes! If this is our goal, beauty and perfection, we probably need all the help we can get get and then some! Should we fear less and trust more in ourselves? All is transitory after all and it seems quit a task (and not to mention a big fat wallet) to keep up with perfection, the pressure and stress it causes to do so, I hear, is not to be underestimated. Luckily we have a fix for that too.

The good news however is that it's great news for all those industries, who thrive on our fears, insecurities and illusions of control. They are the deciders, they define beauty/ugly for us and it's never what we are and so we give them reason to exist. To produce, to sell and selling probably makes them very happy! And when they're happy is there something wrong with a bit of tweaking ourselves here and there to keep ourselves happy? But where and when to stop this tweaking seems to be the tricky bit... Are some of us doomed to be in pursuit forever?

How about variety? It seems to be disappearing. Now I happen to like variety, in many things and many ways. After all "variety is the spice of life", another Shakespeare quote. Take faces. They're great to watch. How they can subtly convey so many things without speaking is amazing but they have to be able to move, please! Somehow it's impossible for me to identify with all these beautifully bland over photoshopped people who, although different still manage to look very similar. To much of a good thing if you ask me, a bit of balance with 'reality' would be nice but this is what sells and that's what counts. It's progress I guess.

How would living in this beautifully ugly world be if we would all look alike... Only identifiable by our tattooed barcode, all in a constant state of happiness... Would we know we were? Who we were...

Does all this make any sense? Is there actually anything sensible at all to say about this subject? Probably not, so lets just all agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and be done with it. Can we?

http://www.day4art.nl/kunstwerk/15785973_THE+PURSUIT+OF+PERFECTION.html

How about this. "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first". Art-critic Clement Greenberg once said.