Edited by

Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

 At the Interface

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Dr Daniel Riha

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Dr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen Morris
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Owen Kelly Professor S Ram Vemuri
Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

A Critical Issues research and publications project.

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The Ethos Hub

‘Beauty’

2012
Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty

Edited by

Gabrielle Simpson

Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
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 Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Gabrielle Simpson

Section 1: Too Beautiful to Bear? Empowering and Befouling Beauty

A Machiavellian Beauty: Ruling by Love and Fear 3

Denise Thwaites

Outlawed Beauty: The (Homo) Erotic Sacrifice in 13

Bataille, Sedwick, Genet and Mishima
Eva Bujalka

Section 2: Defining and Judging Beauty

Taste and Judgement 25

Robert Lumsden

Beauty and Artistic Value 35

Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele

Beauty: The Unconditioned Play of Emotion 43

Madhu Kapoor

Section 3: Beauty Products: Of Bollywood, Street Art and

the Meanings of Fashion Photography

Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and 53

Bollywood TV Serials
Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur

Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in 61

Street Art Production
Ljiljana Radosevic

The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion 71

Photography of Peter Lindbergh and Corinne Day
Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen

Section 4: The Politics of Beauty

Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011: Is the Eye 83

of the Beholder Manipulated?
Gabrielle Simpson
 Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design 93
Mal Burkinshaw and Linda Shearer

Section 5: Beauty and the Matrix of Domination

Professional Beauty: Narratives about Women in the 101

Italian Medical Institution
Ambrogia Cereda

Electrolysis and Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body 111

in Classic Hollywood
Kerry McElroy

The Immanent Splendour of Soul: Manifesting Beauty 121

in ‘Pulse Spiral’
Timothy Allen Jackson

Section 6: Beauty in Culture and Community

The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary 133

Feminine Fashion
Mariette Julien

Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere: Fantasies of Art and 143

Beauty in Israeli and Palestinian Films
Igal Bursztyn

The Event of Art: Immanuel Kant and Arthur Danto 153

on the Experience of Beauty in Art
Christopher Hromas

Section 7: Searching for Beauty through Literature

The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty in 163

‘The Artist of the Beautiful’
Marian Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis

Formal Structures of Literary Beauty in Daniel Alercon’s 173

Short Fiction
W. Michelle Wang
Section 8: Sacralising Beauty

Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī 187

Hülya Alper

Beauty as Religion: Modern Answers to Modern Anxieties 197

Lena Nans
 Introduction

Gabrielle Simpson
‘The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty,’
wrote the poet/playwright/novelist Yukio Mishima, in Temple of
the Golden Pavilion as he pondered beauty’s relevance,
meanings and the spell it cast over him. Beauty is complicated by
the word beauty itself. Limited or overloaded, beauty has been
celebrated as essential or denounced as irrelevant. The existence
of beauty has been challenged, called a search for El Dorado...’

These words were the challenge in the call for papers to present at the First
Global Conference on Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues, Mitchell College, Oxford,
UK, 2011. The call for papers brought topics ranging from ‘Killer Blondes’ to
‘Beauty and Goodness’ from scholars, academics and researchers around the
world. The papers explored, assessed and mapped key core themes, with the
conference organised over twelve sessions, and papers organised into topics which
addressed various aspects of beauty: defining, studying, power, history and the
politics of beauty. This introduction gives a brief glimpse of the breadth of thought
and range of topics discussed in the following papers, with stimulating
conversation and argument during the sessions adding to respective participants’
knowledge, and sometimes delight and amusement, never boring.
The first session, called ‘Too Beautiful to Bear? Empowering and Befouling
Beauty’ heard Denise Thwaites explore ‘Machiavellian Beauty: Ruling by Love
and Fear’ which examines the text of Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’, who rules by
love and fear. The author aligns the text with Plato’s Beauty and Love in
‘Phaedrus’, where the spectacle of beauty is a source of authority and fear inducing
power, and compares this to the elaborate aesthetic found in the 17th Century
French Court, where spectacular beauty, as well as horror, ensured public
passivity. She goes on to examine Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts in ‘Le Partage du
Sensible’, reflecting back to the Machiavellian claim, to ask if a regime based on
beauty is the ultimate realisation of power achieved through both love and fear.
This chapter was followed by Eva Bujalka’s chapter on ‘Outlawed Beauty: The
(Homo) Erotic Sacrifice in Bataille, Sedwick, Genet and Mishima’. The chapter
explores the writings of both French authors, Genet and Battaille. Battaille
explores beauty and transgression related to religion, and Genet explores ‘spoiled
beauty’ through his depiction of ‘lowlifes’. Mishima explores the ‘befouled
beauty’ of tragic death. The author examines these writers to expand their notions
of beauty, betrayal and sacrifice.
The following session ‘Defining and Judging Beauty’ brought the chapter of
Robert Lumsden who sought to consider taste and (aesthetic) judgement under
eight destinations of the history of aesthetics in the West since Plato. Exploring
x Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
Plato, Plotinus, Aquinas, Spinoza and others, he offers a model of criticism which,
he argues, should not readily succumb to the illusion of objectivity.
This was followed by a chapter from Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele
who theorise on ‘Beauty and Artistic Value’. The authors reject anti-beauty
theories of art which minimise the significance of beauty in art. Through a series of
arguments on the function and content of beauty in works of art, they conclude that
artistic beauty is an important, but not necessary, criterion for artistic value.
Next, Madhu Kapoor followed with ‘Beauty: The Unconditioned Play of
Emotion’, a discussion on the critique of beauty and the difference between artistic
creation of an artist and an object made by a craftsman. The author argues that the
artist ‘obtains’ the beauty of their work in the height of emotion, referring to first
and second levels thought: thought and after-thought.
‘Beauty Products: of Bollywood, Street Art and the Meanings of Fashion
Photography’, were the topics explored during the next session. Angela
Ramsoondur-Mungar discusses the impact of Bollywood produced TV series on
young women of Indian ancestry in postcolonial Mauritius. The author surveyed
young female Mauritian students and explores the findings using the postcolonial
theories of Spivak and Fanon.
Next, Lilyana Radosevic explores ‘Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and
Beauty in Street Art Productions’. The chapter discusses the different techniques
used to present ideas in the street, linking it to Kawaii, and aesthetical concepts of
beauty, referencing Danto, Kant and others, to the natural affection of the viewer to
small, sweet things.
‘The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography of Peter
Lindbergh and Corinne Day’ was the title of the chapter presented by Ingeborg
Thaanum Carlsen. The author explores the boundaries and limitations of fashion
photography, referring to the work of Peter Lindbergh, Cartier-Bresson and
Kertesz, Jeurgen Teller and Corinne Day, with reflections on Barthes concept of
‘punctum’.
‘The Politics of Beauty’ session included my own chapter, ‘Beauty, Fashion
and Celebrity in 2011: Is the Eye of the Beholder Manipulated?’ which discussed
legendry beauty mirrored by famous film legends, referencing Ingles, Pringle, Eco
and others to explore the machinations of the Fashion and Beauty Industries, and
Celebrity, in the global economy.
The following chapter, ‘Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design’, delivered
by Mal Burkinshaw and Linda Shearer, describes the Emotional Engagement
Project. The project was developed to explore specific design elements, such as
colour, size and style, and the affect on consumer behaviour, and the psychological
issues relating to identity and wellbeing to satisfy and comfort the consumer. The
project brings together areas of science, design, technology, psychology and
business. It aims to disseminate best practice in Fashion design by an inclusive
approach.
 Gabrielle Simpson xi
__________________________________________________________________
The next session, ‘Beauty and the Matrix of Domination’, included a chapter
given by Ambrogia Cereda, titled ‘Professional Beauty: Narratives about Women
in the Italian Medical Institution’. This chapter discusses beauty and the cultural
codes of a particular time, which can include or exclude an individual in a social
group. The author discusses the changing status of women, referencing Chernin,
Wolf, Bordo and Orbach. The study has an emphasis on a neurosurgical sector,
where a qualitative study of a female dominant cohort demonstrated the beauty
standards perceived, represented and embodied in the sector.
This chapter was followed by Kerry McElroy’s chapter ‘Electrolysis and
Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body in Classic Hollywood’. The chapter
explores the impact of procedures to modify and control the bodies of female
actors in Hollywood from 1900 to 1930. It examines the forces behind the scenes,
where standards of beauty were imposed by movie moguls, with the nexus of
social control of the female body and policing of beauty part of the narrative of
film history.
The following chapter, ‘The Immanent Splendour of Soul: Manifesting Beauty
in ‘Pulse Spiral’, was presented by Timothy Allen Jackson. The author offers
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation ‘Pulse Spiral’ as exploration of a
beautiful system of meaning.
In the next session ‘Beauty in Culture and Community’, Mariette Julien
presented a chapter ‘The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine
Fashion’. Referencing Julien, Ferry, Ricoeur and others, this chapter argues the
adaption of a hypersexual style in a search for authenticity in self.
Igal Bursztyn’s chapter titled ‘Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere: Fantasies of
Art and Beauty in Israeli and Palestinian Films’, references the promise of
happiness, bequeathed by art and beauty (Stendhal), discusses the grim prospective
of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the impact on film making from both
political arenas. The new films reflect a yearning for beauty which transcends
national barriers, and suggests ‘new landscapes of the possible’.
‘The Event of Art: Immanuel Kant and Arthur Danto on the Experience of
Beauty in Art’ was the chapter presented by Christopher Hromas. The author
discusses and argues the different approaches of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Danto
to art, and the role it plays in the formation, cohesion and continuation of
communities.
A session titled ‘Searching for Beauty through Literature’ followed, with the
chapter ‘The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty in ‘The Artist of the
Beautiful’, presented by Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitas. The authors
analyse the story ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne, discussing
the individual search for beauty in artistic creation. The main character mechanised
nature in an attempt to describe perfect beauty. Hawthorne uses this as a metaphor
in resisting the materialism and utilitarianism of his time, urging modern man not
to deny their spiritual essence.
xii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
This was followed by the chapter ‘Formal Structures of Literary Beauty in
Daniel Alarcon’s Short Fiction’, delivered by W. Michelle Wang. The author
examines the objective and subjective aesthetics of literature, referencing Aquinas
and Kant, examining the two versions of Alarcon’s ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979’to
demonstrate that the re-translation of the story heightens aesthetic experience for
the reader.
The last session explored ‘Sacralising Beauty’. Hülya Alper presented a chapter
titled ‘Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī’. The author describes and
discusses the great Islamic theologian and mystical thinker Ghazālī, examining his
masterwork, ‘The Revival of the Religious Sciences’. This was a focus on divine
beauty, perfect and absolute beauty, with the hope of proving that all beautiful
things in the world are a reflection of divine beauty.
The following chapter, given by Lena Nans, was titled ‘Beauty as Religion:
Modern Answers to Modern Anxieties’. Examining the works of Radcliff-Brown
and Malinowski, using a psychological concept proposed by Roy Baumeister, the
author argues that the anxiety in religious practices compares to the anxiety
associated with beauty practices. The author speculates that the trend of media
driven anxiety about personal beauty is a type of witchcraft, with beauty stylists
becoming the witch doctor, and the media as the spirit guides.
As demonstrated in the range and variety of chapters presented, from such
diverse authors and backgrounds, the conference was constantly stimulating. The
following chapters offer the reader knowledge, argument, and possible new and
alternative ways of thinking about beauty, in all its forms and context.
I hope that you are intrigued by the range of thoughts presented at the 1st Global
Conference on Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues and enjoy reading the chapters in
this volume. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Jacque Lynn Foltyn,
Professor of Sociology at National University, La Jolla, California, for facilitating
the conference in Oxford, UK. If you have been engaged and intrigued by the
contents of this eBook then please do join us in our discourse. Details about Beauty
are found in Critical Issues, Ethos: Beauty, and the wider Inter-Disciplinary.Net
project can be found at http://www.inter-disciplinary.net.
 Section 1

Too Beautiful to Bear?

Empowering and Befouling Beauty
 A Machiavellian Beauty: Ruling by Love and Fear
Denise Thwaites
Abstract
This chapter examines the Machiavellian dilemma of having to rule either through
love or through fear, considering both philosophical and historical analyses of a
particular aesthetic tactic that defies this opposition by invoking these two
emotions simultaneously. This tactic exploits the political potential and powers
associated with of the spectacle of beauty. In this analysis I will begin by exploring
Plato’s account of beauty in his text ‘Phaedrus’, highlighting how the spiritual and
emotional connotations of the spectacle of beauty contribute to the justification of
aristocratic rulership within Plato’s anti-democratic political model. To illustrate
the historical relevance of the relationship between beauty and political authority, I
will consider the effects of the aestheticisation of power as found, for example, in
the elaborate aesthetic investment of 17th century French Courts of both Louis XIII
and Louis XIV. I will finish by contrasting this spectacular beauty to another more
modern conception of beauty as the perfection of form. I will suggest that within
our contemporary context of political populism, images of beauty as perfection are
used and distributed to invoke popular adoration, and at times to reinforce the
political, social and economic ideology of today.

Key Words: Beauty, Machiavelli, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, aesthetics, power, awe.

*****

And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved

than feared or feared than loved? It might perhaps be answered
that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can
hardly exist together, if we must choose between them it is far
safer to be feared than loved...
- Niccolo Machiavelli 1

In his text ‘The Prince’, Machiavelli acknowledges the role that love may play
in garnering support for a ruler, but insists that it is fear that ensures the submission
of a principality to its Prince. However, we may question the extent to which this is
necessarily a matter of either/or. In particular to what extent, historically, have
forms of rule based on fear exhibited a complementary aestheticisation, so as to
invoke a response mitigating this opposition between love and fear?
This chapter addresses the Machiavellian predicament which opposes love with
fear, considering philosophical and historical accounts of a political-aesthetic tactic
utilised to invoke these emotions simultaneously—the evocation of spectacular
beauty. I turn to Plato’s text ‘Phaedrus’ to consider how spectacles of beauty have
been philosophically associated with an awe-inducing emotional and spiritual
4 A Machiavellian Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
power, illustrating the connection between this association and political
justifications of ruling authority and sovereign power. To examine this link, I
consider the historical effects of the aestheticisation of power as found in the
elaborate aesthetic investments of both Louis XIII and Louis XIV’s 17th century
French Courts. I will finish by contrasting this spectacular beauty to another
conception of beauty which, in our contemporary context of political populism and
disciplinary power, is used to invoke adoration and reinforce the status quo.

1. Machiavellian Appearances
On first reading, Machiavelli’s observations in ‘The Prince’ may appear
relevant only to a context of amoral autocratic dictatorship rather than of
transparent western liberal democracy. But ‘The Prince’, as an amoral analysis of
how political power may be obtained and maintained, also considers the
mechanism of a Civic Principality that, I suggest, provides insight into problems
and political tactics evident today. In Machiavelli’s Civil Principality, power is
obtained through the favour of citizens or nobles. 2 In that context, a Prince must
maintain the favour of his supporters, since the loss of support means ‘[The Prince]
will have no resource in adversity.’ 3 Acknowledging this, Machiavelli considers
how through history the people’s favour has been gained and maintained by those
in power. This leads Machiavelli to note the primary importance of appearances, as
a political tactic to secure power.
Machiavelli acknowledges that those civil populations that are accustomed to
liberty cannot be manipulated simply by appearances, but also seek results such as
security and the protection of liberty and property. However, he highlights that it is
more important to be reputed liberal than to actually secure liberty, and that the
inverse situation can be harmful to rulership. 4 To this end, Machiavelli urges that a
Prince should never miss an opportunity to demonstrate or give proofs of his
capacity. 5
Yet the question arises, what kind of spectacle best affirms the capacities of the
Prince and thus affirms his power? Grand public executions 6 and wars on
neighbouring countries are recognised tactics for leaders to give proofs of their
might, but Machiavelli suggests it is not sufficient only to demonstrate might and
induce fear. He emphasises the balance that must be found in the image projected
by a ruler, concluding that he must therefore oscillate between being at times cruel
and inciting fear, yet also appearing kind in order to avoid hate and secure favour.
Machiavelli acknowledges the difficulties that arise for a ruler who needs to
oscillate between two apparently contradictory qualities, which make a Civil
Principality a less secure political structure than a Republic. The source of this
problematic is perhaps found in Machiavelli’s maintenance of the binaries between
cruelty/kindness, and fear/love, without considering the capacity of political
spectacles to mitigate such oppositions. That is to say, Machiavelli does not
consider the aesthetic spectacle of beauty that throughout history has been utilised
 Denise Thwaites 5
__________________________________________________________________
by rulers to inspire awe and adoration in their public, whilst also reinforcing the
public’s fear and inferiority.
I will compare this Machiavellian 7 type of beauty to a particular Platonic
conception of beauty, as being an experience with an awesome and rapturous
vision that leaves the spectator in awe. I shall consider how this first kind of
spectacular beauty was utilised historically, aligning it to Plato’s discussion of
beauty in the text ‘Phaedrus’.

2. Plato, 17th Century French Kings and the Spectacular Power of Beauty
Plato may be best known for identifying the arts, in his text ‘The Republic’, as
potentially disruptive influences on political order. However, there are certain
aesthetic experiences which Plato identifies in his other texts as reinforcing the
hierarchy of both the soul and his ideal political state. Plato describes our worldly
existence as a constant struggle and competition between the opposing forces of
desire and reason, represented by the image of a charioteer led by two opposing
horses. But in ‘Phaedrus’ Plato argues that an encounter with Beauty allows the
human soul to be jolted into a state of harmony and order. Describing the influence
of a vision of beauty upon the three elements of the soul, Plato suggests that ‘[the
horses] draw near, and the vision of the beloved dazzles their eyes. When the
driver beholds it the sight awakens in him the memory of absolute beauty; he sees
her again enthroned in her holy place attended by chastity. At the thought he falls
upon his back in fear and awe.’ 8 Through this bedazzling and overwhelming
encounter with the image of beauty, the soul is returned to a state of stillness and
harmony, through which the aggressive and desirous elements of the soul are
calmed, allowing for just order to prevail.
He continues to describe the penetrating power of this spectacle of beauty as
follows:
The newly initiated, who has full sight of the celestial vision,
when he beholds a god-like face or a physical form which truly
reflects ideal beauty, first of all shivers and experiences
something of the dread which the vision itself inspired; next he
gazes upon it and worships it as if it were a god, and, if he were
not afraid of being thought an utter madman, he would sacrifice
to his beloved as to the image of a divinity. 9

While suggesting almost a helpless or irrational response from the spectator,

Plato argues in ‘Phaedrus’ that this sensible encounter with the spectacle of beauty
in fact orientates the spectator on their righteous path towards knowledge of the
abstract form of beauty and the abstract realm in general, as the immortal soul is
reminded of knowledge once possessed of the abstract realm. 10 This encounter
with beauty invokes adoration but also an initial sense of incapacitation on the part
of the spectator who is overwhelmed by its power. However aside from encounters
6 A Machiavellian Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
with beauty in nature, the beauty we encounter, through art for example, will
always be controlled by the philosopher-statesmen, as their power of censorship
dictates common perceptions of which poems, sculptures, plays and so on, may be
considered reflections of the abstract form of beauty.
Thus we should note that the acceptance of the Platonic idea of the righteous
path towards the idea of beauty, when contextualised in line with Plato’s idealist
political philosophy in ‘Republic’, reflects Plato’s anti-democratic
conceptualisation of the position of the masses regarding the need for them to
accept the guidance of philosopher-statesmen towards the political ideals of truth
and justice, because only philosopher-statesmen are born with the potential to
comprehend the abstract realm. 11 In this sense, the power of beauty reaffirms
Plato’s aristocratic political order, since the people require the supreme class to
enlighten our path toward the heavenly plane of abstract forms, including that of
beauty.
This use of aesthetic power and beauty to confirm the rightful place of an
aristocratic elite has been used through history to associate those in power with
divine grace. The symbolism of the nobility, as representatives of God’s will and
beauty on earth was economically maintained through their patronage of artists and
purveyors of aesthetic finery. The relation between the spectacle of beauty and the
Platonic and Machiavellian reflections on fear, love and beauty may be explored in
another way in relation to two particular royal aesthetes—King Louis XIII and
King Louis XIV of France.
The latter of these two kings, Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’ is famous for his
patronage and participation in the arts of the late 17th century French court. His
reign saw the establishment of academies, dedicated to the protection and support
of culture and the arts, which while establishing the King’s public persona as a
great lover of the arts, also ‘served as quasi-governmental organs fulfilling the
propaganda needs of the crown through the composition of panegyrics, the design
of commemorative medals, and the suggestion of architectural monuments—all to
the glory of the Sun King.’ 12 Mark Franko explores the political tactics of both
Louis XIII and Louis XIV in harnessing the arts, and in particular spectacular
performance. These were interpreted by thinkers such as Etienne Thuau as an
avenue for public persuasion, as: ‘…royal performances enabled the public to
visualise the religious aspect of monarchy, whereas the philosophical and
theoretical underpinnings of the raison d’état occurred only in writing.’ 13 That is to
say, through the utilisation of spectacle these 17th century French kings would
communicate their divinely given sovereign power to an audience that was broader
than the reading public, appealing to their religious convictions rather than
philosophical or political reasoning, and thus invoking adoration and awe from the
spectators.
 Denise Thwaites 7
__________________________________________________________________
In ‘Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of Louis XIV’
Franko explores the effect that Louis XIV’s particular participation in beautiful and
spectacular court ballets would have upon the reinforcement of his status as a
divinely-appointed monarch. Firstly, the geometric choreography would frame the
spectator’s attention and manipulate the space of the stage to establish and
communicate reverence for the King and overwhelm the spectator. 14 However, one
might argue that the power of the Sun King was communicated most effectively
not through these explicit formations establishing hierarchy, but rather through the
brilliant spectacle of the refracted light produced by the King’s mirrored costuming
combined with the fractured quality of the seductive, gender-ambiguous characters
that he would play, such as Apollo. While this aesthetic tactic is most readily
associated with the performances of le roi soleil Louis XIV, in ‘Majestic Drag:
Monarchical Performativity and the King's Body Theatrical’ Franko describes how
it can be found in an earlier determination in the ambivalent characters,
performances and spectacles of the precedent King Louis XIII’s French court. In
his performances Louis XIII avoided the more obvious political tactic of playing
the most powerful, masculine or authoritative characters in the ballets. Rather, in
order to reinforce his political status, Louis XIII would characterise personages
such as the fire demon in ‘La Déliverance de Renaud’, as a means to persuade the
public of his absolute right to rule. This persuasion was executed through the
bedazzling magic of the character, rather than just the demonstration of its brutal
might. Franko states: ‘The King as a figure of enchantment and as an enchanted
figure is, like the character of Armide, highly seductive and ambivalent. Tasso
depicted Armide to be, not unlike the French monarch, a theatre of attractions.’ 15
This seductive image of the monarch as an attractive source of rapturous
encounters with beauty was fostered by Louis XIII, in order to accentuate the
underlying authority of his reign. The king’s bejewelled and mirrored costume as
the fire demon accentuated his image as a ruler:

The costume intensifies firelight by refracting it back at the

audience. The king’s body irradiates the bedazzling light of
which it appears constituted. Durand relates the allegorical
meanings of flame, which include the King’s passion for his
wife, his good intentions towards his subjects, and his majesty to
foreigners, but also his power to destroy his enemies….. 16

Note here the parallel between this description of the blinding brilliance of
Louis XIII as the fire demon, and the Platonic description of the dazzling power of
the ‘godlike’ image of beauty in ‘Phaedrus’. The audience’s encounter with the
image of the monarch as the fire demon is simultaneously ecstatic, charmed,
overwhelming, incapacitating and awe-inducing, invoking the dualistic meanings
of fire or the flame. The power of this spectacle is attributed not to the coherence
8 A Machiavellian Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
of the King’s message, but to this oscillation and ambiguity between stillness and
movement, the fearful and the seductive. This image of the French King thus offers
to solve Machiavelli’s dilemma of princely rulership as it embodies both
intimidation and adoration in the public perception of the monarch. In his
spectacular beauty, the king is both loved and feared, the public being seduced and
dazzled by the ‘god-like’ brilliance of his beauty. The overwhelming seduction of
the spectator by the theatre of attractions that is their monarch incapacitates them,
like the Platonic citizen confronted with spectacular beauty, who becoming aware
of humble inferiority in comparison to a divine image, can only hope to be led on
the glorious path identified and exemplified by their ruler.

3. Beauty, Perfection and Contemporary Political Populism

So what is the pertinence to contemporary society of Louis XIII and Louis
XIV’s reinforcing the adoration of their subjects by the seductive power of
spectacles? Michel Foucault in ‘Surveiller et punir: La naissance de le prison’
analysed the modern transition from a social and political structure which
maintains sovereign power to a social and political system which utilises
disciplinary power. I would further suggest that one might analyse the way in
which the utilisation of beauty to court the adoration of the public has similarly
transformed over the past centuries. The political power of beauty today can be
aligned less with a spectacular aesthetic affirmation of sovereign power, instead
reflecting the social preoccupation with images of beauty as an indicator of formal
perfection that in turn establishes norms of behaviour and appearance. The
relationship between Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, the public body
and the emergence of contemporary norms of beauty and appearance warrants a
thorough exploration and investigation, 17 but space constraints do not permit that
here.
Returning to this formulation of the idea of beauty as formal perfection, such a
conceptualisation of beauty can be found in the modern Kantian concept of
adherent beauty, 18 by which an object produces a reflective pleasure in being a
perfect exemplar of an object for which we have a determinate concept: for
example, a perfect example of a teacup. This concept of beauty imbues classicist
approaches to the perfection of aesthetic endeavour, and informs cultural and
political institutions which protect language and the arts, such as l’Academie
Francaise. However, when we observe the aestheticisation of political figures and
couples, such as John and Jackie Kennedy, we may see how this meta-image of
perfection, of beautiful couples and lives, plays a role in the establishment of social
norms. One might say that on an insidious level, this projection of the image of a
beautiful ruler serves to maintain a modernised form of aristocratic power, as those
in power come to embody the norms of beauty that represent the idea of the citizen
in their perfection, asserting their status as an example to be followed by others.
 Denise Thwaites 9
__________________________________________________________________
This efficacy of this aesthetic power is amplified by the market-driven media
industry which bombards the citizen with images of how we can be the perfect
version of ourselves, especially by purchase of goods and services. French theorist
Jacques Rancière in his text ‘le Partage du Sensible’ explores the manner in which
the distribution of images in society not only establishes norms of beauty and
perfection to aspire to, but also determines what and who in society is visible, 19
and who and what remains invisible. In this, the media and political fascination
with beauty as an indicator of perfection reinforces a particular ethos 20 that dictates
perceptions of happiness that can, in turn, sustain the status quo, socially and
economically. For example, as we marvelled at the recent British royal wedding,
where aesthetically everything was ‘perfect’, we forget the manner in which the
media obsession with Kate Middleton’s ‘perfect fairytale’ reinforces feminine
stereotypes and norms of success achieved through the hetero-normative institution
of marriage and preoccupations with class hierarchy, that on a philosophical level
we might otherwise consciously dispute.
Whilst one might not consider this royal spectacle to be a cynical example of
Machiavelli’s recommended manipulation of public love and fear, it undeniably
evokes a sentiment in the spectator that mediates the opposition between these
historically-opposed conditions. The spectator-citizen at once adores their
monarch, whilst also being in awe of their perfection and experiencing a reciprocal
sensation of their own painful inadequacy, playing upon a historically-inherited
class consciousness of inferiority. Citizens might take comfort or marvel at the
perfect glory of their Prince and Princess’s exemplary life together, but one must
be wary that this comfort does not lead to the citizens’ subjugation, manipulation
and the maintenance of social and economic inequalities that perpetuate injustices
of the status quo, when those same citizens may simultaneously be suffering
anxieties surrounding job security, access to education and healthcare or racial and
sexual discrimination stemming from government decisions that effectively
reinforce the social and economic hierarchies of days gone by.

4. Conclusion
Whilst we are inclined to accept traditional binaries between fear and love,
associating the former with brutality and the later with populism, in this chapter I
have attempted to illuminate the complexities of this opposition and the political
tactics that utilise them. Tactics of aesthetic seduction and intimidation may be
generally preferable to extortion of power via brutality and force. Nonetheless, I
argue that one must be conscious of the element of aesthetic seduction present in
contemporary politics, so that we might not allow it to overwhelm or detract from
real political issues.
10 A Machiavellian Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1992), 43.
2
Ibid., 24.
3
Ibid., 25.
4
Ibid., 41.
5
Ibid., 59.
6
Michel Foucault analyses the relationship between the violent spectacle of public
execution and the maintenance of pre-modern sovereign power, describing the
public execution of Robert-Francois Damiens in Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de
la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 9-12.
7
By describing this concept of beauty as Machiavellian I do not suggest that one
can identify this concept within Machiavelli’s texts, but rather that this concept of
beauty responds to the problem identified by Machiavelli of oscillating between
fear and love.
8
Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. Walter
Hamilton (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973), 62.
9
Ibid., 58.
10
This arises through the anamnetic recollection and ‘repluming’ of the wings of
the soul that takes place in an experience of beauty, which allows the soul to return
to its rightful place on high amongst the abstract forms. See Ibid., 58.
11
While the constraints of this chapter do not allow me to elaborate upon this
point, see Plato’s ‘Myth of the Metals’ in Book III of The Republic in order to
identify the link he draws between class structure, justice and knowledge of the
abstract forms.
12
Joseph Klaits, ‘Men of Letters and Political Reform in France at the End of the
Reign of Louis XIV: The Founding of the Academie Politique’, The Journal of
Modern History 43.4 (Dec 1971): 577-578.
13
Mark Franko, ‘Majestic Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King’s Body
Theatrical’, TDR 47.2 (Summer, 2003): 72.
14
Mark Franko, ‘Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of
Louis XIV’, TDR 38.4 (Winter, 1994): 72.
15
Franko, ‘Majestic Drag…’, 79.
16
Ibid., 79-80.
17
The relationship between Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, the body and
ideas of ideal beauty is explored by many contemporary feminist and cultural
theorists. Amongst others, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism,
Western Culture and the Body (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993).
18
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 114.
 Denise Thwaites 11
__________________________________________________________________

19
See Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris, La
fabrique éditions, 2000), 13-14.
20
While Jacques Rancière suggests that the ethical regime of images that typified
Plato’s era has been surpassed by an aesthetic era, I argue that his remarks pertain
more closely to changes in the way in which Art has come to be seen. I suggest that
the place of images of beauty in society, on the contrary, still reinforces the public
ethos, in the manner in which Rancière describes. See, Ibid., 28.

Bibliography
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,
Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard,

1975.

Franko, Mark. ‘Double Bodies: Androgyny and Power in the Performances of

Louis XIV.’ TDR (1988-) 38, 4 (1994): 71-82.

———. ‘Majestic Drag: Monarchical Performativity and the King’s Body

Theatrical’, TDR 47.2 (2003): 71-87.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul

Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Klaits, Joseph. ‘Men of Letters and Political Reform in France at the End of the
Reign of Louis XIV: The Founding of the Academie Politique’. The Journal of
Modern History 43.4 (1971): 577-597 .

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Translated by N. H. Thomson. New York:

Dover Publications Inc, 1992.

Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters. Translated by
Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Plato, The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000.

Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique. Paris: La

fabrique éditions, 2000.
12 A Machiavellian Beauty
__________________________________________________________________

Denise Thwaites is a PhD Candidate (Cotutelle) at both The University of New

South Wales and l’Université Paris 8. Her research focuses on the relationship
between theories and critiques of aesthetic judgement, contemporary art and
deliberative democracy.
 Outlawed Beauty: The (Homo) Erotic Sacrifice in Bataille,
Sedgwick, Genet and Mishima

Eva Bujalka
Abstract
‘Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the
joy brought by the certainty of profaning it,’ French librarian, philosopher and
pornographer Georges Bataille said in his 1957 work Eroticism. Although their
lives and work may on the surface seem completely unrelated, Georges Bataille,
twentieth-century French author Jean Genet, and twentieth-century Japanese author
Yukio Mishima all explored paralleling notions of the destruction and befouling of
beauty in their work. While Bataille’s thoughts on beauty are drawn from his
theory of erotic transgression and ritual sacrifice, Genet explores ‘spoiled beauty’
through his comparison of handsome murderers with saints. Mishima explores
‘befouled beauty’ through his erotic fascination with the bloody deaths of muscular
young men. Although Bataille doesn’t make an explicitly homoerotic reading of
sacrifice, his theories of beauty are important when reading the erotic sacrifice in
gay twentieth-century literature. I will focus on the concept of the ‘beautiful
outlaw,’ from the religious—Jesus and Saint Sebastian—to the criminal—Fou-
Tchou-Li, Maurice Pilorge, and Eugene Weidmann. All were executed in the most
extreme fashion, and all have been read as enduring figures of masculine beauty
that have been worshiped, adored, and eroticised. I argue that the destruction of
beauty is the essence of the erotic or homoerotic sacrifice in the works of Bataille,
Genet, and Mishima.

Key Words: Beauty, erotic, homoerotic, transgression, sacrifice, Georges Bataille,

Jean Genet, Yukio Mishima, Eve Sedgwick.

*****

1. Introduction
‘Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled’ said twentieth-century
French librarian, philosopher and pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962). It is
desired, he goes on, ‘not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty
of profaning it.’ 1 Beauty and the desire to destroy beauty are also major themes in
the homoerotic prose of twentieth-century authors Jean Genet (1910-1986) and
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). Although Bataille doesn’t create an explicitly
homoerotic philosophy, his theories are important to consider when reading Genet
and Mishima because, while all three lived very different lives and wrote very
different works, they all established surprisingly similar links between eroticism,
ritual sacrifice and notions of beauty. Thus, by making a comparative reading of
14 Outlawed Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
their lives and writings, I argue that the destruction of beauty is the essence of the
erotic or homoerotic sacrifice in the works of Bataille, Genet, and Mishima.

2. Beauty, Eroticism and Sacrifice in Bataille

In his book Eroticism (1957), Bataille argues that the less a person physically
resembles an animal, the more beautiful they are. But, he also notes that this
beautiful person would be unprovocative if there was no hint at some mysterious
animal aspect to their bodies, that is, to their genitals. 2 Human animal dualism is an
integral element to Bataille’s theories. For example, he defines eroticism as the
sexual awareness that separates humans from other animals. Bataille’s notion of
erotic transgression is most coherently unpacked by Jonathan Dollimore, who says
that Bataillean erotic transgression is not simply the erotic attraction of the
forbidden, but the belief that prohibition, inhibition, horror, and disgust all
heighten the intensity of erotic pleasure. 3 Bataille sees erotic transgression as being
inexplicably bound up with sacrifice, remarking that eroticism is ‘a violation
bordering on death, bordering on murder.’ 4 Thus, sacrifice, for Bataille is a violent
event that involves spectators looking on and, most importantly, desiring to look
on, as a sacrificial victim is killed. The participants in a sacrifice, just like the
participants in an erotic act experience the anguish, ecstasy and uninhibited
communication associated with the death of the victim, or the little death of
orgasm. 5 In both erotic acts and sacrifice, Bataille says that the desire for beauty
and the destruction of a beautiful person are integral:

In sacrifice, the victim is chosen so that its perfection shall give

point to the full brutality of death [...] Beauty has a cardinal
importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the
essence of eroticism...the greater the beauty, the more it is
befouled. 6

In his 1955 essay ‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice’ Bataille critiques not only Hegel’s
notions of death and sacrifice, but stands in opposition to Hegelian concepts of
beauty. Referring to Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Bataille focuses on Hegel’s
remark that beauty is not able to tolerate death and the negative. 7 Bataille, however,
argues that death and sacrifice are intimately linked with beauty and the desire for
beauty. 8
In Inner Experience (1943) Bataille explains beauty in terms of the dreadful
1905 photos of Chinese torture victim, Fou-Tchou-Li. It is important to note here
that Bataille explains his fascination with these images as the same fascination that
a Christian mystic felt when looking on the crucifixion. Bataille, like the mystic,
would meditate on the images of the torture victim, examining every facet of
suffering on the man’s body so as to identify and empathise with the victim and,
ultimately, to identify and empathise with the suffering of humanity. The photos
 Eva Bujalka 15
__________________________________________________________________
depict a handsome young man who has been lashed upright to a pole. Deep holes
have been carved into his chest, his ribs are visible, and his limbs are (in
subsequent photos) hacked off. Fou-Tchou-Li was condemned to slow death by
Leng-Tch’e, a lingering death by one hundred cuts—all to be administered on a
conscious body before a final death blow which, in this case, was by decapitation.
Before torture, Fou-Tchou-Li was administered opium. The opium and the rush of
terror and endorphins no doubt flooding his body might have resulted in the utterly
unnerving expression on his face—Fou-Tchou-Li appears to be smiling, exalted, in
ecstasy. Bataille describes Fou-Tchou-Li as:

beautiful as a wasp. I write ‘beautiful’! ... something escapes me,

flees from me, fear robs me of myself and, as if I had wanted to
stare at the sun, my eyes rebel. 9

One is reminded of philosopher Michel Foucault’s account of the 1757 torture and
execution of Robert-Francois Damiens, which he uses to open his work Discipline
and Punish (1977). There are similarities between Bataille’s account of Fou-
Tchou-Li’s execution and Foucault’s graphic and fetishised account of Damiens’
torture.
Darren Jorgensen says that Bataille’s reading of these photos as ‘beautiful’ is
based on the prohibition and transgression of prohibition that comes from looking
at these images. That is, the photos of Fou-Tchou-Li’s execution depict a moment
where extreme ecstasy and extreme horror merge and it is this unification of stark
contrasts that motivates our desire to look at the image. 10 When Bataille talks of the
wasp and the sun, he is merging the dangerous with the beautiful and, in the case of
Fou-Tchou-Li, I believe that Bataille sees a sort of abject beauty. The viewer feels
compelled to look away from the brutality in the images, but they cannot, they are
trapped staring in awe. I propose that the beauty in these images can be attributed
to Fou-Tchou-Li’s complete loss of control, to his complete submission as the
‘sacrificial victim’ that positions him very much like Christ on the cross.

3. The Eroticism and Beauty of the Crucifixion

In her book Epistemology of the Closet (1991) Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick
explores the homosexual male gaze in Christianity. According to Sedgwick, the
main impact of Christianity on men’s desire for the male body has, unsurprisingly,
been prohibited. Taking a particularly Bataillean reading, she says that images of
the crucifixion always depict an ‘unclothed or unclothable male body, often in
extremis and/or in ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored.’ 11
Although they are seemingly very different images, I believe that we can make a
comparison between the 1905 photos of Fou-Tchou-Li and Guido Reni’s 1640
depiction of the crucifixion. Much like the Christian mystic who adores the
scantly-clad crucified Christ, Bataille adored the naked Fou-Tchou-Li. Sedgwick
16 Outlawed Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
says that the scandal of the unclothed and exalting Jesus in a homophobic religion
that is dominated by the male gaze hasn’t abated despite artistic efforts of
disembodying Christ’s body, feminising it, or Europeanising it. What has occurred,
she says, has only been a further entanglement of the crucifixion among other
various modern figurations of the homosexual. 12 I believe that Sedgwick sees
Christ as the archetypal male nude—whether he is depicted as suffering or
triumphant he is still the desired object in the image, he is the beautiful object that
the viewer is meant to gaze at and adore. Interestingly, artistic representations of
Christ on the cross are only relatively new. Richard Harries says that this is
because crucifixion as a form of public execution might have likened Christianity
with criminal worship, and so the image of the cross would have produced a very
different reaction then, from what it does now. 13 Furthermore, while earlier
depictions of the crucifixion were entangled in the theological, later, in the early
Renaissance, Christ’s suffering became more prominently displayed and the
crucifixion became entangled in the erotic (one needs only look at Maarten van
Heemskerck’s ‘Man of Sorrows’ or Wolf Huber’s ‘Allegory of the Crucifixion’).
Like Fou-Tchou-Li, depictions of Christ show him stripped naked, or nearly naked,
tortured and killed as a criminal. In Reni’s depiction of the crucifixion we can see
that Christ takes on a feminine demeanour, his body is bent to one side to show the
gentle curve of a hip and, although his muscles are toned, there is a pallid softness
to his body. As a side note, we can see in both the photos of Fou-Tchou-Li and
Reni’s crucifixion, what eighteenth-century painter William Hogarth would go on
to call the ‘S’ line of beauty. Hogarth claimed that beauty in art was not found
through straight lines and strict geometry, but rather through undulating curves that
modulate from one gradient to another. 14 The ‘S’ curve denotes liveliness and
activity, which is a fitting, considering the death and resurrection motif in the
crucifixion. But perhaps it is his expression that, like Fou-Tchou-Li’s, is most
capturing: Christ appears to be gasping more in ecstasy than in agony.
What I am attempting to put forward, in comparing these images, is the
correlation between Sedgwick’s notion of Christ as the beautiful ‘unclothed or
unclothable male body’ that commands our attention, and Bataille’s concept of the
beauty of the sacrifice; the abject beauty of the body that is hideous and haggard—
the sort of beauty that can be seen in Matthias Grünewald’s grisly 1525 depiction
of the crucifixion. Grünewald’s Christ is obviously not beautiful in the same
sentimental way as Reni’s, but rather, it possesses the abject beauty of Fou-Tchou-
Li.

4. Beauty and the Erotic Sacrifice in Mishima and Genet

A reading of Bataille’s and Sedgwick’s work is vital when exploring the
homoerotic writings of Japanese author Yukio Mishima and French author Jean
Genet. Both Mishima’s and Genet’s fictions expound their notions of male beauty
through sacrificial and specifically Christian imagery. Indeed, in their writing,
 Eva Bujalka 17
__________________________________________________________________
sacrifice begets beauty. Stephen Snyder’s review of Annie Cecchi’s comparison of
Mishima with Bataille says that

for Mishima, beauty was inextricably bound up with tragic death

[…] the erotic fascination with pain, blood, and death [was] to be
played out in the muscled body of a young male, which remains
a thing of beauty and a site of purity. 15

Comparatively, Edith Wyschogrod says that in Genet’s writing: ‘when blood is

shed and is linked with transgressive ritual, beauty results. Even if beauty is not the
goal of the sacrifice, it is its outcome.’ 16 Thus, I would like to explore Mishima’s
and Genet’s notions of beauty through the works of Bataille and Sedgwick.
In the same way that Bataille meditated on the Chinese torture victim, both
Mishima and the protagonist in his novel Confessions of a Mask (1948) were
infatuated with Reni’s 1616 depiction of the beautiful, martyred, and well-
recognised gay icon, Saint Sebastian. Comparatively, both Bataille’s and
Mishima’s meditation is focused on young male outlaws who were persecuted,
tortured, and executed. If they are held side by side, it is impossible for the viewer
to overlook the similarities in Sebastian’s and Fou-Tchou-Li’s expressions—of
agony and of ecstasy, the similarities of their near nakedness, and of their
submissive positioning as the sacrificial victim. It is also worth noting that these
similarities (their expressions and nakedness) can be found in Reni’s depiction of
the crucifixion. And, again, we can read Sedgwick’s comment of Christ as the
‘unclothed or unclothable male body, often in extremis and/or in ecstasy,
prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored,’ into all three images. In
Confessions of a Mask the protagonist, Kochan, masturbates and has his first
orgasm while looking at Reni’s depiction of Saint Sebastian. For Kochan it is not
merely the youthful, muscular beauty of the saint’s body that arouses him, but it is
also the destruction of this beauty: ‘[t]he arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant,
youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of
supreme agony and ecstasy.’ 17 Here, Mishima transmutes suffering into pleasure,
making Sebastian’s torture read like something out of an S&M scene.
Christian imagery in twentieth-century literature has been nowhere more
present than in the fictions of iconoclast Jean Genet. Henry Yeager says that the
thieves and murderers in Genet’s fictions ‘correspond to the saints and angels of
Christianity.’ 18 Indeed, since the age of ten when he was mistakenly publically
labelled a thief, Genet became obsessed with concepts of ‘the outlaw,’ and
infatuated with the strikingly handsome murderers Maurice Pilorge and Eugene
Weidmann, whom he eroticised in his fictions. Genet opens his first novel Our
Lady of the Flowers (1943) with a tribute to Weidmann’s fractured beauty.
Weidmann, who survived being shot in the head while being arrested, was
eventually executed by guillotine in 1939. This was the last public guillotining in
18 Outlawed Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
Paris. Genet also salutes the beautiful murderer Pilorge who was executed by the
guillotine a few months earlier. For Genet, beauty and saintliness are interwoven
with one another. In his novel Thief’s Journal (1949) Genet says that Weidmann
and Pilorge were ‘isolated [from society] by their beauty alone,’ 19 and that ‘like
beauty—and poetry, with which I merge it—saintliness is individual,’ 20 is isolated.
Genet uses beheading as an image that corresponds with saintliness and beauty.
In the opening of his novel Miracle of the Rose (1946), he talks of execution by the
guillotine, saying

my love of beauty (which desired so ardently that my life be

crowned with a violent, in fact bloody death) and my aspiration
to a saintliness of muted brilliance [...] made me secretly choose
decapitation. 21

Genet is not alone in his fascination with beheading. Bataille dreamed of being
decapitated as part of a ritual sacrifice and even started up his own secret society,
Acéphale (without a head). Bataille was also fascinated with the beautiful Chinese
torture victim, Fou-Tchou-Li, who was eventually be killed by decapitation. There
is one more significant link between decapitation, eroticism and beauty that must
be discussed, and this link was made by Mishima.
Mishima, ended his life in a spectacular fashion when he staged a coup with his
own private army atop the Tokyo defence force headquarters in 1970. Mishima
commit seppuku, a traditional Samurai mode of suicide. Once considered an
honourable way to die, seppuku had come to be seen as completely absurd by the
time Mishima took his life. The mechanics of seppuku consist of cutting open
one’s stomach before being ritually decapitated. Mishima’s obsession with dying a
glorious death paradoxically drove him to fake illness to avoid army service in his
youth. In his 1970 nonfiction work Sun and Steel Mishima says that a glorious and
tragic death is only possible if the dead person has a beautiful body. For most of
his life Mishima felt that

I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And

it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this
unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war. 22

In 1955, at the age of thirty, Mishima began bodybuilding and eventually created
the beautiful body that he had long desired and eroticised in his writing. With his
body made beautiful, Mishima began posing for photo shoots, often appearing
nearly naked or nearly dead. In close proximity to his fictions, Mishima appeared
in the 1966 film adaptation of his short story ‘Patriotism,’ which ends with a young
general committing seppuku. In 1968 Mishima posed for a photo shoot as Saint
Sebastian. In 1970, just two months before his attempted coup and suicide,
 Eva Bujalka 19
__________________________________________________________________
Mishima posed for a series of seppuku themed photos. Although Mishima is
known to have possessed the fascistic ideal of the body outliving the spirit, he is
also known to have called himself ‘beauty’s kamikaze,’ 23 a phrase that resonates
with Bataille’s belief that ‘beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled.’

5. Conclusion
Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that ‘beauty is but the beginning of terror
which we can just barely endure. What we admire about it so is that it calmly
disdains to destroy us.’ 24 For Bataille, Genet, and Mishima, beauty was found
through paralleling sacrifice with eroticism. I have attempted to outline only the
very basis of Bataille’s notion of erotic transgression; his belief that it is possible to
experience forms of erotic behaviour that ‘transform guilt into joy, pain into
pleasure, torture into ecstasy, and (most miraculously of all) the wish to die into an
overwhelming and unspeakable feeling of love.’ 25 One might add to this mix, the
transformation of the horrific into the beautiful. This is what Bataille did in his
meditation on Fou-Tchou-Li, and what Sedgwick, Genet, and Mishima have
subsequently done in their homoerotic reading of the beauty of religious sacrifice.

Notes
1
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (NY:
Marion Boyars, 1987), 144.
2
Ibid., 143.
3
Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (NY: Routledge,
2001), 252.
4
Bataille, Eroticism, 17.
5
Ibid., 22.
6
Ibid., 144-145.
7
Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979) 19.
8
Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel Death and Sacrifice’, trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale
French Studies 78 (1990): 14.
9
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, tr. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: New York
University Press, 1988), 119.
10
Darren Jorgensen, ‘The Impossible Thought of Lingchi in Bataille’s The Tears of
Eros’, International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound 5
(2008).
11
Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1991), 140.
12
Ibid.
13
Richard Harries, The Passion in Art (Vermont: Ashgate, 2004), 12.
20 Outlawed Beauty
__________________________________________________________________

14
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty: Written With a View of Fixing the
Fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: Strahan & Hogarth, 1776), 48.
15
Stephen Snyder, ‘Untitled’, Monumenta Nipponica 56 (2001): 277-278.
16
Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Killing the Cat: Sacrifice and Beauty in Genet and
Mishima’, Religion & Literature 25 (1993): 113.
17
Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (London:
Peter Owen, 1960), 39.
18
Henry Yeager, ‘The Uncompromising Morality of Jean Genet,’ The French
Review, 39 (1965): 215.
19
Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Penguin,
1967), 213.
20
Ibid., 174.
21
Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove,
1966) 6.
22
Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death, trans. John Bester
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), 26.
23
Victoria James, ‘Beauty’s Kamikaze’, New Statesman 19 (2006): 51.
24
Ranier M. Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Shambhala, 1992).
25
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1993), 89.

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New York: Marion Boyars, 1987.

———. Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt. New York: New York
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———. ‘Hegel Death and Sacrifice’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990):

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Clifton, James. The Body of Christ: In the Art of Europe and New Spain 1150-
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Dollimore, Jonathan. Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture New York:
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Genet, Jean. Miracle of the Rose. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York:
Grove, 1966.
 Eva Bujalka 21
__________________________________________________________________

———. The Thief’s Journal. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. London: Penguin,

1967.

Harries, Richard. The Passion in Art. Vermont: Ashgate, 2004.

Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.

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Eros’. International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound 5
(2008). http://intertheory.org/jorgensen.htm. Accessed 13 May 2011.

Kaye, Richard. ‘“Determined Raptures”: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse
of Decedance’. Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 269-303.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstractfromPage=online&aid=47901.
Accessed 01 January 2011.

Kimerele, Heinz. ‘On Derrida’s Hegel Interpretation’. In Hegel After Derrida.

Edited by Stuart Barnett, 227-238. London: Routledge, 1998.

Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1993.

Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. Translated by Meredith Weatherby.

London: Peter Owen, 1960.

———. Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death. Translated by John Bester.
London: Secker & Warburg, 1971.

Rilke, Ranier M. Duino Elegies. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Shambhala, 1992.

http://homestar.org/bryannan/duino.html. Accessed 04 April 2011.

Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf,

1991.
22 Outlawed Beauty
__________________________________________________________________

Snyder, Stephen. ‘Untitled’. Monumenta Nipponica 56 (2001): 276-279.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2668417. Accessed 12 November 2010.

Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern

Oblivion, 2nd edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996.

Wyschogrod, Edith. ‘Killing the Cat: Sacrifice and Beauty in Genet and Mishima’.
Religion & Literature 25 (1993): 105-118. http://www.jstor.org/pss/40059558.
Accessed 09 November 2010.

Yeager, Henry. ‘The Uncompromising Morality of Jean Genet’. The French

Review 39 (1965): 214-219. http://www.jstor.org/pss/384807. Accessed 06
February 2011.

Eva Bujalka is currently in her first year of a creative writing PhD at Curtin
University in Western Australia and is a short fiction editor for dotdotdash
magazine.
 Section 2

Defining and Judging Beauty

 Taste and Judgement

Robert Lumsden
Abstract
I take the chronology of aesthetics as a history of attempts to underwrite
unsustainable notions of objectivity. The chapter will consider taste and (aesthetic)
judgement under eight destinations to which the relation has been directed
throughout the history of aesthetics in the West since Plato, though the ends in
mind have not always been articulated, and to that degree, have continued to
exercise an unhelpful influence, even dominance, over the enquirer. These
categories, are: (i) objective enquiry: in which evaluation is presumed to aim at
some universal, objective standard (ii) preceptive enquiry, in which it is assumed
that the precepts governing an enquiry will be disclosed in the course of that
enquiry (iii) anticipatory preceptive enquiry: declaration is made at the outset of
the principles of judgement which will govern an enquiry (iv) élitism :the standards
of judgement embraced by a select group are considered to be equivalent to good
taste (v) consensual enquiry: judgement is thought to be equivalent to what most
contemporaries value (vi) contestational enquiry: what counts as fair judgement
and good taste is taken to be a matter of egalitarian struggle for influence among
competing contemporary interests (vii) legacy good taste is considered to be
wholly or partly a consequence of venerable past judgements: taste as heirloom
(viii) arbitrariness: judgement is as disseminatory as language itself, and good
taste taken to be a more or less arbitrary attribution of value. In the second part of
the chapter I consider taste and judgement from a perspective which offers a model
of criticism which should not so readily succumb to the illusion of objectivity.

Key Words: Objectivity, judgement, critical enquiry.

*****

1. Objective Enquiry
This is the presumption that objectivity is a state one works towards. Examples
of theorists in this mode are Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with Theodor
Adorno as a twentieth century inheritor of Hegel’s dialectic. 2

2. Preceptive Enquiry
This is often a disguised form of a priori analysis which depends on assuming
that disinterestedness is possible. Advocates of this procedure are Kant, insofar as
he proposes disinterested enquiry in his Critique of Judgement, Matthew Arnold, F.
R. Leavis, and R. S. Crane and the Chicago School, and (even) David Hume,
26 Taste and Judgement
__________________________________________________________________
inasmuch as he defines ‘taste’ as the taking of a disinterested pleasure in certain
sense impressions.
A number of phenomenologists also engage what seems to me to be an attempt
to reinstate objectivity by guileful means. I take Husserl’s ‘now point’ as an
example. 3 A similar enterprise is abandoned in mid-career and at the last by
Maurice Merleau-Ponty who in one passage echoes a poignant passage by Wallace
Stevens marking the exhaustion of his attempts to capture the res of any occasion :
‘A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition/In a repetitiousness of men and flies’. 4

3. Anticipatory Perceptive Enquiry

In this mode, declaration is made, sometimes not openly, of the principles of
judgement which are to govern an enquiry. From the current perspective, these
terms will be pre-judice as soon as accommodation with them is made at whatever
level of awareness, and the general parameters of its conclusions (at least those)
will already be given in its favoured critical terminology. The critical practices of
certain of the American New Critics, though they espouse disinterested inquiry in
theory, and of this group, John Crowe Ransom especially, with some reader
response critics, Wolfgang Iser and Michel Rifaterre, for instance, offer an
example of this mode. 5

4. Ėlitism
This cuts across the other modes and can range from a more or less dulcet
marking out of the superiority of the critic’s judgement to Hegelian master-slave
stratagems conducted at phatic, proxemic and kinesis levels. There are more or less
muted examples of élitism in the academy certainly, not all of them confined to the
bad old yesterdays of nineteenth century mandarin impressionism. 6 The open and
reasoned elitism of T. S. Eliot, or Virginia Woolf’s reversal of the place Samuel
Johnson accords ‘the common reader’ in her essay of the same title, can appear
refreshingly candid by comparison.

5. Consensual Enquiry
This is a mode in which aesthetic judgement is taken to be equivalent to what
most contemporaries value. Under this banner may be gathered some who are
usually considered to be sui generis. So, Pierre Bourdieu and Jūrgen Habermas 7
are companions because their theories are underpinned by a belief in the sensus
communis, as is Martin Heidegger insofar as consensus can be associated with the
ontic which is potentially available to all before it is inhibited by ‘normal’
consciousness. 8

6. Contestational Enquiry
This is the idea that what counts as fair judgement and good taste is a matter of
debate and (in theory) egalitarian struggle for influence among competing groups.
 Robert Lumsden 27
__________________________________________________________________
At its least salubrious, it is aesthetics as a bourse, with the most attractive
‘companies’ sold high, and others declining in value. There are gradations of
rationality here In this sub species of valuation, (even) to think of a currently
popular ‘stock’ as ‘fashionable’ is to commit oneself to sheer sentiment as
sufficient surrogate for a process of reasoning.

7. Legacy
Good taste is considered to be partly or wholly a consequence of venerable past
judgements: taste as heirloom. An intriguing aspect of this mode is the turn
towards conservative notions of a group of emeritus critics whose views were
previously less foundationalist. Harold Bloom, for example, who once followed a
type of ad-hoc structuralist mode of enquiry in his (fairly) recent book on
canonicity, adopts something near to Matthew Arnold’s great works ‘litmus test’ as
the best means of shaping judgement. 9 E. D. Hirsch, who once considered
literature from a broadly Husserlian-influenced reader-response viewpoint, has also
recently defended the concept of the Canon as necessary to anchor judgements
which would otherwise become diffusely subjective. 10
Plato is the great progenitor of systematic epistemological enquiry, most seem
to agree. But why? By admission even of some of his admirers, he argues unfairly
and his arguments are not infrequently dubious. Re-reading some of the dialogues,
early, middle, and late, I counted arguments ad vercundiam, ad baculum, hasty
generalization, and fallacies of false alternatives (a specialism) and of
interrogation. Why, then, is this man venerated? It seems to me that Plato in large
part is venerated in consequence of having long been held venerable. He stands as
one of the towering examples of the power of legacy in our culture. 11
In addition, though the origins of modern pragmatism have been thought to
derive from the Aristotelian taxonomic method, focussed latterly on the body in its
spatial arrangements, and on its social groupings, and its sign systems
(sociologically or anthropologically inclined empiricist semioticians such as Levy-
Strauss, Latour 12 and Bourdieu could be considered Aristotelian in this respect)
which it sometimes places in a mentalist ‘frame’ (Paul Ricoeur, 13 Erving
Goffman 14 and Jacques Lacan 15 could be situated here), Plato can equally be
considered silent overseer of the resistance offered to the quest for universals
which has come to seem normative since the passing of British Idealism and the
rise of Moore’s naturalist ethics, and of logical positivism, on both sides of the
Channel.

8. Axiomatic Arbitrariness
Instances of this strain of anti-foundationalist thinking can be seen in Richard
Rorty 16 and Stanley Fish 17 who hold that no general basis of representation is
possible.
28 Taste and Judgement
__________________________________________________________________
Having decided that such attempts on universality, from Aristotle’s attempt to
define soul as a formal presence, through Schelling’s grounding of the beautiful in
a transcendental source, through Kant’s attempt to retrieve a sense of the substrate
of phenomena in explaining how it cannot be realised phenomenally, or to locate
beauty in disinterested enquiry, or to reach a sense of the moral absolute in an
encoded imperative, are more or less intriguing, more or less useful, sometimes
brilliant failures, the only available avenue is to develop alternative means of
interpretation and commentary. 18

9. Provisional Destinations
A useful counterweight to Occam’s Razor, which is not always as helpful in the
arrangement of information as it is in limiting the potential harm of preferred
strategies, is Epicurus’ Principle of Multiple Explanations: ’if several theories are
consistent with the observed data, retain them all’. The advantage of this a priori
over Occam’s principle of economy is that it delays judgement. A self-enforced
‘gap’ is put between reception of a text and interpretation of it, consisting of two
phases: (i) the countenancing of a variety of possible explanations, and (ii) the
admission of as many of these as seem plausible and useful. 19
Often, an aesthetic experience is characterized by an immediacy which in a
sense ‘crowds’ the receiver with its peremptory, overwhelming, claim on his or her
attention, and this ‘crowding’ tends to spill over into exegesis, so that it, too,
becomes as irrationally pre-persuaded, as spoken-for, as breathless, as the aesthetic
experience itself. The method proposed here can be considered as an attempt at
‘uncrowding’ an aesthetic experience.
When F. R. Leavis criticizes Milton for spoiling the English language in
treating it as though it were Latin, 20 and Christopher Ricks praises Milton’s
Latinate turn for taking us back to an Edenic moment before language was
compromised, they are not disagreeing over a matter of fact nor, simply, as is
sometimes acknowledged, over a matter of interpretation. 21 They are at odds
because both have read Milton’s poetry too avidly in the direction of their largely
undisclosed idea of what they want it to be.
In the type of reading I am suggesting, it would be a fundamental mistake to
begin to evaluate Milton’s verse by trying to catch sight of it through either critic’s
eyes – still less to see Milton as he really was and is - unless the reader is aware of
the predispositions influencing each critic’s reading, and uses them to help disclose
her, or his, own. Under those circumstances, which are likely to be less bound than
those of the critics the student is reading, certainly less than the reader or the
observer left to his or her devices, a relatively informed (and self-informed)
appreciation should become possible.
Taste, and what will stand as good of it or otherwise, should be placed in the
same register of reception. A definition of taste, then, to conclude: taste is the
indicator of a preference of which one has made oneself aware. This would not be
 Robert Lumsden 29
__________________________________________________________________
conceived as an absolute, nor as an approach to a universally binding definition,
but as a more freely chosen, temporary, fixity; a form of self-disclosure from
which one may be released, relatively unencumbered, into explanation.

Notes
1
Schelling’s attempted solution to the problem at the core of Kant’s system of how
a conditioned subject can apprehend the unconditioned, though better than Fichte’s
stratagem of claiming self reflection as part of the noumenal realm, still places an
aspect of the perceiver perceiving, a priori, in the place of a privileged
comprehension of the noumenal.
2
Robert Lumsden, Reading Literature after Deconstruction (Amherst: Cambria,
2009), 254-256, on Adorno’s ‘quasi’ dialectic.
3
Robert Lumsden, ‘Immediacy and the Impossible Poetic’, viewed on 12 July
2011, http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/assets/docs/proceedings-lumsden-immediacy-
and-the-impossible-poetic-ttp-conference.pdf.
4
The lines are from ‘A Plain Sense of Things’, published in 1952, three years
before Stevens’ death. In his posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty’s declaration of the impossibility of possessing the moment of
experience by reflecting upon it has the aspect of a confession. Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude
Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968), 171. Even in the earlier Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
doubts the possibility of immediacy in the strict sense of the term, insofar as a
momentary experience continually requires re-contextualization. Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1962), 346.
5
‘We cannot attend to all the meaning behind any poem, and we must have some
sort of schedule and priorities in what we do attend to’. John Crowe Ransom, The
New Criticism (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1941), 128.
6
‘There is, as it seems to me, a special example of this general principle in the
nineteenth century, and that example is the writer (John Gibson Lockhart) who
stands at the head of this chapter. No-one, perhaps, who speaks with any
competence either of knowledge or judgement, would say that Lockhart made an
inconsiderable figure in English Literature’. George Saintsbury, The Collected
Essays and Papers 1875-1920, Vol. 11 (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1925). ‘Well now, I put it to you that without mental breeding, without at least
some sense of ancestry, one can hardly have this perception of value, this vision’.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1920), 121.
30 Taste and Judgement
__________________________________________________________________

7
Habermas’s ‘final cause’, the idea that ‘all speech acts have an inherent telos’,
fails if the end towards which language tends is compromised by choices which are
disguised from the enquirer. ‘Telos’ would then not be engaging with ‘telos’, but to
conclusions limited to its own devising.
8
‘In Heidegger’s opinion, normal consciousness, expressed with the inherited
vocabulary of common sense, sees things ‘only with a squint’, as (Gilbert) Ryle
puts it. The primary consciousness, on the other hand, is the world we live in as
agents’. Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Enad and
Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), viewed 8
July 2011 http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~sub24/reviews/Heidegger.htm.
9
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1994). Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
10
E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New
York: Knopf Doubleday, 1988).
11
Where Jowett finds in the Phaedrus a discourse whose frame is fastened ‘loosely
and imperfectly’, Jacques Derrida in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Jacques Derrida,
Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981)—argues for a (nonetheless problematic) structural coherence in the Dialogue
based on a tension between rhetoric and true speaking. Though it does seem to me
that the uncertainties of argument and structure cited by Jowett and Derrida are
there, my critique of Plato rests more on a perception of his being an unreflective
poet, and a poor one in consequence.
12
Latour has come recently to the view that social criticism must ‘cultivat(e). . . a
stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James.’ Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 233.
13
Although Ricoeur often begins with structural analyses which pay their dues to
empiricist methods, his principal concern is to draw conclusions about the ‘inner’
situation of speakers and hearers as shown in their language use.
14
I am thinking of Goffman’s perspective on ‘teams’ as ‘secret societies’ whose
motives for cooperation must to some extent be hidden from the team members
themselves if cooperation is to continue.
15
Lacan’s method was clearly influenced by the Object Relations psychoanalysis
of Melanie Klein. His concept of the Mirror Stage, which has affinities with David
Winnicot’s transitional object, is the bridge in his theory between the body as a
thing in the world, and the body transformed by an idea of it.
16
Richard Rorty in my view is inclined too readily to abandon the quest for
workable generalisation in the service of an ad hoc pragmatism. See Richard
 Robert Lumsden 31
__________________________________________________________________

Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1982).
17
Fish in at least one place abandons this attempt: ‘The only ‘proof’ of
membership (of an interpretive community) is fellowship, the nod of recognition
from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of
us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know’’. ‘Interpretive Communities’, in
Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), 221. Culler’s strategy, which once might have looked rather
fustian, appears more credible in retrospect.
18
Adorno supposes that identity thinking (the idea that a concept can identify with
its object) is mistaken, and recommends substituting a kind of critical
consciousness which is aware of this circumscription and employs it. But this ‘non-
identity thinking’, too, is a type of identity thinking in which consciousness
supposes that it can identify with its object—non-identity thinking.
19
This view, though not positivist, is consonant with Ernst Mach’s that knowledge
is ‘a never-ending process of adjustment of thoughts to reality and to each other’.
See ‘Logical Positivism: The Vienna Circle Unity of Science Its Program and
Presuppositions (Progenitor to Post Modern Relativism)’, James D. Strauss,
Lincoln Christian Seminary, viewed on 8 July 2011, http://www.worldvieweyes.
org/resources/Strauss/Logical/Positivism.htm. The position taken here also has
affinities with George Santayana’s on certainty: ‘Santayana concludes that if one
attempts to find the bedrock of certainty, one may rest his claim only after he has,
at least theoretically, recognized that knowledge is composed of instances of
awareness that in themselves do not contain the prerequisites for knowledge’.
Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, entry ‘George Santayana’, viewed on 15
June 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana, viewed 15 June 2011.
20
‘Milton’s Verse,’ in F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in
English Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963), 42-61.
21
Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978).

Bibiliography
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New
York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
32 Taste and Judgement
__________________________________________________________________

Derrida, Jacques. Disseminations. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Enad, Parvis and Kenneth Maly. Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning.

Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by

David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1971.

Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J.

Shapiro. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972.

Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenlogy. Translated by Alfred

Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York:
Knopf Doubleday, 1988.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.

Lacan, Jacques. Ėcrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London:

Tavistock, 1977.

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. New

York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963.

Lumsden, Robert. Reading Literature after Deconstruction. Amherst: Cambria,

2009.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrase in Dispute. Translated by Georges

Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
 Robert Lumsden 33
__________________________________________________________________

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin

Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.

———. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Edited by
Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1968.

Michelfelder, Diane P. and Richard E Palmer. Dialogue and Deconstruction: The

Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Press, 1989.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Champagne, IL: Project

Gutenberg, 1990.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.

Riceour, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language,

Action, and Interpretation. Edited, translated, and introduced by John B.
Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Ricks, Christopher. Milton’s Grand Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1982.

Saintsbury, George. The Collected Essays and Papers 1875-1920, Vol. 11. London
and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1925.

von Schelling, F. W. J. System of Transcendental Idealism. Translated by P. Heath

with an introduction by M. Vater. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1978.

Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader. Edited by Andrew McNellie. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1984.

Robert Lumsden is a writer living in South Australia who has previously lectured
in English literature at the National University of Singapore and the National
Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
 Beauty and Artistic Value

Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele

Abstract
This chapter defuses anti-beauty and pro-beauty arguments by offering a more
adequate account of artistic beauty. We argue that neither beauty, nor extra-beauty
concerns should be discarded as values of art. Therefore, we distinguish artistic
beauty from both aesthetic excellence and beauty as such. Hence, when we judge
that an artwork is aesthetically valuable, it does not automatically follow that the
artwork is beautiful. If artistic beauty is equated with aesthetic excellence then the
notion of beauty is stretched almost beyond recognition or many non-beautiful
artworks are denied aesthetic value. Moreover, the beauty of an artwork does not
plainly coincide with beauty per se. Many artworks can be perceived as beautiful,
but this does not automatically entail that the perceived beauty is an aesthetic merit
of the artwork, i.e. that it contributes to the artwork’s artistic value. Furthermore, if
the beauty of an artwork contradicts or diminishes other properties of an artwork,
the artwork’s beauty counts as an aesthetic demerit. Properly drawing these
distinctions is of paramount importance for the following reasons. (1) These
distinctions allow us to assign aesthetic excellence to non-beautiful art. There is no
need to include non-beautiful art within the realm of beauty in order to judge such
artworks as aesthetically valuable. (2) These distinctions help clarifying why not
all beauty in art counts as artistic beauty. Beauty that is incidental or contradicts
the aims or content of the artwork is not artistic beauty. Thus, surface beauty in art
does not necessarily imply artistic beauty or aesthetic merit. (3) Artistic beauty is
not the mere representation of a beautiful thing. What is ugly in nature can be
beautiful in art. We conclude that these distinctions are useful for assessing the role
of beauty and aesthetics in art.

Key Words: Art, philosophy, aesthetics, artistic value, aesthetic value, artistic
beauty, Nick Zangwill, Arthur Danto.

*****

1. Introduction
Several contemporary philosophers of art argue that appreciating an artwork
merely in terms of whether it is beautiful or not ignores important political,
conceptual and social concerns which the artist intended to put forward. 1 So-called
beauty theories of art, however, claim that the artistic value of all art resides in its
being beautiful: beauty constitutes the essence of art. 2
This chapter will defuse anti-beauty and pro-beauty arguments by offering a
more adequate account of artistic beauty. We will argue that neither beauty, nor
extra-beauty concerns should be discarded as values of art. Therefore, we will
36 Beauty and Artistic Value
__________________________________________________________________
distinguish artistic beauty from both aesthetic excellence and beauty as such.
Hence, when we judge that an artwork is aesthetically valuable, it does not
automatically follow that the artwork is beautiful. If artistic beauty is equated with
aesthetic excellence then the notion of beauty is stretched almost beyond
recognition or many non-beautiful artworks are denied aesthetic value. Moreover,
the beauty of an artwork does not plainly coincide with beauty per se. Many
artworks can be perceived as beautiful, but this does not automatically entail that
the perceived beauty is an aesthetic merit of the artwork, i.e. that it contributes to
the artwork’s artistic value. Furthermore, if the beauty of an artwork contradicts or
diminishes other properties of an artwork, the artwork’s beauty counts as an
aesthetic demerit. Consequently, we will argue that artistic beauty is not purely
formal beauty. To sum up, this chapter aims to distinguish between (1) artistic
beauty and aesthetic value and between (2) artistic beauty and other kinds of
beauty in order to restore the value of beauty in art. Because of the failure to make
these distinctions, beauty was marginalized or all other relevant aesthetic and
artistic considerations were excluded from the appreciation of art. Whatever the
value of beauty might be in life, beauty is a historically important, but not a
necessary artistic value.

2. Beauty and Aesthetic Value

In the first part of this chapter, we will argue that not all aesthetic values of an
artwork can be reduced to beauty. Consequently, we will challenge theories of art
that claim that beauty constitutes the core of an artwork’s value. In his book The
Metaphysics of Beauty, Nick Zangwill equates judgments of beauty with
‘judgments of aesthetic value’. 3 ‘Beauty’, according to Zangwill, is not one
aesthetic property amongst many others, but rather corresponds to a verdictive
aesthetic judgment, while other aesthetic properties correspond to substantive
aesthetic judgments. Verdictive aesthetic judgments concern the aesthetic merit of
things. To claim things are dainty, dumpy, graceful or garish are substantive
aesthetic judgments. 4 These pick out properties that determine aesthetic merit or
beauty. 5 Substantive aesthetic properties do not necessarily imply a positive
aesthetic judgment, as they do not necessarily have evaluative content. Indeed,
when we dislike Karel Appel’s ‘Flowers and Animals’ for its garishness, one might
reasonably object that while the artwork is garish, in this case garishness counts as
an aesthetic merit. Describing a work of art as garish can justify a positive as well
as a negative aesthetic judgment, depending on the context in which the aesthetic
property garishness is operative. Garishness is not necessarily good or bad in itself.
Still, the substantive description stands: we all agree that ‘Flowers and Animals’ is
a garish painting. Correspondingly, although an aesthetic property as such is
perceived as an aesthetic merit, it can be rejected as an aesthetic merit of the
artwork under consideration if the aesthetic property contradicts the artwork’s
other properties. According to Zangwill, judging that an artwork is beautiful,
 Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele 37
__________________________________________________________________
however, does imply that it is a good, i.e. an aesthetically valuable artwork: beauty
always coincides with aesthetic merit and is in itself necessarily good.
In language and in traditional beauty theories, beauty is associated with
harmony, balance and pleasure. The claim that all good art is beautiful attenuates
the notion of beauty to the point of vanishing. Much of Philip Guston’s later work
is a case in point. His work has obvious substantive aesthetic properties that
determine the artwork’s aesthetic merit, such as expressiveness and power. Still, to
claim that his highly disturbing paintings are beautiful is inadequate, as they are
neither balanced nor harmonious, nor do they have the apparent intention to please
the audience. Further, equating artistic beauty with aesthetic value also urges us to
appreciate all works of art for their beauty, while this often contradicts the aims of
the artist. Arthur Danto rightly argues that beauty is an incidental attribute in most
of the world’s artistic cultures and many artworks are beautiful as objects, more so
than as works of art. 6 At any rate, it can be claimed that beauty is often not the
main focal point of the artwork, but plays the minor role of drawing attention to the
object as such. Much avant-garde art even had the specific aim of not being
beautiful. Dada art tried to address the inhumanities of the First World War and
wanted to ‘assassinate’ beauty. In a similar vein Philip Guston claimed that the
world as it is does not deserve beauty. 7 Thus the products of Dada and of other 20th
century artists who made statements against beautifying the world, are
misperceived if perceived as beautiful. 8 Examples like these show that to claim that
all aesthetic value should be reduced to ‘beauty’ is downright confusing.
Now, while the above-mentioned artworks should not be called beautiful, they
should not necessarily be denied aesthetic value. Non-beautiful artworks can be
appreciated as aesthetically valuable, i.e. they can possess other aesthetic qualities
besides beauty. Beauty must be seen as one aesthetic property among many others.
Hence, beauty can also be considered a substantive aesthetic property: this is how
it is used in language and it is in line with traditional beauty theories. Moreover,
the question arises whether beauty always necessarily counts as an aesthetic merit
of an artwork, even if it will often count as a merit. It is to this issue that we will
now turn.

3. Beauty and Artistic Value

Zangwill rightly notes that some substantive aesthetic features mostly tend
towards a positive evaluation while others mostly tend towards a negative one.
Indeed, gracefulness mostly implies positive aesthetic merit, while ugliness will
often induce a negative aesthetic judgment. In what follows, we argue, however,
that, in the context of art, no substantive feature always works in one evaluative
direction, i.e. even the beauty of an artwork can count as an aesthetic demerit or a
marginal aesthetic merit. As aesthetic properties are internally connected to all
other artistic properties of a work, it can be a matter of critique that an artwork is
graceful, elegant or beautiful when it is inappropriate for it to be so. 9 For example,
38 Beauty and Artistic Value
__________________________________________________________________
beauty can distract us from moral and cognitive features of an artwork. Sabastao
Salgado’s photographs of human suffering are a case in point. It is a matter of
debate amongst art critics and social scholars whether we can present as beautiful
what calls for indignation. 10
The beauty of an artwork is an aesthetic merit of the artwork, only if the
artwork’s beauty adds up to or is part of the artwork’s artistic value. Artistic beauty
is a kind of beauty that matches the concept of the artwork in question. Aesthetic
properties take part in a judgment on the artistic value of an artwork only if they
are relevant for the artwork. Graham McFee rightly argues that:

one’s calling a painting, say, gaudy amounts to something

different when one recognizes that the painting is an artwork
from what it amounts to when one mistook the gaudy object for,
say wallpaper. 11

Therefore, taking an artwork for a merely aesthetic object is misperceiving it.

Artistic appreciation, contrary to mere aesthetic appreciation, locates the artwork in
question in the history and traditions of art making and art-appreciating. 12 That is
not to say that one cannot value an artwork merely for its (perceptual) aesthetic
merits.

[…] of course one might value an art-object (say, a painting) as

one valued wallpaper: both are attractive wall-coverings. But
when I do this for the artwork, I am not continuing to regard it as
an artwork, since this is not consistent with so regarding it. 13

Thus, what is beautiful in art does not amount to the same as what is beautiful
in non-art. In some cases, the perceptible aesthetic properties that an artwork has
are irrelevant to the appreciation of the artwork as an artwork. A classic example
where beauty appreciation in an artwork is out of place is Duchamp’s canonical
work Fountain: to claim it is beautiful is to miss the point of the artwork. Still,
there have been voices that claimed that the artwork can be appreciated for its
beautiful surface. George Dickie wondered: ‘Why cannot the ordinary qualities of
Fountain,—its gleaming white surface, the depth revealed when it reflects images
of surrounding objects, its pleasing oval shape—be appreciated?’ 14 Well, perhaps
they can, but to appreciate Fountain for its perceptual properties is to miss the
point of the artistic endeavour entirely. The beauty that the object might,
controversially have does not necessarily have any bearing on the aesthetic merit of
the artwork as such. The appreciation of such artworks does not depend on their
perceptual properties. 15 Even if we acknowledge that art can have non-perceptual
aesthetic properties, it is highly unclear how the wit, the boldness and the
impudence of the artwork could be identified with beauty. Such works of art are
 Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele 39
__________________________________________________________________
not artistically beautiful. Many artworks are unjustly granted artistic beauty, while
they are only incidentally beautiful or not beautiful at all. Yet, some artworks that
do possess artistic beauty are not called beautiful, because, again, the distinction
between natural, human and artistic beauty is not correctly made. We will now
discuss this problem in the light of Arthur Danto’s comments on Matisse’s Blue
Nude.
Arthur Danto rightly argues that an artwork that is conceived as ugly and
artistically excellent does not ‘become’ beautiful due to its artistic excellence. 16 He
thus makes a correct distinction between artistic beauty and aesthetic excellence.
Still, he fails to make a proper distinction between natural, human and artistic
beauty. On the one hand, he argues that the meaning of an artwork is internally
related to its aesthetic qualities while in natural beauty, beauty is external to
meaning 17 On the other hand Danto's aesthetics still surprisingly construes beauty
along formalist lines. 18 Although Danto rightly claims that we have to identify the
meaning of the work as given by the thought, in order to see whether the work is
beautiful, the beauty of a work seems to be limited by external factors, but cannot
be positively influenced by it. 19 When beauty is inappropriate to the content of the
work, the artwork fails to be artistically beautiful, but beauty itself seems to be the
same in nature as in art. 20 In the ‘Abuse of Beauty’ Danto writes that Matisse's
Blue Nude is possibly great, but definitely ‘unbeautiful’: someone who claims it is
beautiful is ‘talking through his or her hat.’ 21 He writes that:

[i]t would be very difficult to accept the claim that Matisse’s

Blue Nude is at all beautiful: she is fierce and powerful and
sufficiently ugly that voyeurism seems ruled out, let alone
arousal – almost as if the ugliness were a sort of veil of modesty
with which Matisse covered her nakedness. 22

While Danto rightly contests the view that all good art is beautiful, Dada being
a good example, he unjustly excludes those artworks from the realm of beauty that
do possess artistic beauty. Danto disregards two important issues. First, substantive
aesthetic properties are not timeless, fixed essences. What was beautiful in art in
the Renaissance is not the standard of artistic beauty in contemporary art. Our view
of what pleases through balance and harmony in art has changed through the
history of art. Substantive aesthetic properties in art, including beauty, can only be
judged correctly by someone who properly situates a work with regard to its
context of origin, including its place in the artist’s oeuvre, its relation to the
surrounding culture, and its connections to preceding artistic traditions. 23 As
discussed above, a beautiful artwork is not beautiful tout court, but beautiful in
connection within a certain artistic context. Indeed, in the Renaissance era, Blue
Nude could not have been described as ‘beautiful’, but most likely as disturbing
and perverse. It must also be noted that Blue Nude could not have been made in
40 Beauty and Artistic Value
__________________________________________________________________
that era. Secondly, as Nehamas rightly observes, here Danto seems to assume that
being beautiful and looking good are the same. 24 In real life this woman would
perhaps not be considered beautiful. Yet we should not be assessing human beauty,
but artistic beauty here: it is not about what is depicted, but rather about the
depiction as a whole. Thus Danto fails to distinguish between artistic beauty and
other kinds of beauty, and, as a consequence, limits the scope of artistic beauty
dramatically.

4. Conclusion
We have argued that artistic beauty should be distinguished from aesthetic
excellence and other kinds of beauty, most notably natural and human beauty.
Following Zangwill’s distinction between verdictive and substantive aesthetic
properties, we have defended that beauty is a substantive, not a verdictive aesthetic
property. This entails that neither all aesthetic merit is to be identified with beauty
nor artistic beauty is to be equated with other kinds of beauty.
Correctly drawing these distinctions is of paramount importance for the
following reasons. (1) These distinctions allow us to assign aesthetic excellence to
non-beautiful art. There is no need to include non-beautiful art within the realm of
beauty in order to judge such artworks as aesthetically valuable. (2) These
distinctions help clarifying why not all beauty in art counts as artistic beauty.
Beauty that is incidental or contradicts the aims or content of the artwork is not
artistic beauty. Thus, surface beauty in art does not necessarily imply artistic
beauty or aesthetic merit. (3) Artistic beauty is not the mere representation of a
beautiful thing. What is ugly in nature can be beautiful in art. These distinctions are
useful for assessing the role of beauty and aesthetics in art. Within the Western
history of art, beauty is an important and predominant feature of the aesthetic merit
of art. Moreover, beauty is a crucial aspect in life and this does separate beauty
from other aesthetic values. Still, this does not entail that beauty is a necessary
feature of artistic value.

Notes
1
Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001):
21.
2
Ruth Lorand, Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art (London
and New York: Routledge, 2000): 288 and Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of
Beauty (Cornell University Press, 2001).
3
Nick Zangwill, ‘Beauty’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold
Levinson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 326.
4
Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, 9.
5
Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty, 19.
 Annelies Monseré and Bart Vandenabeele 41
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6
Arthur Coleman Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art
(Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003), 60 and 95.
7
Ibid., 118.
8
Ibid., 49.
9
Ibid., 113.
10
Ibid., 112.
11
Graham McFee, ‘The Artistic and the Aesthetic’, British Journal of Aesthetics
45 (2005): 376.
12
Ibid., 369.
13
Ibid., 384.
14
George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1974): 42.
15
James Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’, British Journal of
Aesthetics 43 (2003): 368.
16
Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 107.
17
Ibid., 97 and 101.
18
Diarmuid Costello, ‘On late Style: Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty’, British
Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 427.
19
Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 95-96.
20
Ibid., 121-122.
21
Ibid., 36-37.
22
Ibid., 114.
23
Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006): 316.
24
Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a
World of Art (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2007): 97.

Bibliography
Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Costello, Diarmuid. ‘On late Style: Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty’. British
Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 424-439.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art.
Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003.

Dickie, George. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. New York:
Cornell University Press, 1974.
42 Beauty and Artistic Value
__________________________________________________________________

Levinson, Jerrold. Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006.

Lorand, Ruth. Aesthetic Order: A Philosophy of Order, Beauty and Art. London
and New York: Routledge, 2000.

McFee, Graham. ‘The Artistic and the Aesthetic’. British Journal of Aesthetics 45
(2005): 368-387.

Nehamas, Alexander. Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a

World of Art. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Shelley, James. ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art’. British Journal of Aesthetics

43 (2003):363-378.

Zangwill, Nick. The Metaphysics of Beauty. Cornell University Press, 2001.

———. ‘Beauty’. In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Edited by Jerrold

Levinson, 325-343. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Annelies Monseré is a fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at

Ghent University and she is working on her PhD within the philosophy of art. Her
research focuses on the definition and the identification of art.

Bart Vandenabeele is a professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral

Sciences at Ghent University. His research focuses on the values of (modern and
contemporary) art, beauty, tragedy, the sublime, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
Kantian aesthetics.
 Beauty: The Unconditioned Play of Emotion

Madhu Kapoor
Abstract
This chapter is going to discuss ‘obtaining’ beauty as a pre-rational concept. It is
immediate and instant. Many times the old and pestering question has been asked
about the nature of the judgment of beauty; the answer has been explored and
developed, and in vein, because these so-called parameters suggested by the critic
are nothing but ‘an afterthought’ of the critic’s mind. What has been received as
data in the first hand is later on judged by the critique as beautiful. I do not mind
accepting the judgment as suggested by the critic, but I would prefer to call them
second level thought. Thus I make a distinction between an artist such as a poet,
painter, sculptor and musician, and other craft men, and their criticism of an item
made by them. The former creates the item in the height of his emotion and the
latter judges them after it is being created. My concern with the former ones is that
they create a piece of beauty in their most intimate moment. There they ‘obtain’
the beauty in their work- be it piece of music, painting, poetry or any other kind of
writing. My concern is with the latter also, but debate here that the critic himself
obtains the beauty, not judges them.

Key Words: Beauty, pre-rational, after-thought, rasa, cognitive state of mind,

affective state of mind, pratibha, height of emotion.

*****

I
At the very outset I would like to make it clear that I am not against any kind of
parameter or standard regarding the judgment of beauty. A number of times the old
and pestering question has been asked about the nature of this judgment and the
answers have been explored and developed, but all in vain, because these so-called
parameters suggested by the critics are nothing but ‘an afterthought’ of the critic’s
mind. What has been received as data at the first hand is later on judged by the
critic as beautiful. I do not mind accepting them as suggested by the critic but I
would prefer to call them second level thought. Thus I would make a distinction
between an artist like poet, painter, sculpture, musician and other craft men and the
critique of them. The former creates the item in the height of emotion and the latter
judges them after it is created. My concern is with the former who creates a piece
of beauty in a most intimate moment. There he ‘obtains’ the beauty in his work− be
it a piece of music, painting, poetry or any other kind of writing. My concern is
also with the latter,as long as the craft man himself obtains the beauty, not judges
it.
44 Beauty
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Of course, I am not denying the fact that one is guided by the socio-cultural
background which is embedded in one’s system. My socio-cultural background
limits my ‘judgment of the beautiful object’. It governs my attitude towards the
‘judgment of the beautiful object’. But it is the psychological criterion which
shapes my background and there it ends. I would like to go further and will show
in this chapter that there is no logical criteria which educates me for ’what is
beautiful’ and ‘what is not so’. In fact a logical criterion is the abstraction once the
‘beauty is obtained’. For instance we never say, ‘If an item fulfills certain
conditions, then it is considered as good’. This hypothetical way of judging debars
the very goal of ‘obtaining the beauty’.
There are two ways of expressing beauty. One way is to lay down certain
criterion, say ten or fifteen, and the person is asked to judge accordingly, as
happens in a ‘beauty pageant’ and in other ‘competitions’ set for getting a job.
According to the laid down criterion a winner is declared in the above cases, and
allows the statement: ‘She is the most beautiful woman’ or ‘Mr. V will get the job’.
Or the other way it may happen that one who fulfills all the criterion is still not
judged the best among the given lot because ‘he/she does not possess the unique
factor, say X factor’. The former way of determining the beauty is said to be
objective, or quantitatively satisfying all participants. The latter is said to be
subjective because it possesses the ‘unique factor’ which determines the winner,
though it lacks logical criterion. The former way customized the Beauty. It is as
good as saying that ‘I am writing poetry on demand’. It is not spontaneous since it
is produced according to the demand, whereas in the latter case it is spontaneous
and comes out naturally.
I can give another instance from our basic emotion. That is, love, which is not
taught but it is instinctively there in the heart. Of course one can learn it by
presenting gifts to someone to show that he or she loves him or her. One can
pronounce certain sentences to prove that one loves someone. One can care for
someone and show that one loves them. All these are not parameters, but ways or
behaviours which may be genuine or may not be so. It is very difficult to decide.
But when it comes naturally it does not require any parameter because it is there.
This is what I call unconditional, that is, not depending on any requirement.
What I propose in this chapter is this that there is difference between a
‘cognitive aspect of judgment’ which is under the constraint of rules and
principles, and ‘the affective aspect of the mind’ to obtain beauty (upalabdhi)
which defies all rules and grammar of the language. It is the feeling which one
obtains and understands afterwards. The question is which one is prior? My choice
will be obviously the latter one. In the ‘cognitive aspect’ you will go on listing the
parameters one after another and the list will be inexhaustible, whereas in the
‘affective aspect’ beauty is obtained immediately, not supported by any criterion. It
is to leap in the sea of beauty while not understanding the concept of beauty. This
spontaneous feeling or reaction to an item as ‘beautiful’ may be compared to the
 Madhu Kapoor 45
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concept of pratibhȃ, where one obtains the meaning of a sentence within a flash of
understanding, over and above the words uttered. This feeling of ‘obtaining the
Beauty’ is sometimes described as ‘rasa’ or aesthetic rapture by Indian literary
critic, like abhinavagupta. Bharata says in his Nȃţya-Śȃstra that one does not
obtain the beauty if one does not obtain ‘rasa’. 1
Rasa is generated by nine sthȃyibhȃva (permanent sentiment) that is
instinctively given to us and accepted by the Indian Rhetoricians. When one is
depicting anger in a dramatic situation, the audience is delighted to see it because
its depiction is a correct representation of the life situation and so he receives rasa
in that. The person who is acting is delighted because he can identify himself with
the character. Different ingredients from life create that situation to generate rasa.
It is interesting to note that in real life there is no aesthetic pleasure if such a
situation occurs. It is only when it is depicted in drama that it generates rasa. For
example, when one is struggling with poverty, one is not enjoying it; but when one
is depicting it in movie or theatre one is enjoying it because one is a mere spectator
(darŚaka) and not the enjoyer (bhoktȃ). The poet or whoever the artist is, borrows
this from real life and identifies himself with the situation and then transfers it to
the actor who in his turn obtains the same feeling, and then transfers it to the
audience or viewer through his act. So at three different times and levels—the
creator, the actor and the audience—receive the same feeling of beauty in the same
manner. According to Abhinavagupa 2 the feeling of beauty is the consequence of
having rasa from the object. 3
The feeling is beyond logical comprehension. It is obtained intuitively. The
artist transforms the object into a higher level filled with rasa that spreads
everywhere. It is the foundation on which the whole system is built. Ǡnanda, so to
say, rasa is generated from every kind of emotion, be it murder, anger, love, hate
etc. because the viewer still feels a subtle difference within oneself as an actor and
spectator. 4
It is very difficult to define what rasa is. So when it is asked what rasa is, the
answer given is: it is aswȃdya or what is given or experienced at a primary level
that becomes the object of second level experience. 5
Abhinavagupta makes it clear that the rasa is in the viewer (prekşaka) not in
the actor who is acting. The actor is like cup in which the wine is served. The cup
has no taste of wine; it is the drunkard who obtains the rasa (pȃtre na
madyaswȃdya). The actor is like the cup who displays different emotions who
himself is free from those emotions. Though, I opine that the viewer himself is free
from the life situation experience. He is not involved there. He is at a distance.
Jagannȃtha, another literary critic, calls it ‘camatkŗti’ (awesome feeling), which is
earlier described as pratibhȃ by Bhartŗahari and which I prefer to call upalabdhi.
It is the sudden feeling which allows one to jump with joy. Just as the different
parts of the sentence, say words, produce different meaning but the sentence-
meaning is produced immediately after the last word of the sentence is uttered.
46 Beauty
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Sentence meaning is not the aggregate of the word-meanings but it is over and
above those words. It is the whole which is obtained harmoniously together with
the words, yet different from the words.
Understanding beauty will take away the very charm of delightfulness which
one acquires while listening to a piece of music or watching a picture or enjoying
the beauty of the angry mood in beloved’s gesture. In the concluding remarks I will
come back to this point once again

II
Let me make a diversion here and introduce concepts of ‘mere apprehension’
and ‘making a judgment’. This we find in almost all the writings of great
philosophers both Western and Indian. For instance, Descartes, when he talks of
the truth and falsity of a statement, emphasizes that it is claimed at the judgmental
level. But when we apprehend an idea it is neither true nor false: it is a given data
which is not yet processed or analysed or given an opinion. In other words, it is not
yet judged.
In Indian philosophy, the two kinds of knowledge (jňȃna) are accepted: one is
nirvikalpaka and the other is savikalpaka. The former is mere apprehension of
‘something’ as given. It is regarded neither as true nor as false. It is not designated
by name, quality, universal etc. (nȃmajȃtyȃdikriyȃrahita). When we first look at a
person we do not acknowledge him by name, we do not recognize his qualities. In
case of ‘nŗasingh’ we do not acknowledge whether it is a man or a lion. Thus the
primary apprehension is nirvikalpaka. It is at the second level that we recognize the
object by its quality, name etc. Thus, according to the Naiyȃyikas, the
Nirvikalpakajňȃna paves the way for the latter judgmental knowledge which is
subject to truth and falsity.
The Buddhist goes a step further and opines that when we acknowledge an
object by name, quality etc. we are wrapping the object with so many layers that
we cannot recognize the real nature of an object. The real nature of an object is
hidden from our perception. We can see the coated object. Our perception becomes
biased and loaded with different kinds of colours and cloths. So the real nature of
an object is distorted in our perception. According to the Buddhist, truth must be
seen in naked form which is obtained by Tathȃgata, meaning ‘one who sees the
situation as such’. It is pure in its apprehension (viŚuddha jňȃna) which is
kalpanȃrahita. Similarly one can say that beauty is bereft of any preconceived
notion. It is not loaded with judgments. It is only afterwards that we analyze and
reveal different criterion used with a subject in different circumstances and in a
different manner.
Let me add here another literary critic’s opinion, according to whom, a plain
report (vȃrtȃ) such as ‘the sun rises in the east’, ‘the moon is risen in the sky’ and
‘birds are flying to their nests’ cannot generate any beauty in the readers’ mind.
But for Daṇḍȋ, the description of objects or items as they are (tadavasthavaṁ)
 Madhu Kapoor 47
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cannot be ignored. They generate beauty in the mind of the sensitive person. It is
called svȃbhȃvokti or a natural way of expression which is unadorned, a natural
description or an unembellished description of nature. The said vȃrtȃ may be
highly suggestive. It may exceed the plain meaning or reporting as now-a-days
happens with journalists manufacturing reports. What is needed is a sensitive
reader (shŗdaya pȃţhaka), whose mirror like minds are made crystal clear by their
constant practice of reading poetry in such a way that their minds become
identified with whatever is described in poetry. 6 That is why pratibhȃ in Bhartŗhari
is generally regarded as ‘giving each time newer and newer experiences’
(navanavonmeşasȃlinȋ pratibhȃ).
What I would like to communicate through this chapter is this: ‘beauty is
obtained without any rules and grammatical operations and once it is obtained, we
analyse it, dissect it and find out the ingredients underlying it. The ‘obtaining-ness’
(upalabdhi) is pure and without any support. The cognitive analysis is the later
pursuance. The justification of social, religious, cultural and/or political are
imposed on us: they play a crucial role in making my judgment. But I would like to
take ‘obtaining beauty’ from these entire criteria. They are the cause of the
origination of a judgment of beauty, not the cause of the beauty-feeling. It is an
instant reaction on our part to say ‘wow! It is neither cognitive nor a thoughtful
apprehension. It is like a flower blooming in the mud, spreading its fragrance, yet
untouched by the quality of mud. Social, religious, cultural, and political aspects
play a crucial role in making my judgment. Thus it is clear that one does not learn a
standard of beauty first and make a decision, rather it is the other way round. One
obtains beauty-feeling and then analyses it through different kinds of parameter. It
is the cognitive aspect that tries to dominate the feeling.

III
In this section I would like to take up certain special terms which seem to be
incoherent in our communicating system but they spread the message of joy and
delight. Let us take this line from Alice in Wonderland:

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.

In the above mentioned case, one can show that in reality the talk is
contradictory and inconsistent but when one reads it one enjoys it and feels a kind
of bliss inside because he understands the meaning of the given words. One can
say here, while understanding a linguistic statement one needs to learn that
particular language, one needs to understand the intricacy of the vocabulary of the
language, context and circumstances. So it becomes a presupposition for enjoying
the given linguistic statement. There is a long debate among the Naiyȃyikas and the
Vaiyȃkaraṇas in Indian philosophy regarding the status of the statement like
‘hare’s horn’, ‘pigs fly’, and ’square circle’ etc. According to the Vaiyȃkaraṇas
48 Beauty
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what we call meaningless statement like ‘hare’s horn’, generates verbal
understanding but according to the Naiyȃyikas they do not generate verbal
understanding as such.
There are many passages which are shown by the Vaiyȃkaraṇas that strongly
enhance their position. When one calls me a liar, while I am not so, I feel hurt and
may use abusive language against the speaker. It is argued that unless one
understands the meaning of the statement one cannot react sharply in that fashion.
It shows that such statements, like ‘pigs fly’ or ‘square circle’ are not meaningless.
Therefore, the meaning of the statement is obtained as given data and later on, the
judgment is passed as true or false. Similarly, beauty is obtained primarily as a
given data and then judgment is passed as ‘beautiful’. The point which I would like
to raise is this that passing a judgment is a cognitive function which analyses,
correlates and processes the data and finally one comes to a conclusion or makes a
decision, that is, a judgment.

IV
In this last concluding section I would like to remark that the scientific method
analyses the given item under scrutiny with specific precision, so that one can
reach the core of the item, but while doing this the harmony of the item is lost
somewhere in the midst. The more we analyse the object in small parts, the more
we lose contact with the harmony of the whole object. Just as in a musical
symphony the sound of the different instruments are not heard separately but they
are received together. In togetherness the melody of the different instruments
becomes one whole which generates beauty. Just as the different petals of the
flower, when separated, lose their beauty, it no longer remains the flower as such:
when an item is analysed logically with a critical view, it loses its charm. One has
to watch and see the rhythm and flow of the situation at a non-judgmental level,
only then one can feel beauty in any manner because it is watched only and not
judged. Real beauty does not reside in any of the parts, but in the whole with the
magic touch of the artist. This apprehension is purely intuitive. One does not need
any logical criterion to judge the beauty. So Bhaţţanȃyaka says: Rasa is neither
perceived nor produced nor manifested. It is this presupposition without which one
cannot obtain Beauty, so to say rasa. 7
I establish in this chapter that pure observation, without any judgment,
produces beauty which is not learnt but it is obtained gradually. Perhaps that is
called the bliss experience (brahmȃnanda). I find my support in Kuntaka’s writing,
who says an artist’s genius is uncategorisable; he compared it to kimapi and ko’pi-
experience, that is to say, one cannot describe it in any fashion. What the critic has
done so far is mostly analyse and try to understand the emotive meaning abstracted
from the object; but it is important to understand the way by which that meaning is
conveyed. ‘Obtaining the beauty’ is indistinguishable and inseparable from the
manner of its presentation. And there lies the justification of the title unconditional.
 Madhu Kapoor 49
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
1
Na hi rasȃdŗte kaŚcidapi arthaḩ pravartate (Nȃţya-Śȃstra).
2
Tena nȃsţya eva rasaḩ na loke ityarthaḩ. (‘Locana’ by Abhinavagupta)
3
Tatra sarve amȋ sukhapradhȃnaḩ svasamviccavarnarupasyaika ghanasya prakȃ
Śasya ȃnanda sȃratvȃt… Ityȃnandarupatȃ sarva rasȃnȃṁ.
4
Tathȃ mulaṁ rasaḩ sarve tebhyo bhȃvaḩ vyavasthitaḩ (Nȃţya-Śȃstra 6/9).
5
Rasa iti kaḩ padȃrthaḩ? Ucyate aswȃdya. (Sahitya-darpana, III pariccheda).
6
Yeşam kȃvyanusȋlanavasȃd viŚadȋkŗte/ Manomukure varṇaniyatanmayibhȃvanȃ
yogyatȃ// (Locana under verse I of Uddyota I Dhvanyȃloka).
7
Rasaḩ na pratȋyate, na utpadyte, na abhivyaňjyate, tat abhyupagamyate (Locana
under verse IV of Uddyota II Dhvanyȃloka).

Bibliography
Bhatta, Mammata. The Kavya Prakasa. Edited by Madhusudan Shashtri. Varanasi:
Thakura Prasad and Sons Booksellers, 1972.

Srimad, Anandavardhana Carya. Dhvanyalokah. Edited by Acarya Jagannatha

Pathaka. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Vidyabhavana, 1987

Visvanatha Kaviraj. Sahityadarpana. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1977.

Madhu Kapoor, Department of Philosophy, Vivekananda College, Thakurpukur,

Kolkata-700063, e-mail address: mattoo_k@yahoo.co.uk.
 Section 3

Beauty Products: Of Bollywood, Street Art and the

Meanings of Fashion Photography
 Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and
Bollywood TV Serials

Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur
Abstract
What is beauty for a Mauritian woman of Indian origin in the twenty-first century?
This chapter proposes looking at beauty and its understanding from a postcolonial
Mauritian perspective and the Bollywood culture. Young women of 20 to 30 years
of age are daily exposed to media. After leaving university or work, they relax at
night with some Hindi television serials that the Mauritius Broadcasting
Corporation (MBC) broadcasts through its digital channels 1, 2 and 3. Their only
contact with the Indian culture is through television. This chapter aims at
attempting to understand what the attraction is in these serials, and how they
influence Indo-Mauritian women in their negotiation of beauty. The use of the
sindhoor, mangalsutra, the costumes and other accessories to make the Indian
woman beautiful are also the trend among Indo-Mauritians. A survey conducted
among students on campus and at the same time postcolonial theory will be used to
make sense of beauty and how it is perceived and lived among young Mauritian
females.

Key Words: Mauritius, identity, beauty, postcolonial, Indo-Mauritian female,

mimicry.

*****

1. Introduction
Mauritius is an island that celebrates multi-ethnicity. Inhabitants originate
mainly from Africa, India, China, England and France. The island was colonised
by the French and later taken over by the British in the Battle of Grand-Port in
1810. Indentured labourers from India came mainly from Bihar and settled in the
island in the late nineteenth century. With the independence of the island in 1968,
Mauritius was set for its economic development and for the formation of a national
identity.
The majority of the population today is of Indian origin and in faith either
Muslim, Hindu (including Telegu, Tamil and Marathi). The study here focuses on
Indo-Mauritians of Hindu faith, as the Bollywood TV serials broadcast by the
Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) show gods and goddesses from the
Hindu mythology. In addition, poojas (Hindu prayers) and the fact that Indian
actresses playing Hindu married women wear the ‘bindis’ (red dot on the
forehead), ‘mangalsutras’ (the gold and black beads chain) and the vermilion or
Kumkum or the ‘sindoor,’ 1 as we call it in Mauritius in both English, French or
Creole (the red or orange dye on the top of the forehead either in the hair or the
54 Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and Bollywood TV Serials
__________________________________________________________________
forehead only) all point to the fact that Hinduism is predominant in those serials.
Therefore, the question is: do young Mauritian women of Hindu faith negotiate a
definition or re-definition of beauty while they view those television serials?
Popular 2011 Bollywood TV serials aired by the MBC are ‘Kasam Se,’
‘Meera,’ ‘Jai Shri Krishna’ broadcast on MBC1, ‘Radhaa Ki Betiyaan Kuch Kar
Dikhayendi’ (MBC2), ‘Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai’ are diffused. The actresses are a
mixture of emancipated or conservative Hindu women and those who blend the
two, depending on the situations the characters find themselves. The majority of
the population watches those serials, even those of non-Hindu faith.
‘Kasam Se’, produced by the same Ekta Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms, is a story
of three village girls who leave for the city. The interesting thing about it is that the
three girls are very beautiful but beauty only helps the character Pia, as two men
fall in love with her. She is not conventional, dressed mostly in European style and
only on special occasions (like parties, social gatherings, engagement or wedding
ceremonies) does she wear a sari.
‘Meera’ produced by Sagar Arts is about a young sixteenth-century Indian
princess and devotee of the Hindu deity Krishna and her tribulations. She does not
put on any make-up, lets her hair loose and wears no jewellery. Through her
devotion and fight against the injustices of the patriarchal society, this character
demonstrates not only spiritual force but also woman power. Meera, as a young
woman, is played by the Indian actress Aditi Sajwan.
Ms. Sajwan also plays in the Meenakshi Sagar Production TV serials ‘Jai Shri
Krishna’ as Yashoda, the surrogate mother of the deity Krishna. Her heavy makeup
and colourful dresses symbolize gaiety, happiness and joy of motherhood. Their
make-up, dress and jewellery are a blend of the modern and the ancient. The
colours are bright and joyful. This serial is about the child-god Krishna.
‘Radhaa Ki Betiyaan Kuch Kar Dikhayengi’ is about a mother and her three
daughters who move to the cruel city Mumbai from their peaceful town Meerut.
The elder daughter is called Rohini. She is dressed in a dress with light trousers
and long scarf called ‘churidar’, has long hair and works in the fashion world.
Rugini is a carefree girl and Ruchi is sandwiched between obedience to her mother
and her college life. They are dressed in the European style.

2. Interest of this Chapter

Hence the attraction in writing this chapter is my query about what Indo-
Mauritian young women make of the beauty in these actresses, since I am myself
an Indo-Mauritian woman who does not follow the traditions of my ancestors who
migrated to the island in the nineteenth century. I question the use of wearing a red
bindhi or a mangalsutra of the Indian married woman. Many young Indo-Mauritian
women who get married still wear things like the red bindhis and the mangalsutras.
I question why some Indo-Mauritian women feel the need to dress up in a way
similar to Indians when they are not Indians. My family name is Indo-Mauritian
 Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur 55
__________________________________________________________________
but my culture is a blend of Africa, Europe, India and China. I feel connected to
the sound of the ‘ravane,’ the musical instrument that accompanies Sega songs. I
adore eating Chinese food. I dress up in the European style and feel very ill at ease
in the heaviness of Indian dresses and accessories. I eat my dhal puri (an Indian
dish) with peanut butter. I attend prayer ceremonies that relatives invite me only to
enjoy the Indian dishes prepared on that purpose.
How can we feel connected to India when we celebrate so much our
multiculturalism in our everyday life? Does the quotidian viewing of Bollywood
TV serials have an impact on us? And do we become conscious of ourselves, our
presentation to the gaze of others based on what we perceive to be beautiful?
I also ask myself about those young women who negotiate their sense of beauty
in relation to the quasi-daily exposure to the Bollywood TV serials. Their sense of
beauty relates to their sense of the self, hence their identity. We are daily exposed
to a category of films or adverts or TV serials that unconsciously drive people to
change or reinforce certain beliefs.
So this idea made me conduct a survey online with my female students and
colleagues’ students. I also talked to some students informally about the topic.
They were asked about their frequency of watching those Bollywood TV serials
and what attracted them in particular in relation to beauty.

3. The Attraction of these Serials

The respondents to my survey were Indo-Mauritian young women between 20-
30 years of age, a majority live in villages more than towns. They watch the
Bollywood television serials as fun, as an entertainment and also to see ‘what is
going on there’ (read ‘there’ as ‘in India’). They watch an average of two
Bollywood TV serials per week. The attractions in those Hindi Bollywood TV
serials are the costumes used, the jewelleries, the body figures, the hairstyles and
the décor (most of the shooting happens inside studios that showcase the interior of
a house). They do not see all episodes due to lack of time (concentration on studies
or family matters are time consuming) but still the TV serials become a part of the
routine as well.
The respondents also claimed that beauty from Bollywood influences their
fashion style. They say they find it interesting that the actresses playing different
roles sport costumes particular to their characters but my respondent claim to use
all the styles as fashion ideas. As costume designer Ritu Deora says, ‘the
personality of a show depends much on the look of the characters.’ 2 But for Indo-
Mauritians, the costumes are more important than the relation between costume
and role of the actress.
In the TV serials that I mention above, all the actresses are fair complexioned.
The celebration and devotion to looking white is associated to colonial history and
also the pursuit for getting suitable male partners. It is common in Mauritius as
56 Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and Bollywood TV Serials
__________________________________________________________________
well. Though my female respondents said skin colour does not count in their
definition of beauty, we all know it counts for most male Mauritians. In India too,
it is unsaid and very often denied, that skin colour primes till now. It is the
colonized mind that still cannot detach itself from the idea that to be white is to be
beautiful (and powerful). 3 Dia Mohan writes, ‘While the fairness value has
affirmation in caste and colonial histories, it also has affirmation in contemporary
social conditions.’ 4 The colonizer has had such a power in making a cultural shift
in the Indians or even in colonised islanders that, till now, and for centuries to
come, for men and women alike, being fair complexioned will be seen as one
criterion to be beautiful.
The Indo-Mauritian young woman wants to emulate the beauty of the Indian
actress as the former has now been recognised as an object of beauty ‘vetted’ by
the world. Indian Sushmita Sen was crowned Miss Universe in 1994. Lara Datta
was crowned Miss Universe 2000. There is no more this understanding that to be
blonde or brunette with blue or grey or green eyes, that is, to be white means to be
beautiful. The Indian women who were crowned Miss World and Miss Universe
and the Indian actresses, with their make-up done by experts, their body
decorations like bindies, mangalsutras or nose-rings (for some serials, especially
those depicting ancient India and costume and accessories), are seen as making
part of the package ‘Beautiful and Indian’.

4. Reflections
Indo-Mauritian young women negotiate afresh the idea of beauty definitely
from their viewing of Bollywood films and serials. The popularity and frequency
of viewing those serials help to provide guidance on how to put on the sari or to be
aware of the different designs available or fashionable in India. In the same way,
renown shops of Indian wear in Mauritius like Tulsidas, India Palace and Gopee
bring from India what is fashionable there, but also what the Mauritian market
seeks in terms of necklaces, bindies (special ones for weddings for example) and
even children’s wear for special events.
The sindoor, the red powder that should be traditionally worn above the
forehead by married Indian women, has also become fashionable in the way it is
worn: the Bollywood TV actresses wear the sindhoor on the forehead without the
red bindhi. Even the traditional way of wearing it in Mauritius has already grown
unfashionable. Some Indo-Mauritians respondents have told me that when they get
married, they will wear the sindoor just like the actresses, ‘discrete but there,’ to
look as ‘beautiful as Indian brides’.
The ‘mangalsutra’ which is the main jewellery item (necklace made of gold and
black beads) given by the husband to the wife during the wedding ceremony has
different lengths. In the Bollywood TV Hindi serials, the actresses at some point
wear short necklaces and others wear long ones. Some Indo-Mauritians wear it
even as casual or office-wear as a mark of their Hindu belonging and to show that
 Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur 57
__________________________________________________________________
they are married. These respondents view the wearing of the mangalsutra by the
Indian actresses as an important jewellery item and an artefact primordial to the
beauty package of the married Indian woman. They said they would feel
‘complete’, ‘woman’, ‘Indo-Mauritian’ if they are similar to the married Indian
actresses. The media thus produces a form of hegemony on the Indo-Mauritian and
defines the result of the gaze. So this category of Indo-Mauritians do not wish to be
seen as different from the Indians and hence reject the European cultural impact.
Maybe it is a form of resistance of the ex-colonial power and in parallel the desire
to connect to the ancestral land.
The bindies are a must during ceremonies for the Indo-Mauritian of either
Hindu or Tamil or Telegu or Marathi faith. The married Hindu women wear the
red bindhies. The Hindi TV serial reinforces their cultural beliefs and the Hindu
Indo-Mauritian women believe that what they have been doing is correct all along.
In addition, they believe they become beautiful with all the accessories on their
bodies. Hence, the Indo-Mauritian body is re-mapped culturally to mimic the
customs and traditions of their ancestral land.
Other respondents claim the uselessness of the mangalsutra as they say they are
Mauritians, not Indians and Mauritianism is multiculturalism. For them, a wedding
ring is enough and Indian jewellery items are not needed for them to feel beautiful.
Hence there is a prioritization of the pride to belonging to the multi-ethnic
Maurtian nation, commonly known as the rainbow nation.
On the other hand, Indo-Mauritian young women look more alike to Indian
women when dressed in Indian wear because there is a match between what is seen
every day on TV and what is seen in weddings and other parties. Being beautiful
for the Indo-Mauritian women is to mimic the beautiful Indian women. Indian
media prompts the viewers to be fascinated by the gorgeous saris, jewelleries and
wonderful makeup. Indo-Mauritians are doing what French hair stylist advised to a
Bombay audience that is learning to become ‘fashion translators, not fashion
victims.’ 5 Mauritians have been translating every cultural space, and Indian beauty
is translated and transposed in the Indo-Mauritian space.
Imitation of particular characters can create a fashion and character statement.
Nirmala Sood, the costume designer for Ekta Kapoor’s serials says, ‘The negative
character has to create an eerie impact, or say, an emotion of hatred, when he/she is
portrayed. For that, he/she needs to stand out in a crowd.’ 6 What is perceived in
India as ‘eerie’ or can create an emotion of ‘hatred’ can be neutral to Mauritians or
simply exciting. Hence what is seen and glorified in media can be manipulated by
the female Indo-Mauritian. The mimic action is ambivalent: some female Indo-
Mauritians dress up in what is termed as ‘eerie’ to provoke or make a fashion
statement. Hence the Indo-Mauritian, who feels like a real islander that is,
celebrating, living and enjoying all the cultures of the island, is Indianized through
the imitation of looking beautiful like the Indian actresses, but is not an Indian. The
hybridised identity of the Indo-Mauritian is made further problematical.
58 Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and Bollywood TV Serials
__________________________________________________________________
Hence distance is lessened between India (the ancestral land) and Mauritius
(our homeland). The Indo-Mauritian self re-connects with the Indian culture via
fashion via the Bollywood TV serials. Imitating the Indian actresses enhances the
mimicry process; the irony is that an ex-colony is not mimicking the ex-colonial
space but a space that was colonised previously.
On the other hand, there is the Indian mimicry of the West in terms of body
shape. Long ago, Indian actresses were plump or chubby in a particular way. Slim
midriffs with huge waists: for Indian men it was a sign of beauty and also fertility.
When I watched the Hindi films in my childhood (while I understood nothing of
the dialogue on Hindi—most films then did not provide English or French
subtitles) I was mesmerized by the fact that those Indian actresses did not look at
all like the women in my family. To me, they were ‘Others’.
As Susan Runkle says, ‘beauty is [now] fair, tall and slim…’ 7 For the Indians
today, the slim figure is equated with beauty. As Sherry Blankenship writes,
‘Indians have been seduced by the West, and often view the imitation of the West
as the hallmark of success. There are economic aspects of Western-style capitalism
to be envied and enjoyed but, ideally, not at the expense of losing the folklore and
traditions of the past.’ 8 For Indo-Mauritians, imitating the beautiful Indian
actresses has become even easier. Today the Indian actresses have a proportionate
amount of zero-fat on the whole body. Their bodies can look ‘Westernised’, but in
fact, this idea that they look ‘Westernised’ comes from the international diasporic
collective consciousness of the older Indian actresses with large waists.
With the perfect bodies that Indian actresses showcase these days, nudity is no
more an issue. They wear transparent saris with bikinis-style blouses, and in
Mauritius, Indo-Mauritians imitate and appropriate the new Indian styles to look
elegant and also fashionable. Of course, Indo-Mauritians do not lose time buying
fashion catalogues: what is seen on the serials is enough to understand what the
trends are.
To be fashionable and beautiful for the Mauritians is open: some follow up the
Indian style that has itself become a mixture of both the West and the East.
However, Mauritius is multi-ethnic in fashion style, culture, thinking and
behaviour. Many Mauritians, like my relatives and I, need to read the subtitles for
clarification of the Hindi language or dress up in the European style. Therefore,
this question of Otherness is re-negotiated. Otherness for the Indo-Mauritian young
woman is not more the West but it becomes the blend of feeling as an ‘Other’
towards the Indian woman. That implies the norms established by the ancestral
land become the new Centre. Most Indo-Mauritians are dressed in a blend of the
West and the East and also immersed in the ‘culture of their own’; Mauritian
culture is such that the inhabitants imitate, mimic, but are also proud of their
various origins.
The diffusion of various Bollywood TV serials by the MBC this year has made
an impact on many viewers. It has reinforced identification with the contemporary
 Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur 59
__________________________________________________________________
Indian beauty culture or the total embracement of the European style. The process
is like this: first there is an attraction, then an attempt to understand and appreciate,
then a desire either to imitate or reject. Some respondents claimed pride in the
fashion style, the hairstyle, the makeup and costume as well as the jewellery of the
Indian actresses as, in fact, they are quite impressive. To Mauritians, India is seen
as a place where all those tools to make women and men beautiful are celebrated
and available. At the same time, India has become the ‘centre’ for many Indo-
Mauritians. There is desire to return to the country of their origins in their
imagination. There is also a relationship of love and nostalgia or a longing to
belong to an identity that sometimes cannot be found in Mauritius since the island
hosts so many ethnic communities and cultural diversities.
Hence, the definition of beauty for the Indo-Mauritian women lies in the re-
moulding of fashion style, even in the use of specific cultural Hindu markers. At
the same time, they do not feel left out of the trend. 9 Each Mauritian deals with
their identity the way they want.

Notes
1
Wahid Saleh, ‘The Bindi and the Sindoor’, Viewed 22 July 2011,
http://www.indiawijzer.nl/what_is_indiawijzer/wahid_press_and_publication/publi
cation/10_bindi.pdf.
2
‘Interview with Costume Designer Ritu Deora’, IndianTelevision.Com, Viewed
10 Sept. 2011, http://www.indiantelevision.com/interviews/y2k3/actor/ ritu.htm.
3
Anjana Gosai, ‘India’s Myth of Fair-Skinned Beauty’, Guardian.co.uk, Viewed
20 April 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/19/india-fair-
skinned-beauty.
4
Dia Mohan, ‘Mirrors of Value? Advertising and Political Theatre in the
Hegemonic Construction of Women in India’, International Young Scholars’
Seminar Papers on eSS (March 2006): 5.
5
Susan Runkle, ‘The Beauty Obsession’, Manushi 145 (February, 2005), Viewed 8
September 2011, http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue145/lovely.htm.
6
‘Interview with Costume Designer’.
7
Runkle, ‘The Beauty Obsession’ .
8
Sherry Blankenship, ‘Outside the Centre: Defining Who We Are,’ Design Issues
21.1 (2005): 26.
9
Ibid., 24.
60 Female Indo-Mauritian Negotiation of Beauty and Bollywood TV Serials
__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography
Blankenship, Sherry. ‘Outside the Centre: Defining Who We Are’. Design Issues
21.1 (2005): 24-31.

Datta, Pulkit. ‘Bollywoodizing Diasporas: Reconnecting to the NRI through

Popular Hindi Cinema’. Thesis, Oxford, Ohio: Miami University, 2008.

Gosai, Anjana. ‘India’s Myth of Fair-Skinned Beauty’. Guardian.co.uk. Accessed

20 April 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/19/india-fair-
skinned-beauty

IndianTelevision.Com. ‘Interview with Costume Designer Ritu Deora’. Viewed 10

September 2011, http://www.indiantelevision.com/interviews/y2k3/actor/ritu.htm

IndianTelevision.Com. ‘Interview with Costume Designer’. Viewed 9 September

2011, http://www.indiantelevision.com/perspectives/y2k3/interview/nimsood.htm

Johnson, Newtona. ‘Gendering Diaspora: Revising Home’. draft conference paper.

Accessed on 28 August 2011. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/njohnsonepaper.pdf

Puwar, Nirmal. ‘Multicultural Fashion: Stirrings of another Sense of Aesthetics

Memory’. Feminist Review 71 (2002): 63-87

Rupal, Rita. ‘Indian Beauty Parlours’. Feminist Review 71 (2002): 88-90

Saleh, Wahid, ‘The Bindi and the Sindoor’. Viewed 22 July 2011,
http://www.indiawijzer.nl/what_is_indiawijzer/wahid_press_and_publication/publi
cation/10_bindi.pdf

SenGupta, Sayan, Shrinking Spaces and Widening Distances: A Contradiction in

Contemporary India. Accessed on 28 August 2011. http://www.inter-
disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/senguptadpaper.pdf

Angela Ramsoondur-Mungur is Lecturer at the University of Mauritius. She

teaches in the Department of English Studies.
 Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art
Production

Ljiljana Radosevic

Abstract
As an independent visual expression, street art won its position in urban culture at
the beginning of the 1990s. Different techniques used to present ideas, such as
spraying, stencilling, putting up stickers or paste-ups, doing site specific
interventions and so on, allowed artists to develop them more carefully and with a
particular sense of public space. Since 2008 and Lewisohn’s study Street Art: The
Graffiti Revolution, street art has been the subject of academic research on many
occasions. However, the issue of cute/kawaii featured in street art has not yet been
the subject of extensive research. This chapter attempts to find out in what kind of
relation within street art discourse we can place the aesthetic concepts of beauty
and that of cute/kawaii, and whether a trend of producing cute/kawaii street art can
be identified. Concepts of Western cute and Japanese kawaii will be compared, and
the relationship between the concept of cute/kawaii and that of beauty will be
addressed. Seen through different aesthetic theories an effort is made to understand
the relation between these two opposing, and yet today, very close concepts. There
is also the question of a possible natural affection on the part of the viewers for the
small and cute things, which we can usually find in stickers and paste-ups. As a
result this study raises a broader question: to what extent is cute/kawaii aesthetics
taking over the place of beauty in street art.

Key Words: Street art, cute, kawaii, beauty, popular culture, graffiti.

*****

Recently street art production has become a trend in the art world, many
independent galleries and important institutions such as Tate Modern, Victoria and
Albert Museum, Brookline Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angles,
Foundation Cartier Paris etc. have hosted street artists and their shows. Its artistic
value has been adopted from both high art and popular culture. The only on-going
discussion about the existence and legitimacy of street art is on a legal level,
which, of course, is essential to the concepts and philosophy of street art. And this
problem, most likely, will never be solved. Therefore let us concentrate on street
arts relations to high art and popular culture, and more importantly to the aesthetic
concepts of beauty and cute.
As an independent visual expression street art won its position in urban culture
at the beginning of the 1990s, but its presence in high art institutions and auction
houses became notable by Banksy’s presence around the turn of the century. Since
then we can trace two flows in street art—mainstream and off-scene. In the
62 Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production
__________________________________________________________________
mainstream scene we can include all those artists who had their shows, art sales
activities, and monographic books. Then there is the off-scene that consists of all
those local, unknown artists who probably will never become part of the
mainstream, and who represent the biggest portion of street art production.
Art world’s opinion on what is and what is not art, and what can enter its
domain is arbitrary, and has changed relatively often since the advent of
modernism. But we can notice that, even though it cherishes innovation and
independence, it is always more eager to accept expressions which are not too
alternative and which can, even in some remote way, connect to previous tastes.
For example, the art world has on several occasions tried to include graffiti into its
system, first at the beginning of the 1980s and last time with the street art hype, but
it never fully succeeded. Graffiti, being exclusively a product of sub cultural
groups and mostly not understandable for an outsider, became, as Baudrillard calls
them, empty signs. 1 Graffiti can be interpreted as many things and as nothing,
therefore they were too much for the art world to bear. With street art the situation
is somewhat different; here we can see clear figuration and narration which could
be easily perceived and analysed. Different techniques used to present ideas, such
as spraying, stencilling, putting up stickers or paste-ups, site specific interventions
and so on, are quite imaginative, but they have all been used in high art since the
emergence of conceptual art, in particular the Fluxus movement, and graffiti. So
the art world has the background and philosophical tools to read street art. As a
result the artists included in mainstream street art are those who could be compared
to producers of high art on a visual level (like Swoon, Gaia, Blue, Bast, JR etc.) or
on the level of ideas (like Banksy, Marc Jenkins, Zevs etc.).
Within the off-scene we can see production in which the visual and conceptual
expressions are more closely related to popular culture. Just to be clear, street art in
general is heavily influenced by popular culture but it has huge influence on
popular culture as well. The only difference is that in mainstream street art this
relation is used, let us say, in a more sophisticated manner. In an off-scene
production the use of popular culture or its values and aesthetics is more literal.
Cute/kawaii characters or aestheticisation are omnipresent in this fraction of the
street art production.
Cute as a minor aesthetic concept has tried to establish its independence, both
from the high art concept of beauty, and low art kitsch, for quite some time. The
new trend of cute accessories, stationery, gimmicks, toys and clothes appeared in
the 1990s. This aesthetic started to spread simultaneously in the Western cultural
circle and in the East Asia, and its new characteristic is that it was mostly directed
at young adults and grownups. But it is uncertain which of these two parallel flows
had more influence on popular culture and more influence on one another.
Concepts of cute and kawaii need to be positioned within a contemporary
philosophy of art in order to fully understand the influence of the phenomena. Only
 Ljiljana Radosevic 63
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then we can compare cute with beauty and try to establish how they coincide and
differ within the contemporary aesthetic discourse.

1. Cute and Kawaii in the Age of Consumerist Aesthetics

[W]hile prestigious aesthetic concepts like the beautiful, sublime,

and ugly have generated multiple theories and philosophies of
art, comparatively novel ones such as cute, glamorous,
whimsical, luscious, cozy, or wacky seem far from doing
anything of the sort, though ironically, in the close link between
their emergence and the rise of consumer aesthetics, they seem
all the more suited for the analysis of art’s increasingly complex
relation to market society in the twentieth century. 2

During the 1990s art became closer to life and its most important feature,
according to Bourriaud; it became relational aesthetics. 3 Beauty, as Danto says,
became trivial and popular culture and the aesthetics of consumerism became
stronger than ever. 4 The conclusion is that beauty left the throne at the top of the
hierarchy within the philosophy of art for other aesthetic concepts to claim, and
turned predominantly to popular culture ones.
When the public is left without ‘beautiful’ figuration and narration in ‘high’ art
it usually turns to popular culture for resources. Cute was perceived as part of the
everyday life and usually as a trait of kitsch objects, and as such cute art and design
could not establish itself as an independent art form. What was required was a
change in general opinion and new philosophical concepts that would not a priori
exclude it. Thus cute aesthetics blossomed in the 1990s with Alessi design, Jeff
Koons, Takashi Murakami and the Superflat art movement, Mark Ryden and the
Pop Surrealism, and others. That was also the period when the Western world
became exposed to manga and anime which in a period of a few years gained
ground in comic markets both in the US and in Europe with a number of
bestsellers. An important influence spread by manga and anime was the aesthetic
concept of kawaii. That is why, when we talk about cute art, we must not forget the
notion of kawaii which is not synonymous with cute. Together they form a basis
for this aesthetic analysis.
In his analysis of cuteness in American contemporary society, Cross concludes
that the children of today are more than ‘pure’ they are perceived as ‘cute and
spunky’. 5 In contrast with the adults need to prolong the childhood of their
children, the children are becoming more eager to grow up, and in that situation
children prove to be easy prey to the marketing campaigns of different firms, the
fields of which range from clothes, video games and other forms of serious
consumerism. 6 On the other hand many adults admire the freedom of youth and see
it as a possible lifestyle rather than a stage of life. Cross explains that the popular
64 Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production
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psychology promotes regression as the only way to feel alive. Thus, he says, we
have created a curiously contradictory culture of ‘jaded children and youth-hungry
adults’. 7 These accounts could be easily applied to Western European societies
with minor differences. And it is clear that societies in this stage could have more
preference for cute aesthetics regardless of the age of the consumers.
A similar state of mind can be found in Japan, and further more throughout the
East Asia. One of the most important analysts of Japanese popular culture, Sharon
Kinsella explains that youth culture, which has flourished in Japan since the 1960s,
has been identified as the main production field of post-war individualism and
viewed as a particularly painful spot by many leading intellectuals. Individualism
in general and youth culture in particular have been interpreted as a form of wilful
immaturity or childishness. 8 In her eye-opening study about Hello Kitty, Kristina
Yano gives us several definitions of kawaii and we can clearly see the way they
coincide and differ:

Sharon Kinsella, for example, defines kawaii as ‘essentially . . .

childlike; it celebrates sweet, adorable, innocent, pure, simple,
genuine, gentle, vulnerable, weak, and inexperienced social
behaviour and physical appearances’. Brian McVeigh’s checklist
of Japanese Cute includes variously: females, femininity,
weakness, cheerfulness, bright colours, infants and children,
light-heartedness, outgoing friendliness, and diminutive size. As
Merry White notes, kawaii calls upon a sense of vulnerability as
‘something to be taken care of and cuddled. 9

To these accounts we can also add definitions from other authors:

Kawaii means ‘cute’ in Japanese, and denotes a common popular

culture closely linked to aesthetic expressions of kitsch. The
‘cute’ is defined as childlike, sweet, innocent, pure, gentle and
weak. The aesthetics of cuteness (kawairashisa) has been
developing in Japan since the 1980s, and in the late 1990s it
turned into an explicit kitsch-culture… Wherever it appears [in
East Asia] cute-kitsch culture is more than an aesthetic style, but
a fully-fledged way of articulating a subjective attitude that
becomes manifest in design, language, bodily behaviour, gender
relations, and, most generally, in subjective perceptions of the
self. 10

Cuteness is typically regarded in the Western cultural sphere as benign and

non-threatening, and it is considered to be the basic trait of children and baby
animals. From this point of view kawaii becomes somewhat threatening because it
 Ljiljana Radosevic 65
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holds one more thing which is culturally unacceptable. Yano is concerned that
most definitions of kawaii eliminate the erotic element (that later became one of
the dominant elements) because kawaii embodies not only a childlike image, but
also a sexualized one. 11 This of course, raises a lot of questions, not only in Japan
but throughout the world where ever kawaii has inserted its influence. Another
element could be added to kawaii, and that is the horror or gothic character which
was almost unknown in this form in the Western societies. That is why in street art
we can very often see scary monsters and dark characters with cute characteristics.

2. Beauty in Relation to Cute/Kawaii

After the comparison of cute and kawaii, and the recognition of their
particularities, what would be suitable discourse for the comparison of cute/kawaii
and beauty? Since cute/kawaii as an aesthetic concept has not been discussed to
such extent as beauty, we do not have different theories to compare. What we can
do is find a sphere to which they both belong, such as popular culture and everyday
aesthetics, and try to see how they relate to each other within that particular sphere.
It is important to keep in mind that we are not trying to put an equation mark
between these two concepts but to look at them as two trains on parallel tracks that
run between fine art and popular culture. Even though it has been mentioned that at
the end of the 20th century beauty has been avoided by the art scene as something
trivial, it does not mean that beauty has altogether disappeared from the aesthetic
and artistic discourses. At the same time cute aesthetics has spread into fine art
production, assuming some of the positions once held by beauty. When it comes to
the sphere of popular culture every aesthetic concept is equal, but it is the taste of
consumer that decides which one of the many is momentarily considered as the
'prestigious' one. It seems that at the moment cute/kawaii holds that very position.
As a natural part of popular culture, street art shares its aesthetic views to a certain
extent. We could therefore say that this analysis might help us resolve certain
aesthetic issues regarding street art.
The distinction between two kinds of aesthetic experience upheld in the
Kantian aesthetic tradition—the agreeable and the beautiful, might help us make
sense of the relation between the concepts of beauty and cute/kawaii. Kant defines
as agreeable all the pleasures of the senses unmediated by reflection. This
definition of agreeable could be applied to cute/kawaii to a certain extent, because
cute does what it does—it gives pleasurable sensations. Kant also says that unlike
beauty, the agreeable does not please but gratifies, which provokes a desire for
similar objects. This is exactly what cute objects do by producing a desire to have
them. This is the reason why they are so suitable for mass production: they
enhance the consumerist logic and they may provoke the need to collect them. But
this is only one way to look at the cute/kawaii concept, and this does not change
our perception of it. Cute art remains trapped in the high art/low art discourse
which does not allow us to look at art with cute features as good art.
66 Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production
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Instead we can take in consideration Leddy and his attempt to redo Kant's
theory of the judgment of taste. Leddy sees the agreeable as a possible definition of
everyday aesthetics. But he goes further and explains that Kant’s reasoning has to
be re-evaluated because, as he says, recent aestheticians have questioned the idea
that aesthetic appreciation could be completely disinterested. This of course
undercuts Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. But Leddy
also argues that the concept of beauty should not be excluded from everyday
aesthetics. Moreover, he proposes the following modifications in order to use
Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable. He proposes the
following: the agreeable is primarily a matter of the play of sense and imagination;
the beautiful is primarily a matter of the play of imagination and understanding. 12
Yet, the agreeable may contain some play of imagination and understanding, and
sense should not be excluded from the beautiful. This insight gives us a better
platform for putting cute/kawaii in relation to beauty, because it allows both of
these concepts to exist in street art production and be regarded as equally good.
Thinking in terms of the pleasure-principle tradition, it is understood that
beauty evokes a pleasurable response. If while perceiving an object one does not
experience pleasure one is not experiencing beauty. McMahon criticizes this
conception by arguing that when all pleasures evoked by the perception of the
object are counted as pleasurable responses to beauty, beauty is collapsed into the
agreeably sensuous and the good. 13 And it is exactly there that beauty becomes
equal to cute and all the other minor aesthetic categories. In everyday life and in
popular culture people get pleasurable responses from things that are far from
beautiful, but are still cherished because they move something inside of the viewer.
There have been philosophic attempts to give evolutionary justification for our
capacity to experience beauty. One has to wonder can these attitudes ever be
proven, or can they be regarded simply as philosophical speculation. But when it
comes to cute/kawai it has been scientifically proven that the recognition or cute
has evolutionary basis. 14 These infantile features are collectively known as the
baby schema 15 and on a graphic level this comes down to a circle with three dots.
This represents the basis on which different artists elaborate in a different manner.
Also, different viewers have their own perception of the level of cuteness, but this
feature is unmistakably recognized as being cute.

3. Conclusion
If we agree with Susan Sontag’s statement that ‘one cheats oneself as a human
being if one has respect only for the style of high culture’ 16 then we can also
embrace the aesthetic traits of cute culture. Not because it offers a comfortable
feeling of the agreeable, but because it became one way of scanning the
contemporary society with all its positive and negative sides. The gap that the
absence of beauty has created in art during the last twenty years has been filled
with different concepts, one of which is cute. A minor aesthetic concept known
 Ljiljana Radosevic 67
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from everyday life, which had been thought could never exist on its own, has won
its independence. Contemporary social conditions have enabled it to blossom and
to take its place in high art and popular culture. This form of art, cute/kawaii art,
can be mistaken for pure kitsch if one does not pay attention. If one takes a better
look, she will see that cute art objects are laden with meaning, with social critique,
with questions of morality and sexuality, and they are a bit freaky.
All these traits could be found in the off-scene street art production, especially
in paste-ups and stickers. Many street artists have participated in the market of
design toys for adults, a market which in the Western cultural circle has developed
during the last decade. Some of the mainstream street artists such as Miss Van, Kid
Acne, Buff Monster also include cute/kawaii features in their artwork. But an
interesting point in the cute street art works is that grownups produce cute art and
toys for other grownups that enjoy, collect and consume them. Moreover, quite a
large segment of street art production on the streets is marked by some variety of
cute/kawaii aesthetics. Which brings us to the question: is this the reason why
people find street art more acceptable, agreeable, and less threatening than graffiti?
It is possible that off-scene street art has accepted the cute/kawaii aesthetic instead
of aiming at classical beauty, because it allows the artists to provoke the sympathy
of the viewers, hide unexpected issues inside their characters, and produce
artworks which enhance the wish to possess them.

Notes
1
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 2002), 76-86.
2
Sianne Ngai, ‘The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde’, Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 811-
847.
3
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002).
4
Arthur Danto, ‘Beauty and the Philosophical Definition of Art’, in The Abuse of
Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court,
2003), 17-37.
5
Cross also points out that western society requires an image of purity, and
explains that when the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s removed that
burden from women, it was shifted to the child. In Gary Cross, The Cute and the
Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 6.
6
Ibid., 11.
7
Ibid., 12.
8
Sharon Kinsella, ‘Japanese Subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the Amateur
Manga Movement’, Journal of Japanese Studies 24.2 (Society of Japanese Studies,
1998): 315.
68 Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production
__________________________________________________________________

9
Christine R. Yano, ‘Flipping Kitty; Transnational Transgressions of Japanese
Cute’, Medi@sia: Global Media/tion in and out of Context, eds. Todd Joseph,
Miles Holden and Timothy J. Scrase (New York: Routledge, 2006), 211.
10
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, ‘Wong Kar-wai’s Films and the Culture of the
Kawaii’. SubStance #116 37.2 (Board of Regents and University of Wisconsin
System, 2008): 95.
11
Yano, ‘Flipping Kitty’, 210.
12
Tom Leddy, ‘The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics’, in The Aesthetics of Everyday
Life, eds. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), 6.
13
Jennifer Anne McMahon, ‘Beauty’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics,
eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London and New York: Routledge,
2001), 232 .
14
Sanefuji Wakako, Hidehiro Ohgami and Hashiya Kazuhide, Development of
Preference for Baby Faces across Species in Humans, (Japan Ethnological Society
and Springer, 2006), 250. Viewed 02 March 2010, http://www.springerlink.com/
content/8448487913854735/
15
When compared with adults, babies have eyes located at, or below the midline of
the face, prominent and protruding foreheads and non-protruding chins. In
Wakako, Preference for Baby Faces, 250.
16
Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 115.

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journals/substance/v037/37.2.botz-bornstein.html.

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Children’s Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Danto, Arthur. ‘Beauty and the Philosophical Definition of Art’. In The Abuse of
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Court, 2003.
 Ljiljana Radosevic 69
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Dorfles, Gillo. Kitshc: An Anthology of Bad Taste. London: Studio Vista London,
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Fisher, John A. ‘High Art versus Low Art’. In The Routledge Companion to
Aesthetics. Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 409-421. London
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Sociology 54 (2006): 784-801. Viewed 27 March 2010 http://csi.sagepub.com/con
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Kinsella, Sharon. ‘Japanese Subculture in the 1990s: Otaku and the Amateur
Manga Movement’. Journal of Japanese Studies 24.2 (1998): 289-316. Viewed 27
March 2010. http://www.jstor.org/openurl?volume=24&date=1998&spage=289&
issn=00956848&issue=2.

Leddy, Tom. ‘The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics’. In The Aesthetics of Everyday

Life. Edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, 3-22. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005.

Lent, John A. ‘Comic Art in Asian Cultural Context’. In Medi@sia: Global

Mediation in and out of Context. Edited by Todd Joseph Miles Holden and
Timothy J. Scrase, 224-242. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Lunning, Frenchy, ed. Mechademia 2: Networks of Desire. University of

Minnesota Press, 2007.

McMahon, Jennifer Anne. ‘Beauty’. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.

Edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 227-238. London and New
York: Routledge, 2001.
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Napier, Susan J. Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing

Contemporary Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Ngai, Sianne. ‘The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde’. Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 811-
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Miles Holden and Timothy J. Scrase, 207-223. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Ljiljana Radosevic is researcher at the Centre for Research of Contemporary

Culture, Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
 The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography of
Peter Lindbergh and Corinne Day

Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen

Abstract
The boundaries between different types of photography, such as art photography,
mass-produced photography, and private photos, do not seem to exist for today’s
photographers. At one and the same time, a particular type of photography can be
both a work of art and a commercial product. Thus, the German photographer Peter
Lindbergh (b. 1944), who has worked as a fashion photographer since the 1980s
shows in his work evidence of his roots in art and art history. In his fashion photos,
he has been inspired by what is now considered art, for instance the street
photography of the 1920s and the 1930s—bringing to mind the work of Cartier-
Bresson and Kertész. But what other influences can we discern? Apart from
Lindbergh’s use of black and white photography, is it possible to see existentialist
or other cultural or philosophical themes in his photos? If more complex cultural or
psychological elements can be detected in Lindbergh’s fashion photos, what
constitutes the relation between the fashion item (clothes, shoes, bag, etc.) and the
non-fashion theme? Why do we assume that existentialism belongs to the latter
category? Could Barthes’ concept of the punctum be applied to a fashion photo?
Corinne Day (1962-2010, UK) is another photographer who worked in both
fashion and art. Day utilized snapshot aesthetics in her fashion photography, and
she photographed her friends from the fashion world in what we must assume were
private moments, but then converted the photos into art projects. What (if any) part
did the cultural themes of the 1990s play in Day’s fashion photography? Can any
dimension of Day’s photography be considered as having acquired a lasting
cultural impact? My chapter will treat these and similar questions through an
analysis of fashion photographs as well as other artistic products by Lindbergh,
Day and other contemporary photographers as, for instance, Juergen Teller (b.
1964, Germany).

Key Words: Fashion photography, time and temporality, the punctum, Peter
Lindbergh, Corinne Day.

*****

1. Fashion Photography beyond Fashion: Introduction

What is the meaning of fashion photography? Does it go beyond selling a piece
of clothing or selling a style?
This presentation focuses on examples from two fashion photographers that I
will analyse in order to understand how fashion photographs represent and work
with existential themes not inherent to the world of fashion. The photographers use
72 The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography
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the idea of the boring, the absent and the negation in their pursuit of this. The
photos analysed are taken by Peter Lindbergh and Corinne Day and have been
published in Vogue.
Common to Lindbergh and Day is the interest in the deviations from the usual
ideas of beauty, good looks and suitable surroundings. Instead, they emphasize the
boring or abandoned place, the negation or negativity and the invisible.
In the following we shall see how this is effectuated.
When raising the question of existential themes in photography, and more
especially in fashion photography, the readings of the photos must go further than
poststructuralist semiotics and deconstruction as well as the essentialism that seems
to cling to our understandings of photography.
The readings of the photos must likewise go beyond the internal values of the
fashion industry that are the platform of most historians of fashion photography.
The Danish historian of photography, Mette Sandbye combines the insights of
the poststructuralists with the knowledge of the phenomenologist and existentialist
philosophers. In this chapter, I will follow some ideas inspired by Mette Sandbye
in order to obtain a glimpse of the identity built, reworked, written and felt through
fashion photography.
An interest in the boring and the negation is fundamentally a desire for reality.
Photos are privileged in this respect because of their indexical traces of reality.
Characteristic for photography is also its peculiar temporality. This temporality is
closely linked to the observer’s experience. When the observer realizes that what
he or she sees only exists in pictures, because the depicted person—for instance a
grandparent as a child—is dead, the observer will gain an experience and
understanding of time. The grandparent in the photo is spatially close, but
temporally removed. The observer will experience the passage of time.
According to the philosophers that Mette Sandbye uses, knowledge in general
and the meaning of the photo derives from an interchange between the perceiving
subject and the perceived object. 1
When confronted with a photograph, the observer experiences the presence of
the absent. It is a meeting with the past and a feeling of loss and sorrow. Such an
experience can be part of, or the beginning of, a formulation of an identity for the
photographer, the person photographed as well as for the observer.
Mette Sandbye writes (in my translation):

Photography is an ambiguous medium. On the one hand, there is

something rational, realistic-tautological about it. On the other
hand, the experience of the photographic picture as a present
fragment is connected with a melancholic experience of loss. The
latter points to an absence, a something connected with memory,
but which we will never be able to reach. Modernity’s experience
of the world as both temporally and spatially fragmented seems
 Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen 73
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as if moulded into the photographic image. An enormous drama
is hidden here. This makes photography interesting to deal with
as photography. 2

Mette Sandbye has also examined the way in which photographers since the
1960s have used the style of the snapshot and the everyday, even boring setting in
an aesthetics that moves photography in a new direction, away from its early
ambitions to be like painting. Characteristics of this are: accidental cutting,
shakings, blurs, closeness to everyday life, more innocent descriptions, vitality –
that which belongs to a world of things and facts, that which comes directly from
the heart, that which is related to the surface. 3

2. Poets of Fashion Photography

The ability to move an observer has been described by Roland Barthes as the
punctum, a concept which he established in Camera Lucida in 1980. The punctum
is a particular quality experienced by an observer of a photo. It often comes from a
detail in the photo that the photographer could not arrange. The detail disturbs the
observer, often in a way that makes it difficult for the observer to verbalize what he
or she sees. Barthes writes:

Here, on a torn-up pavement, a child’s corpse under a white sheet;

parents and friends stand around it, desolate: a banal enough
scene, unfortunately, but I noted certain interferences: the
corpse’s one bare foot, the sheet carried by the weeping mother
(why this sheet?), a woman in the background, probably a friend,
holding a handkerchief to her nose. 4

The punctum is felt immediately; it is not possible, from an analysis, to

determine that it exits in a photo. The fact that there indeed was a punctum in the
photograph is often recognized only when the photo is no longer in front of the
viewer. As Barthes explains further here, the punctum can also be a more general
feeling of being captured by the photo without knowing what exactly in the photo
causes this.
In a world where language with its inherent temporal conditions defines our
lives, there is a longing for the meeting with the inexpressible—or unutterable—
and a non-linguistic experience.

3. Peter Lindbergh
Peter Lindbergh (b. 1944) from Germany began his career as a fashion
photographer around 1978-1979, after years as an art student and a traveller.
Lindbergh’s earliest editorials highly resemble the fashion photography of the
time, but Lindbergh developed on the one hand, the trend of making models appear
74 The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography
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more natural, and on the other, a taste for situating his fashion photography in big,
empty, desolate landscapes. In a conversation with Heinz-Norbert Jocks,
Lindbergh speaks about his taste for photos that express a great deal without much
occurring in them. 5 A typical Lindberghian landscape could be a place with few or
no traces of humans—except for the models placed there by Lindbergh. It is
uninviting and desert-like with no places for humans to take cover. Or: there could
be a house, or a detail of a house. This will often appear ruined and unsuitable for
living. Another kind of typical Lindberghian landscape is the city, big or small.
The streets of his cities seem abandoned with few or no cars, with closed shops,
and empty pavements.
Lindbergh’s taste for the supermodels of the late 1980s and their successors can
be difficult to juxtapose with his taste for the boring and the abandoned. Since a
photographer is primarily occupied with his own being and identity when
photographing, Lindbergh can be said to be exploring aspects of his own identity,
for instance the meaning of his childhood in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany.
Or maybe he is exploring the limits of emptiness and repetition as a part of his
occupation with meditation.
An example of a big landscape is depicted in his editorial in Italian Vogue,
April 1998. The photo is also a clear example of an inspiration that Lindbergh
himself mentions, namely Henri Cartier-Bresson’s well-known photo of a man
leaping across a puddle. 6 The grey colours and the haze are identical—or provide
identical impressions. Cartier-Bresson’s buildings in the background are replaced
by hills or mountains. The dominating fence in Cartier-Bresson is turned into a
narrow, but bright horizontal line dividing back- and foreground. The leaping man
is replaced by four women walking in a line.
The leaping man and the walking women are headed in opposite directions.
Whereas the man follows the ordinary reading direction, from left to right,
forward, towards the future, the women walk away towards the past. Cartier-
Bresson’s photo is probably an example of the decisive moment, i.e. the
photographer has patiently been waiting with his camera ready for this particular
thing to happen. Thus considered, we know that Lindbergh’s fashion photos are
staged. The image of the models slowly walking towards the background and away
from the observer creates a dreamlike quality as well as a feeling of sorrow or loss
or loneliness. It could be a story of a journey, for instance an expedition, and it
could even be a journey back in time to childhood experiences and childhood
dreams. Or it could be an expedition in photography to investigate the decisive
moment of Lindbergh’s declared mentor, Cartier-Bresson, and attempting to
extend the moment in time.
Due to the size of the puddle in Lindbergh’s vast landscape, the photographer
does not need to wait for that one singular moment to obtain the right photo. There
are a succession of moments that will all be all right. Cartier-Bresson’s moment is
left behind in favour of continuity and repetition. The long, conical dress and its
 Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen 75
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mirrored image—the punctum of this photo in my opinion—gather together the
history of photography with Lindbergh’s personal investment.

4. Corinne Day
Corinne Day (1962-2010) from Britain had her renowned story ‘Under
Exposure’ published in the June 1993 edition of Vogue UK. Day’s background in
alternative magazines such as The Face and i-D revealed itself in her choice of a
model, Kate Moss, with an atypical look for that time. Moreover, the setting was
definitely less glamorous than that normally seen in Vogue. The photos of this
story show a radiator, a chest of drawers, and an unmade bed. The walls are a bare
white; other colours appear faded. The viewer gets the feeling that he or she is
looking directly into the home of a young woman preparing for, yes: for what? In
one photo, the model stands against a white wall. Apart from the model, the only
decoration on the wall is a string of fairy lights with bulbs in at least five different
colours. The string of fairy lights is placed in a way so as to make it roughly follow
the model’s pose—or is it that the model is posing in this particular way to follow
the contour of the light-string?
The everyday mood of the photo is stressed by an undecipherable detail of
something in the room that we can see at the edge of the photo. The clothes are a
combination of cheap and expensive (£ 4 and £ 70). Several elements of the picture
raise questions: The white wall—as an association to a classic gallery wall; the
inanimate or man-made object framing the model; the contrast of colours (bright
pink vest and brown-greyish panties with perhaps a little pink to match the vest);
the apparent unwillingness of the model, as indicated by her empty eyes and the
absence of a smile, to cooperate with the camera and thereby the viewer; the cross
around the model’s neck.
Day revives an old theme in her ironical portrait of the fashion model as the
crucified daughter of consumerism/fashion/popular-culture. The crown of thorns is
replaced by a string of small variously coloured fairy lights. The string follows the
contour of the woman, including her head, against the white wall. She is crowned
as a queen of fashion. She poses with one arm stretched out horizontally, as if she
were hanging crucified. Resembling the drained body on the cross, she slouches.
Her eyes are as empty as the eyes of a dead or dying person. The colour of her vest
gives associations to the colour of blood. The left arm that is stretched out has the
quality of a punctum to me. We can only see the uppermost part of it. We do not
know what the rest of the arm looks like, or what the hand at the end is doing. This
partial showing of the model is a part of fashion photography’s vocabulary, but it is
also, in this instance, moving in its own way, and it causes curiosity.
From what will she save us?
In her article about ‘Heroin Chic’, Rebecca Arnold sees fashion photography,
such as that of the early Corinne Day and her contemporaries, as a description of a
76 The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography
__________________________________________________________________
search for the meaning of life in a time and in a society that is structured by norms
that do not fit with the possibilities of youth. 7
Perhaps the meaning cannot be represented in a straightforward manner.
Corinne Day follows in the footsteps of centuries of artists in her experiments with
the invisible—in this instance it is the divine. In other fashion photos, she
experiments with representations of the provisional, as for instance re-creations of
known performance art from earlier decades. The meaning and beauty of life is,
perhaps, precisely this temporary condition of being on the verge of not being or
being as becoming.

5. Conclusion
To conclude, let us consider a couple of ideas about Lindbergh and Day
expressed by Klaus Honnef and Bradley Quinn.
Klaus Honnef has stated that Peter Lindbergh began using the distinction
between the look and the gaze around the time of the photo we have been looking
at. 8 This distinction was formulated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in Les
quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse published in 1973. 9 The gaze is
a concept that describes incidents that remove the screen that controls and directs
the looking for the viewer. The viewer will thereby see what determines his or her
looking and see something more in what he or she was looking at. I do not concur
with Klaus Honnef. Although Lindbergh’s photos do have the potential for
punctum à la Roland Barthes, and narratives that involve the viewer to a higher
degree than the mere pleasure of flipping through a fashion journal, I do not think
they are strong enough to be able to give a viewer the epistemological slide that is
usually connected with the gaze.
According to Bradley Quinn, Corinne Day and other contemporaneous
photographers from the period of her early, more alternative work use the decay of
the surroundings consciously as a tool together with designer clothes to break
down and change the rules of fashion photography. 10 Although ‘Under Exposure’
is not from The Face, it is from the early period, and in it Day makes use of an
unglamorous setting without leaving behind typical model poses. The model poses
in ways that signal, for instance sexual submission and being an object of
voyeurism. Nevertheless, Corinne Day puts a few, often ironic, elements into the
photos in order to make it her own language.

Notes
1
Among others, Sandbye refers to the works of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin,
Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Paul Sartre.
2
Mette Sandbye, Mindesmærker: Tid og erindring i fotografiet (Copenhagen:
Forlaget politisk revy, 2001), 11.
 Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen 77
__________________________________________________________________

3
Mette Sandbye, Kedelige billeder: Fotografiets snapshotæstetik (Copenhagen:
Forlaget politisk revy, 2007), 214-226.
4
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 23-25.
5
Heinz-Norbert Jocks, ‘Peter Lindbergh: Das Foto aus dem Geist eines Bastards,
Ein Gespräch von Heinz-Norbert Jocks’, Kunstforum international 175 (2005):
172.
6
Ibid., 172.
7
Rebecca Arnold, ‘Heroin Chic’, Fashion Theory 3.3 (1999).
8
Klaus Honnef, Foreword to Peter Lindbergh: On the Street by Karin Hänsler and
Felix Hoffmann (München: Schirmer Mosel Verlag, 2010), 15.
9
Jacques Lacan, Psykoanalysens fire grundbegreber: Seminar XI (Copenhagen:
Forlaget politisk revy, 2004).
10
Bradley Quinn, The Fashion of Architecture (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 187-204.

Bibliography

Arnold, Rebecca. ’Heroin Chic’. Fashion Theory 3.3 (1999): 279-296.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage Books, 2000.

———. Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

———. The Fashion System. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1983.

Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Short History of Photography’. In Classic Essays on

Photography. Edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 199-216. New Haven, CT: Leete’s
Islands Books, 1980.

Burgoyne, Patrick. Creative Review (October 2000): 48-51.

Compton, Nick. ‘Tomorrow is Another Day’. i-D (September 2000): 240-244.

Cotton, Charlotte. Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion

Photographs. London: V&A Publications, 2000.

Day, Corinne. Diary. Hamburg: Kruse Verlag, 2000.

78 The Aesthetics of Boring Places in the Fashion Photography
__________________________________________________________________

Edwards, Steve. Photography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2006.

Harrison, Martin. Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945. London:

Jonathan Cape, 1991.

Hänsler, Karin, and Felix Hoffmann. Peter Lindbergh: On the Street. München:
Schirmer Mosel Verlag, 2010.

Jeffrey, Ian. Photography: A Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 1981.

Jocks, Heinz-Norbert. ‘Peter Lindbergh: Das Foto aus dem Geist eines Bastards.
Ein Gespräch von Heinz-Norbert Jocks’. Kunstforum international 175 (2005):
154-175.

Kismaric, Susan and Eva Respini. Fashioning Fiction in Photography since 1990.
New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004.

Lacan, Jacques. Psykoanalysens fire grundbegreber. Seminar XI. Copenhagen:

Forlaget politisk revy, 2004.

Lindbergh, Peter. 10 Women. München: Schirmer Mosel Verlag, 1996.

———. Images of Women. München: Schirmer Mosel Verlag, 1997.

———. Peter Lindbergh. Hamburg: Stern, 1999.

———. Portfolio. Paris: Éditions Assouline, 1998.

———. Smoking Women. Hamburg: Stern, 1996.

Meyerowitz, Joel and Colin Westerbeck. Bystander: A History of Street

Photography. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1994.

Munroe, Alexandra and Jon Hendricks. Yes Yoko Ono. New York: Japan Society
and Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2000.

Quinn, Bradley. The Fashion of Architecture. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

 Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen 79
__________________________________________________________________

Sandbye, Mette. Kedelige billeder. Fotografiets snapshotæstetik. Copenhagen:

Forlaget politisk revy, 2007.

———. Mindesmærker. Tid og erindring i fotografiet. Copenhagen: Forlaget

politisk revy, 2001.

Shinkle, Eugénie, ed. Fashion as Photograph: Viewing and Reviewing Images of

Fashion. London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008.

Sinclair, Charlotte. ‘Pioneer Spirit’. Vogue (January 2011): 150-155, 177.

Smedley, Elliott. ‘Escaping to Reality: Fashion Photography in the 1990s’. In

Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis. Edited by Stella Bruzzi
and Pamela Church Gibson, 143-156. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Sontag, Susan: On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 2008.

Wells, Liz, ed. Photography: A Critical Introduction. London and New York:
Routledge, 2009.

Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen has an M.A. in literature and a B.A. in linguistics

and philosophy from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is an
independent researcher and writer, and has written earlier about the genre of the
ekphrasis. The chapter presented at Beauty 1 is part of an ongoing research project
dealing with the everyday style of photography.
 Section 4

The Politics of Beauty

 Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011: Is the Eye of the
Beholder Manipulated?

Gabrielle Simpson
Abstract
Beauty launched a thousand ships, was the downfall of Julius Caesar and Mark
Anthony, destroyed the dream of King Arthur’s Round Table, and was the joyous
quest of Don Quixote. This is the beauty of legend: what is beauty in a globalized
world? Despite a plethora of media related to beauty, fashion and celebrity there
are few studies which examine theoretical links between the three. Most
publications relate to the methodologies of marketing, their links to success in
sales, with a consumerist approach which promises hope and beauty. Other
publications review and theorise the fashion industry. A small number address the
rise of the cult of celebrity. This chapter explores the relationships between beauty,
celebrity and fashion in 2011. Is beauty exploited or manufactured by media
publicity? Is it associated to fashion? Are these formed by celebrity? Are these
linked to a philosophy of beauty? Is this philosophically and culturally biased? Is
beauty formed through reference groups lead by advertising agencies to support
their idea of a ‘good’ beauty product promotion? Celebrated, legendry, ‘beautiful
in their time’ women has been the tools used to create what is now a billion dollar
industry. Reviewing books and articles, from Umberto Eco and Joanne Entwistle,
to Hamish Pringle, on the subjects of Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity, an analysis
will lead to new theories which show the interrelatedness of the three areas from a
critically philosophical and theoretical basis. The chapter, which will be
incorporated into the author’s current research, will contribute to future research in
these areas establishing new knowledge bases for further study.

Key Words: Beauty, fashion, celebrity, make-up, skin care, cosmetics, marketing,
advertising, fashion industry, fashion designer, media.

*****

1. Introduction: Elusive Beauty

Perception of beauty in western society is quoted and translated in David
Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, as ‘Beauty in things exists merely in the
mind which contemplates them’. Is the quote still relevant to 2011? Is the eye of
the beholder manipulated?
Examining first learned beauty from education and background, then tracing
the emergence of beauty in fashion and beauty product houses, with the role of
celebrity and the media, the chapter will explore theories surrounding beauty,
fashion and celebrity.
84 Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011
__________________________________________________________________
Personal encounters with various aspects of beauty in childhood of early fairy
stories like Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had great impact on
a visually dominant child. Beauty was not only gentle and delightful to watch, but
good. An upbringing with pictures of Madonna and child, angels, saints and glory
make renaissance works very familiar in adulthood, and lays the foundation for a
personal perception of beauty.
Later exposure to Homer’s mythical Helen of Troy with the legendary launch
of a thousand ships as Paris, entranced by her beauty, pursues Helen. A developed
admiration of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and their fight for
right, with human frailty in the face of Guinevere’s beauty bringing destruction of
the round table and its aims for justice. Then knowledge and enjoyment of
Cervantes writings of ‘Don Quixote’, and his quest of chivalry and love of
Dulcinea: his description of her beauty sublime

‘her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful

attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are
verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields,
her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips
coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her
hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from
sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only
extol, not compare.’ 1

Through Shakespeare and others came knowledge of Julius Caesar, Mark

Anthony and Cleopatra, who was not described as beautiful, but was able to
enchant two powerful men, to their destruction. Here is powerful beauty, used as a
political force. There seems, with some, a perception that beauty can bring
destruction.
These examples have been portrayed in artefacts, paintings, plays and films.
The depiction in film has been by some of the more celebrated beauties of film:
Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot and latterly, Diane
Kruger. All of these have informed a personal interpretation of beauty in the
female form. This does not start to describe the beauty of an object, nature and the
world around us.
Poets, writers, playwrights, philosophers and theorists write of beauty. John
Armstrong 2 writes of Hogarth holding a public meeting in 1752 to determine
public views on beauty. His conclusions reflect the basic qualities of good design,
simplicity, symmetry, and movement without too much exaggeration. Armstrong
notes that these findings are reflected in Hogarth’s paintings. Armstrong states that
our view of beauty is something learned; that we develop an educated view of
objects.
 Gabrielle Simpson 85
__________________________________________________________________
Umberto Eco 3 writes comprehensively of the aesthetic of beauty, drawing on a
range of works from ancient Greece to the 20th Century beauty of Provocation and
Consumption, which describes the proliferation of difference in attitudes to beauty.
He examines the attitudes of the futurists and their extolling of ‘form follows
function’ and industrial aesthetics, which then, through machines allows the
development of ‘beautiful’ machines, manufacturing things of beauty.
The media has played an important role in developing attitudes which provoke
and consume, assisting in the development of ideas about beauty and what is
beautiful. Ideas of beauty are as broad as the audience, and media assists in the
development of these ideas: as Marshall McLuhan stated ‘the medium is the
message’ 4 with ‘message’ often humorously replaced by ‘massage’: the media
massage of our thinking.

2. The Beauty of Fashion Houses

As Joanne Entwistle 5 states ‘the body constitutes the environment of self, to be
inseparable from self’, and in most societies the body is clothed in some way, if not
adorned to make the wearer more attractive. To clothes the bodies of more affluent
women and royalty, fashion houses developed in the late 19th Century, with the rise
of more widely distributed wealth, and status attached to the wearers of more
beautiful and flattering clothes.
Charles Worth established the first ‘fashion house’ in 1858 at No.7 rue de la
Paix, Paris. He was the first male ‘couturier’, with his family carrying on the
tradition. In 1868 the sons established the ‘Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture
Parisienne’ known now, in English, as the ‘French Federation of Fashion and of
Ready-to-Wear of Couturiers and Fashion Designers’. This was the start of what is
now a global industry worth billions. It presently has 96 members, with the most
familiar names in fashion amongst them.
The fashion houses in their design and making of the clothes have used the
basic elements and principles of design. Elements of design are line, shape,
direction, size, texture and colour, with tone and value. The principles are balance,
gradation, repetition, contrast, harmony, dominance and unity. Fashion designers
have experimented and changed the shape of clothes, exaggerating and enhancing
the body, designing and using a range of materials to make beautiful, but
sometimes outrageous clothes. The fashions which change and demonstrate new
ideas make front page news, and are in museum collections. The various fashion
houses are known for their particular style of clothes. A Chanel outfit is usually
easily recognized, as Karl Lagerfeld acknowledges in each collection the original
shapes used by Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in her work.
Fashion houses have extended their product range from couture clothing, which
is designed and made for an individual by a designer, to prêt-a-porter ‘ready to
wear’ post 2nd World War, and into perfume, in the early 20th Century, with
Chanel’s famous ‘Chanel No.5’ in 1921, Worth’s ‘Je Reviens’ in 1932, Lanvin’s
86 Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011
__________________________________________________________________
‘Arpege’ in 1927. The ‘fashion brands’, as they are now called, have extended their
market into a range of accessories: handbags, shoes, jewellery, eyewear, and into
skin care and cosmetic products.
A visit to their individual websites will show the face or celebrity personality
fashion houses have used. Chanel has used Oscar winner, Nicole Kidman for
‘Chanel No.5’, Keira Knightly for ‘Mademoiselle’ and Dior has used Natalie
Portman for ‘Miss Dior’. These are just some of the perfumes and personalities
used.
The range of cosmetics and beauty products is large with new colour stories
introduced each season and new skin care innovation products created promising
youth and beauty. Many will have a chosen ‘face’ to represent their brand for the
season. If a person can’t afford a couture outfit they can own a small part of the
brand in perfume or cosmetics, and hopefully hold back time with the latest in
branded skin care.

3. Manufactured Youth and Beauty

Cosmetics and skin care have been used for centuries, with societal approval
and disapproval of their use at different times depending on the ruling stance. In
the 20th Century, with the changing status of society and of women, three women
are well known for the role they played in developing the skin care and cosmetic
industries; these are Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, and later Estee
Lauder.
Before these women, it was mostly actors who wore make up which was lead
based and harmful. The person to develop lead free grease paint make up was
Ludwig Leichner. He studied chemistry, and singing, performing as a baritone,
wearing make-up, and in 1873 established a ‘poudre and make up factory’ in
Berlin. Leichner, as the theatre make up is called, was sold by Max Factor in his
Los Angeles shop opened in 1908. Maximilian Faktorowicz, had been a wigmaker
and cosmetician to the Imperial Court in Russia. His name became Max Factor as
he came through Ellis Island immigration in New York.
Max Factor worked to improve the consistency of make-up, developing a soft
pliable cream in 12 precisely graduated shades, which was favoured by actors in
movies. The store, as he called it, had a private room for actors to be made up
before going to the studio. The skills Max Factor learned in the Russian Imperial
Court were used to enhance the looks of the movie actors and many matinee idols.
Max Factor was an innovator in the field, creating false eyelashes as well as the
continuously developed and enhanced range of make-up and hair products.
Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein were great rivals in New York. Helena
Rubenstein had started manufacturing her beauty products in Australia in 1903,
selling her Creme Valaze as a scientific product for the skin, after the skin had
been diagnosed. She opened salons in Melbourne, moved to London and Paris,
opening salons in both cities, then to New York. She presented as a scientist,
 Gabrielle Simpson 87
__________________________________________________________________
offering pseudo scientific skin care solutions, using skin peeling, and was
masterful at gaining publicity, with grandiose references to European training and
therapies.

‘Ms. Brandon calls Rubinstein the first self-made female

millionaire, an accomplishment she owed primarily to publicity
savvy. She knew how to advertise—using ‘fear copy with a bit of
blah-blah’—and introduced the concept of ‘problem’ skin types.
She also pioneered the use of pseudoscience in marketing,
donning a lab coat in many advertisements, despite the fact that
her only training had been a two-month tour of European skin-
care facilities. She knew how to manipulate consumer's status
anxiety, as well: If a product faltered initially, she would hike the
price to raise the perceived value.’ 6

Elizabeth Arden, born Florence Nightingale Graham in Canada, came to New

York and learned her trade as a ‘beauty culturist’ with Eleanor Adair and then
Elizabeth Hubbard. She set up business with Hubbard in 1909. She was gifted with
packaging, and promoting product: ‘Beauty is one part nature and three parts care’,
creating fluffy face cream which she packaged in gold and pink, with a pink
ribbon, and sold as ‘Venetian Cream Amoretto’. She opened the now famous Red
Door Salon at 509 Fifth Ave. New York, and took her products worldwide, with
salons around the world, said in the 1930s, to be as well known internationally as
Coca Cola. Her brand was seen to be the most prestigious, with clients including
British royalty.
The beauty houses mentioned are only three of the many businesses which
form part of the international industry dedicated to creating personal beauty, with
sales in the billions each year. They each meet a market need, or cleverly create
that need. Arden and Rubenstein had beauty salons where the products used while
receiving a facial ‘treatment’ can be bought for personal home use. This is a selling
technique still used today. Max Factor specialises more in make-up than skin care,
teaching people how to apply make-up to enhance personal features. Estee Lauder,
who started in 1946, introduced the concept of ‘gift with purchase’ where spending
$30 dollars on a product will give a ‘free’ gift. The concept of ‘gift with purchase’,
either as a gift of product, or a facial, are part of normal marketing and sales
practice for beauty houses today.

4. The Media Beauty Massage

The media has played an important role in establishing the beauty houses, with
Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein consummate publicists in the early 20th
century. Helena Rubenstein, known as ‘Madame’, had exotic stories about her
European origins which were very newsworthy in Melbourne at the time. Both
88 Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011
__________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Arden and Madame used the word cream in advertising, which denotes
soft richness when applied to the skin. Both designed sumptuous salons which
exuded an air of privilege. They also treated exclusive clientele, which made their
products desirable by association. This was in 1910.
In 2011 the fashion and beauty industries run like a well oiled machine. Hamish
Pringle 7 describes how advertising agencies assist manufacturers in designing their
product marketing campaign. Reference groups are asked to describe the
characteristics of a product giving it anthropomorphic attributes. This assists in
designing the correct advertising campaign for the product, from the look and
smell of the product, packaging, to the advertisements and market distribution. It
also assists in choosing the correct celebrity personality to represent the product. A
review of the beauty product websites shows the celebrity the different houses have
chosen. All these beauty houses have websites with chosen celebrity faces, with
links to these under the bibliography at the end of the chapter.
The agencies will also negotiate product placement and use in appropriate films
and TV shows. TV shows like Top Model and Project Runway and other related
TV series have specifically selected cosmetic and hair product companies as part of
the program. Most recently Justin Bieber has been used to promote a skin care
product for young people. This would be an expensive, but very effective
commercial with direct appeal. Pringle gives examples of the success of various
celebrity personality advertising, with a return on investment which demonstrates
that success.

5. Summary and Conclusion

A personal perception of beauty has been formed by exposure and education,
but has instinctive attributes in the parent/child connection in most animals.
Armstrong’s statement of beauty as something learned has truth but still raises the
question of what, how and when we learn.
Fashion designers are trained gifted individuals who can design clothes of
beauty, sometimes startling and provocative with their presentation, but still
grabbing media attention and possible museum space, with status attached.
The production of beautiful and astounding fashion has a cost which is afforded
by brand extension to other products. The brand develops the style and tone of the
product which is mirrored by the celebrity chosen to promote it.
The celebrity demands media attention, even with the launch of the advertising,
which gives both the fashion house and the celebrity more media attention, further
promoting the product.
The celebrity used will impact our perception of the product: if the celebrity
gives delight, the product is enhanced in our eyes. The perception of beauty is
further enhanced by the beauty of the celebrity.
The same system is used for cosmetic and beauty products. The cycle of beauty
product, celebrity beauty and perceived product benefits to assist personal beauty
 Gabrielle Simpson 89
__________________________________________________________________
contrive to imprint on the mind to form our perception of beauty, a manipulated
eye.

Notes
1
Umberto Umberto, On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea (Australia: Random
House, 2004), 212.
2
John Armstrong, The Secret Power of Beauty (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
3
Umberto Eco, On Beauty.
4
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York, Signet Books, 1964).
5
Joanne Entwhistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010).
6
Ruth Graham, ‘More Than Skin Deep: The Corporate Rivalry between Two
Cosmetic Giants left some Scars that can't be Smoothed Over’, Wall Street
Journal, 5 February 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870475
4304576096532209518142.html?mod=googlenews_wsj, Accessed 17 June 2011.
7
Hamish Pringle, Celebrity Sells. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

Bibliography
Armstrong, John. The Secret Power of Beauty. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

Baudot, Francois. Fashion: The Twentieth Century. New York: Universe, 2006.

Craik, Jennifer. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Eco, Umberto. On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. Australia: Random House,

2004.

Entwhistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.

Paloma-Lovinski, Noel. The World’s Most Influential Fashion Designers. London:

New Burlington Press, 2010.

Alef, Daniel. Elizabeth Arden, Beauty Queen. Santa Barbara, CA 931101: Meta4
Publishing, 2007.

Alef, Daniel. Estee Lauder, Doyenne of Beauty. Santa Barbara, CA 931101: Titans
of Fortune Publishing, 2010.
90 Beauty, Fashion and Celebrity in 2011
__________________________________________________________________

Baston, Fred E. Max Factor, The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World: New
York: Arcade Publishing, 2008.

Pringle, Hamish. Celebrity Sells. England: John Wiley and Sons, 2004.

Inglis, Fred. A Short History of Celebrity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 2010.

Woodhead, Lindy. War Paint: Madame Helena Rubenstein and Miss Elizabeth
Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry. New Jersey: Wiley and Sons,
2003.

Online Resources:

Chanel. http://www.chanel.com/fashion/8#8. Accessed 17 June 2011.

Christian Dior. http://www.dior.com/file/prehome_new/index.html. Accessed 17

June 2011.

Elizabeth Arden. http://shop.elizabetharden.com/home/index.jsp. Accessed 17 June

2011.

Estee Lauder. http://www.esteelauder.com.au/about/index.tmpl. Accessed 17 June

2011.

French Federation of Fashion and of Ready-to-Wear of Couturiers and Fashion

Designers. http://www.modeaparis.com/-federation-. Accessed 17 June 2011.

Graham, Ruth. ‘More Than Skin Deep: The Corporate Rivalry between Two
Cosmetic Giants left some Scars that can't be Smoothed Over’. GoogleNews. (5
February 2011). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487047543045760
96532209518142.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Accessed 17 June 2011.

Helena Rubenstein. http://www.helenarubinstein.com/index.aspx. Accessed 17

June 2011.

Leichner Kosmetics. http://www.leichner-kosmetik.de. Accessed 17 June 2011.

L’Oreal Paris. http://www.lorealparis.com.au/en/au/spokes/index.aspx. Accessed

17 June 2011.
 Gabrielle Simpson 91
__________________________________________________________________

Max Factor. http://www.maxfactor.co.uk/uk/home/default.htm. Accessed 17 June

2011.

Gabrielle Simpson is a Master of Design Research student at the Centre of Fine

Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has a background as
an educator in Fine Art, Drama, and Textiles and Design. Her research and writing
is devoted to the Fashion and Beauty industries and Celebrity.
 Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design

Mal Burkinshaw and Linda Shearer

Abstract
The fashion industry has a very narrow approach to diversity of image and there is
clear evidence that the industry continues to promote an unhealthy and generic
view of body shape, beauty, race and age. We are entering an era where emotion
and experience are increasingly important in both personal and professional
development. People are looking for diversity, meaning and integrity in what they
do and what they buy and are embracing individualism after a prolonged period of
mass-market consumption. The Emotional Engagement project aims to explore
how specific design elements such as colour, size and style affect consumer
behaviour and whether psychological issues related to identity and wellbeing can
be fused into fashion to satisfy and comfort the consumer. It also aims to transform
current thinking about fashion education and consumption and add a new
dimension to the way in which businesses engage with their products, markets and
consumers. This project is unique in placing emotional consideration at its core in
seeking to examine and question the methods currently adopted throughout the
fashion supply chain, particularly those that involve image, such as design and
marketing. It takes an inter-disciplinary approach by bringing together areas of
science, design, technology, psychology and business. Further, it aims to
disseminate best practice by engaging with relevant stakeholders and the wider
community and takes an inclusive approach. It is the responsibility of fashion
educators to develop in our future fashion designers and influencers the importance
of developing emotional consideration to consumers. The research will ultimately
underpin and inform how we educate students to become more aware of the
emotional impact of their design messaging and will develop, through creative and
exciting educational methods, a sustainable approach to emotional engagement in
fashion.

Key Words: Emotional engagement, diversity, considerate design, beauty,

identity, fashion, size.

*****

1. Context
The Emotional Engagement project is currently a collaboration of
researchers/academics from four Scottish Fashion Higher Education Institutions
(HEIs). The vision for the project is to develop a new way of thinking about
fashion that takes account of the end users and their needs. At its core is a desire to
engage and encourage fashion students and industry professionals to take a more
‘considerate’ approach to design, to acknowledge and embrace diversity and to put
94 Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design
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the end user at the forefront of decision making. The project is at an incipient stage
but has already attracted support from ‘All Walks Beyond the Catwalk’ who are
supporting the Centre of Excellence for Diversity at Edinburgh College of Art. The
EE project comprises two broad areas:

• the ‘integration’ of emotional consideration within fashion

education (All Walks Centre of Excellence for Diversity)
• research related to emotional engagement

This chapter outlines the early work in progress of the project with the aim of
stimulating dialogue and feedback. It will focus on the pedagogy of the All Walks
Beyond the Catwalk, Icon Project’, undertaken by Edinburgh College of Art as an
initial introduction to Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design.

2. Icon Project
The key objective of the All Walks Centre of Educational Excellence for
Diversity Centre is to generate, implement and oversee All Walks Diversity
Projects within institutions nationally. In the session 2010/2011, Edinburgh
College of Art introduced the ‘All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, Icon Project’.The
project philosophy was designed to target students at an early educational stage;
when they would be impressionable, receptive to new ideas, and able to apply the
philosophy of Emotionally Considerate Design to subsequent projects. The Icon
Project was therefore designed within the educational programme at Second Year
Level; the stage when design students specialise in the subject of fashion design,
and the philosophy was also introduced to the learning outcomes of all year group
projects from stage 2 to MA level.
It was identified that students have a tendency to design for an industry
standard model proportion, normally a size 10, without fully considering how their
work will appeal and address the spectrum of consumer diversity. By allowing
students to place so such focus on fashion shows and models as end content for
their work, educators become increasingly responsible for encouraging a restrictive
and elitist industry that works against the notion that fashion design should be
accessible to all. It was concurred that the purpose of fashion should be to make the
wearer/consumer more confident and happy about themselves, both physically and
emotionally. The students were therefore asked to design an outfit for a woman
who represents diversity of image, the aim being to creatively address her
emotional needs whilst also creating a directional and high-end contemporary
aesthetic.
By implementing written project content and through verbal lecturing
techniques in the studio, all staff members were asked to trial and feedback
educational methods on the subject of consideration to body and beauty diversity
within design processes. This freedom to experiment academically has helped to
 Mal Burkinshaw and Linda Shearer 95
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develop the main principles and the need for a research strategy to underpin the
educational content.

3. The Process
Prior to being issued with the design brief the students attended a lecture where
the concept and reasoning for developing Emotionally Considerate Design within
the curricula at ECA was discussed. At this event, Caryn Franklin gave an
inspirational presentation about the All Walks beyond the Catwalk vision and
showed a series of photographs by celebrated fashion photographer Rankin, which
were produced under the title ‘Snapped’. These images, which represented a
diversity of models, were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London and
demonstrated to the students how fashion can be communicated through diverse
representation of beauty, in a modern and dynamic way.
Following the showing of a short film of a fashion show by a well known
design brand, in which the models were extremely thin, they discussed why this
messaging is so unhealthy for designers and consumers. New students are
presented with images of models in fashion shows, and often accept these images
to be ‘the norm’. This significantly direct approach was intended to confront
students’ understanding of what is acceptable. The lecture attempted to provide a
platform for students to challenge notions of ideal beauty within fashion
messaging, including catwalk and fashion publishing.
Leading on from the lecture the students were invited to exhibit imagery, film
and drawings that communicated their feelings about ‘Beauty within Fashion’. The
objective of the exhibition was to commence the project with an individual point of
view about what they viewed as inspirational beauty. The project required each
student to connect with a different woman, referred to as their ‘Design Icon;’ the
intention being to introduce the notion that each woman represented key
inspirational qualities. Prior to the set up of the exhibits, the students were not
given information about the Icon Project. The lecturing team sourced the women
with the prerequisite that, as an entire group, they would represent diversity of
body image, age, race and beauty. In total 22 women were identified for the
project, ranging in age from 22 to 65, in size from a size 10 to 18 and with a broad
ethnic demographic. Specifically they were women who each had a strong identity
through personal style, or whom, we felt, would connect with the project
philosophy. The students and Icons first met each other at the Beauty within
Fashion exhibition where they were invited to interact, using the exhibition content
as a primary point of discussion. This process proved successful in pairing each
Icon with a student, notably with many of the partnerships occurring naturally and
instinctively.
The students were allocated the task of researching their icon through a variety
of journalistic and photographic methods. They were required to research and
develop an understanding of their Icon’s emotional feelings on a range of fashion
96 Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design
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related subjects, including her views on body self confidence and her perceptions
of beauty and self esteem. The aim of such verbal and written analysis was to
encourage each student to develop an emotional awareness of his/her Icon before
proceeding to design. The Icons were asked not to direct their individual designers
in what to design but to advise them to consider her emotional viewpoint on the
garments during fittings. It was strongly felt that should the Icon start to dictate the
design content, an element of emotionally considerate learning would not be
achieved. Ultimately the student designer had to lead the design process in order
the stop the project becoming a traditional ‘made to order’ scenario.
The students were asked to record a series of body measurements to inform
their design process and cutting work. By photographing their icon against a plain
background from a variety of angles, it was intended that the student would capture
their muse’s natural beauty and body type. In addition the students were taught the
importance of developing a discreet, considerate and respectful approach during
this process by exchanging in sensitive and complimentary dialogue. This helped
the students to build a trusting relationship between designer and client.

4. Project Outputs
The first key output for the students to evidence an understanding of the project
aims was a collaborative exhibition titled ‘Beyond Beauty’, showcasing a portrait
shot of each Icon, presented in a gallery style and accompanied by a statement to
celebrate her natural beauty and body shape. The project also asked each student to
research how fashion currently addresses the issue of body and beauty diversity.
This research allowed the students to demonstrate an understanding of who has
explored this subject through design and fashion messaging already. This helped
them to underpin the project approach with a clear historical analysis. After the
students had collated and evidenced their research, they proceeded to investigate
design through a combination of creative cutting and flat pattern drafting. Both
methods of pattern cutting were taught to the students as separate modules in the
previous Semester, and this project asked them to develop an understanding of how
to work with both methods, which is a key element of their future studies. It was
highly important, that the All Walks Icon Project still provided the students with
the mandatory academic skills required from the course.
Another core component of a fashion design course is in teaching the students
about fabric qualities and their application toward fashion design. The Icon Project
asked the students to prototype their ideas in jersey fabrics, one of the most
common fashion fabrics internationally. To ensure parity in the technical aspects
and cohesion of the collection, the fabrics were sourced by the lecturing team in a
broad colour spectrum, so that the students were able to consider the emotional
impact of colour on their Icon. Each student was then able to select colours that
they felt flattered the body and worked with the variety of skin tones represented
within the group.
 Mal Burkinshaw and Linda Shearer 97
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The students proceeded to work with two lecturers in design and pattern-
cutting, who each has firsthand experience of bespoke design on a one to one client
basis, and who were therefore suited to the roles of overseeing the project
development. Key to the success of the project was in ensuring that emotional
consideration to the Icon was encouraged within lecturer to student dialogue. Each
week the design lecturer would maintain an overview of the methods that the
students were using to understand diversity of image. The majority of the students
was highly receptive to this concept and developed close working relationships
with their Icon.
The project also demanded that the students retained responsibility for
allocating and timetabling key meetings with their Icon into their curriculum.
Rather than comprehensively structure all the project timescales for the students, it
was felt that by asking them to self-direct key aspects of the project, they would
develop important transferable skills. The students were asked to evidence the
results of fittings and design meetings twice a week, in design and cutting classes,
where the lecturers would note which students demonstrated the ability to self
direct their studies and, more importantly, the extent to which each student was
engaging with the project.
Not all students demonstrated ‘emotional consideration’ to their Icon and in
such instances the lecturers met with the students in question to discuss this. To
manage the situation in a non-confrontational way, each student was asked to
consider how their Icon must have felt emotionally about the lack of contact, and
the effect it would have on her self-esteem; for example that the Icon thought that
the student did not like her personally, or had not found her age or body type
inspiring. Once the student understood that poor time keeping and attitude to the
project had a direct negative emotional impact on another individual she proceeded
to work with her Icon both sensitively and appropriately. This scenario occurred
with two students out of twenty-two, and whilst it was initially viewed as a failure
of the project, it soon became apparent that this was a core part of the learning
process for the students.
The key outcome of the project was to provide a showcased segment during the
annual Edinburgh College of Art fashion show in 2011. Presented in Salon Style,
without a catwalk, the task of integrating non-models within such a high profile
show proved to be both frustrating and inspirational. The Icons were asked not to
make eye contact with the audience, and to walk in a natural way, at a slow pace. It
was communicated that the Icons were not expected to act or walk like
professional models, and that this showcase was a celebration of natural beauty.
Feedback from the show was, in the majority, positive. Many women attending the
show found the All Walks Icon Project to be inspiring and confidence building.
Backstage the majority of Icons spoke of feeling confident and attractive, and
this was in stark contrast to how they had anticipated they might feel at the fashion
show. It was also noted how caring the students appeared to be towards each Icon,
98 Emotional Engagement in Fashion Design
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how they would ensure she had water, food or a chair whilst she was waiting to
model. Many of the students stated that they were sad to have finished the
partnerships, and that the Icons had become to them like friends or family.

5. Conclusion
Based on the feedback from staff and students it was evident that this trial of
Emotionally Considerate Design had proved to be educationally viable and of
importance for future development within the academic curriculum. The students
were highly receptive to considering diverse body and beauty ideals as part of the
design process. Their feedback indicated that the project had impacted on their
perception of image and beauty and that they had engaged directly with their Icon
at an emotional level far beyond that of a personal bespoke service situation. The
project also appeared to have a subsequent impact on the level 3 and level 4 design
work which demonstrated a wider consumer market and age base than in previous
years.
The project is being repeated In Edinburgh College of Art during the academic
session 2011/12, this time with students indentifying and selecting their own Icons.
The ethos of this project is also being applied to Emotional Engagement projects at
other institutions across the UK, in fashion, jewellery, photography, branding and
marketing. In parallel to the design project, the Emotional Engagement research
project aims to explore further possibilities of embracing diversity through
emotional consideration in fashion.

Mal Burkinshshaw is Award Leader of Fashion at Edinburgh College of Art and

Director of the All Walks Centre of Excellence for Diversity. His research interests
are Emotional Consideration in Fashion Design.

Linda Shearer is Programme Leader of Fashion Business at Glasgow Caledonian

University. Her research interests are in the areas of Dress and Identity and
Emotional Engagement.
 Section 5

Beauty and the Matrix of Domination

 Professional Beauty: Narratives about Women in the Italian
Medical Institution

Ambrogia Cereda
Abstract
Beauty standards regularly change over time and identify the cultural codes
according to which an individual can be accepted or isolated by a social group; can
take advantage or disadvantage from a situation. In contemporary Western
societies forced adherence to standards of physical beauty seem to have grown
stronger for women as they gained power in other societal arenas, moreover an
intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty has prevented them from politically
and economically climbing the hierarchies of organizations. Studies in economic
theory have investigated different occupations focusing on looks and trying to
quantify the degree to which physical beauty (or the quality that the general public
might ascribe to being good-looking) has relapses in terms of possibilities in the
labour market and actual earnings. What then is the relationship between beauty
and professionalism? This paper aims to reflect upon how beauty standards—
perceptions of physical beauty in women—are socially shaped in the medical
professional sector, and how they can change the set of skills needed for
professional recognition. Data are derived from a pilot study focused on the Italian
medical institution, which is a traditionally masculine realm of activity. Focusing
on the neurological sector in particular, I will try to discuss how beauty can be
considered an element of the professional kit of women belonging to a group in
which look is not usually deemed as a part of their professionalizing practice.
Using a qualitative methodology, based on 15 in-depth interviews to women in
their specialization in neurology I will outline the ways in which beauty standards
are perceived, represented and embodied.

Key Words: Beauty, professions, organization, gender.

*****

1. Beauty in the Everyday Professional Agenda

Beauty standards not only represent the idea of a social group with
psychological factors such as personality, intelligence, grace, politeness, charisma,
integrity, congruence and elegance, but also provide prescriptions as to the way in
which individuals in that community have to manage their physical attributes,
which are valued on a subjective basis. Canons regularly change over time and thus
modify the cultural codes according to which an individual can find him/herself
accepted or isolated by a social group; can take advantage or disadvantage from a
situation. The habit of making ‘visual’ improvements to our body—to make it
102 Professional Beauty
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more perfumed, thinner, curvaceous or refined—has revealed a double dynamic
which has been advanced across the centuries. 1
In contemporary Western societies standards of physical beauty seem to have
grown stronger for women, who have been forced to adhere to pre-constituted
models as they gained power in other societal arenas. Compelling writing about an
unattainable standard of beauty has strongly criticized the prevention of women
from politically and economically climbing the hierarchies of organisations, and
for pushing them to divert their energies, time and money into ephemeral and
subjugating projects. 2
Even if the handiness of beauty in ordinary practice might appear obvious, and
since this study is not considering professions, where a precise bodily image is
explicitly required (e.g. actors, models, newsmen/women, etc.), is not clear yet
why a discourse on professionalism should address the realm of beauty, but it
should, and it has, for reasons related to identity, gender and agency issues.
The proliferation of facilities, and the quest for and practice of embellishment
have paralleled and enhanced the emergence of a liberated postmodern
subjectivity, celebrated through ‘the effacement of the material praxis of people,’ 3
which has reversely rendered beauty a prominent issue in the everyday cultural
agenda. This can be seen as the outcome of another endorsed sociological
assumption on personal identity: one is an individual, only after he/she has
experimented the fall of the grand narration of big traditional society, and feels free
to create his/her own identity: to get rid of the insignia of profession, community
and geography by making a statement about the kind of self, that he/she has
recreated and materialized through a precise project about their body. 4 Therefore,
when social actors have reached this level of self-determination they consider an
appropriate image the best necessary prerequisite of any social—and above all
professional—aspiration. Examples can be found in traditional and new media,
which reinforce the discourse about appearance. Broadcasting new narrations of
makeover practices, common people have experimented and experienced the
miracle of transforming their dull and scruffy personality into a self-confident and
rampant new identity. This vision is obviously created thanks to a period of
training with lifestyle professionals, who make their contribution to the
construction of a discourse about professionalism which includes beautiful
appearance as a part of the toolkit.
Beauty is thus narrated as a (moral) professional task; as a variable about which
anyone has to be conscious to work to make an ideal projection about oneself come
true: to accomplish a personalized project is the goal. This shifts the idea of beauty
from natural gift towards a step in the process of self-accomplishment; it also
transforms a symbolic and cognitive matter into a matter of technical skills and
self-expression, which can be conveyed thanks to the visibility and immediateness
of beauty, and which represent a certificate of social competence.
 Ambrogia Cereda 103
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For reason, instead of being interpreted as a set of passive procedures to
embody cultural standards into cultural subjects, beauty can be investigated as
series of practices in which individuals are learning from the situation and
contributing to the construction of their own desires and objectives; though
sometimes escaping the neat separation between means and ends. In this new
framework an individual can be seen as more or less free to learn and develop
beauty as a skill acquired in social and professionally situated activities, thus
reinforcing the attention to an exterior natural given: ‘only skin deep’; or tuning it
with the meritocracy of the institutional professional system in which he/she is
operating.
This double dimension seems to recall a double dynamic that Georges
Vigarello 5 has pointed out, which is related to the models of behaviour embodied
by the new characters portrayed in traditional and new media. These human
typologies are regarded as examples and at the same time make their body an
object-expression of willpower. If a new element is at stake—appearance—as a
tool, what kind of power is given by it? And, how can the owners of this tool use it
in their profession?
The neurologic medical sector provides a context to understand how it can be
used in a masculine organization by females, who represent the majority of
students in specialization (12 out of 15), and everyday confront themselves with a
complex intertwining of social background and professional socialization that
determine their professional behaviour.
While not reducing beauty practices to a fruitful investment for professional
career achievement, and avoiding to make professional settings the sites for the
production of social discrimination based on beauty, I will try to shed a light on its
role in the construction of feminine professional identities by discussing a concrete
case as an example of institutionalisation, also based on gender differences.
I will do this by first introducing the concept of beauty as a status, discussing
the effects of beauty on cognitions and behaviours, and their interlocking with
gender; I will then consider how beauty, as a part of situated activities, endorses a
two-faced relationship with professionalism, and finally analyse this relationship in
the ritual of the colloquium in the ambulatory.

2. Beauty at Work, or why Women should Care about their Appearance

Considering what I have been discussing, the relationship between individual
choices of being or appearing beautiful, and what this seems to have to do with
professionalism can be discussed only if we analyse the relationship in terms of
individual perception.
Studies about beauty as physical attractiveness have shown that these two
human traits are more interconnected than one could imagine, since attractiveness
can produce a wide range of effects: 6 from creating social advantages over uglier
individuals, to being perceived as capable to do things better than less attractive
104 Professional Beauty
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people (having higher evaluations at school or happier marriages), and to influence
interactions in a successful way (healing psychological distress, selling goods).
These findings have been interpreted as derived from the social structure and
have been grouped into effects on ‘cognitions’, regarding attractive and
unattractive people, and effects on ‘behaviours’ in interaction with those people. 7
The first group includes advantages derived from hypothetical abilities (e.g.
writing better essays, making better swindlers), the second group regards the
advantages derived from different types of subordination or super-ordination that
can be observed in interaction (e.g. white men on black people, men on women).
Webster and Driskell suggest that physical attractiveness is ‘a diffuse status
characteristic in our culture’ 8 and that a series of assumptions are related to this
former. Starting from what common sense has always taught us, that it ‘is
considered better to be beautiful than to be ugly’, they provide a second point
which appears less obvious, and that explains how people who possess the high
state of attractiveness are also expected to possess the high state of other specific
characteristics—in this case, they are considered more competent to pilot a plane;
and especially passing to the third point: ‘people who possess the high state of
attractiveness are also expected to possess the high state of general, unlimited
characteristics’ in their study; these people are seen as better at situations in
general, and are deemed endowed with capabilities of doing ‘things that count in
this world, most tasks, and abstract ability’.
Social expectations related to physical attractiveness are translated into
practical difference when the labour market is taken into account as a field of
research.
Studies in economic theory have investigated different occupations focusing on
looks and trying to quantify the degree to which physical beauty has relapses in
terms of possibilities in the labour market and actual earnings. 9 Evidence has
shown that beauty creates a hierarchy in the continuum of wages in many
professional fields, and in general demographic and labour-market characteristics,
plain people earn less than people of average looks, who earn less than the good-
looking. Moreover, the beauty hierarchy seems to acquire a gendered tone: if the
effects of a beautiful appearance are compared between men and women, it is
shown that unattractive women are less likely than others to participate in the
labour force and are more likely to be married to men with unexpectedly low
human capital. This phenomenon also draws attention to the role of beauty in the
gendered processes of domination within professions.
The structure of the labour market, the relations in the workplace, the control of
the work process, and the underlying wage relationships are always affected by
symbols of gender, processes of gender identity, and material inequalities between
women and men. 10 The young women interviewed in this study find themselves in
the middle of a deep change in the professional setting, which is being transformed
in terms of gender lines, since the majority of students enrolled in this field are
 Ambrogia Cereda 105
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feminine, and represent a generational turnover, not only in terms of age but also in
terms of gendered process. They are thus experiencing a peculiar situation in the
organizational logic of the profession in terms of responsibility, job complexity,
and hierarchical position, all aspects that can be illuminated by a perspective on
gender, thus understanding the rationale according to which the discourse on
professionalism is being recreated and reproduced in this professional sector. Like
any organization, the neurology is crossed by

gendered processes in which both gender and sexuality have

been obscured through a gender-neutral, a-sexual discourse, and
suggest some of the ways that gender, the body, and sexuality are
part of the processes of control in work organizations. 11

As illustrated by the interviewees, the medical sector—and the neurological

qualification in particular—represents a masculine field of competence, where
privileges are transmitted and reproduced in many different ways, but necessarily
aimed at recreating gender hierarchies. What seems to be ignored and denied are
the gender and beauty issues intertwined with the routines of diagnosis and
collective activities.
In these occasions the repetition of a task which needs to be accomplished on a
daily basis - and that necessarily needs to be learnt through intensive practice -
helps omitting any references to beauty requirements while taking hierarchical (and
gender) difference for granted. A typical occasion in which this can be observed is
when specializing students are asked to follow doctors in their ambulatory work.
Officially the role they are playing is that of the younger collaborator who is
learning how to manage colloquia and diagnosis by observing what goes on the
ambulatory, but in the practice this doesn’t seem to occur in the expected way, and
the student ends up covering the task of the secretary who fills in formularies and
calls for patients in the waiting room to be visited. The perception of this
divarication between external appearance and actual work creates a dystonic
sensation about the professionalizing process and challenges the a-sexual/a-
gendered representation of the neurology professional.

This is a work that anyone could do, that has nothing to do with
professionalism since it doesn’t require a qualification in
neurology and it is not related to getting in touch with patients,
but is still part of a process. It is something you are asked to do
and you do it. You are there because there are hierarchies and
roles. 12

Joan Acker has pointed out how regardless their locations in the organizational
hierarchy men have a vested interest in maintaining their gendered advantages.
106 Professional Beauty
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Men not just are passive recipients of organizational advantages but also actively
recreate their dominance every day. They maintain organizational arrangements
and institutional policies that appear to be gender neutral, but that, in fact,
advantage men. They are comfortable with styles of social interaction that sustain
masculine and feminine identities even as they deny doing so. There is no rhetoric
built around the habit of ‘accompanying the professor’ and to make it appear
gender neutral, but the concrete advantage is the symbolic expression of different
degrees of power in the organization: this is not free from beauty variables.
Far from being a neutral field dominated by the laws of meritocracy, the
professions have never avoided discrimination, might it be arising from such
factors like working-class labour unions or upper reaches of corporations or other
aspects related to physical appearance. The professions are, indeed, competing
settings in which multiple factors, especially power struggles, determine schemes
of inclusion/exclusion and rewards. Moreover, considering the evidence derived
form the series of studies I have just mentioned, it is clear that professions involve
situated activities in which many aspects of the professionalizing process escape
the logic of rational and cognitive behaviour.
The other less important tools, which can be interpreted as ‘beauty scripts’ are
still available to anyone in the practice and represent a subterranean way to adapt
to the organization and to provide an example of what Dorothy Smith has called
‘the gender subtext of the rational and impersonal’ which hosts any organization. 13
It is necessary to go beyond gender as category, social role, or identity in order
to understand how gender differentiation and women’s disadvantage are produced.
The processes creating and maintaining sex segregation are complex and vary with
time and place, therefore a way to understand how they are created and maintained
is studying their specific forms in selected contexts.
The medical organization offers an opportunity to shed a light on the dynamics
of these processes since it is developed on hierarchical distinctions and gendered
institutional processes.
The gender perspective postulates a question on the extent to which a particular
institutional area has been moulded by and through gender.
In this study, the health care system has appeared a site at the crossing of many
directories: scientific world, professionalism, caring, and gendered politics,
revealed by the analysis of the process of apprenticeship in neurology as not only
related to gendered hierarchies, but also to patriarchal mechanisms of
inclusion/exclusion from the leading group typical of institutions.

3. Concluding Remarks
In this paper I have tried to answer the questions about the role of gender in the
neurological professional sector, and about the extent to which beauty has got
something to do with professionalism. Analysing how appearance not only
interlaces individual choice and “discursive space” for self-expression, but also
 Ambrogia Cereda 107
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entails an organizational dimension, in which bodies are rendered part of a
performance tuned to the aesthetic of the organization itself. In this framework, the
passion of individual bodies, as well as their capability of being active elements in
the process of reproduction of beauty as a code of expression, is not mere
reproduction of the dictatorship of beauty as accessory, but also choice of a useful
script for the medical practice. Another aspect of the relation between beauty and
professionalism is indeed determined by the social context in which individuals
manifest them, the fact that we recognize them only in interaction.
Similar assumptions characterize the process of specialization in neurology
where having an attractive look might help you receive sooner the results of an
enquiry for a patient or to be rewarded as a unique author for a collective practice
of work.
What I think might appear as still interesting is the way in which students in
their specialization need to find explanations for these events which account for
their un-gendered belonging as scientists, in order to shift the discourse on beauty
and to reinforce study and endurance as the main qualities of a professional.
These latter are often portrayed as non-sufficient for the creation of a highly
professional profile, being care and the focus on the patient as a person the most
important aspects of their work. 14 By denying their membership in a community of
women and who can be deemed as beautiful, female students are taking their
qualification to reinforce a traditional discourse of patriarchal power, according to
which gendered features (i.e. beauty and labour of care) are not the most powerful
tools to access and to be recognized by the community of professionals, unless
authorized by this same power.

Notes
1
George Vigarello, Histoire de la beauté. Le corps et l’art d’embellir de la
Renaissance à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
2
Joan Acker, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’,
Gender and Society 4.2 (1990): 139-158; Kim Chernin, Womansize: The Tyranny
of Slenderness (London: The Women’s Press, 1983); Naomi Wolf, The Beauty
Myth: How Images of Beauty are used against Women. Bantham New York:
Doubleday Dell, 1990; Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western
Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Orbach,
Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age.
London: Penguin, 1993.
3
Bordo, Unbearable Bodies, 29.
4
Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2003).
5
Vigarello, Histoire de la beauté.
108 Professional Beauty
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6
E. Berscheid and E. Walster, ‘Physical Attractiveness’, in Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 7, ed. L. Beikowitz, (New York:
Academic Press, 1974), 157-215.
7
Murray Webster Jr. and James E. Driskell Jr., ‘Beauty as Status’, American
Journal of Sociology 89.1 (1983): 140-165.
8
Ibid.
9
Daniel S. Hamermesh and Jeff E. Biddle, Beauty and the Labour Market National
Bureau Of Economic Research, November 1993, Working Paper No. 4518; Susan
Averett and Sanders Koreman, The Economic Reality of the Beauty Myth, National
Bureau Of Economic Research, November 1993, Working Paper No. 4521.
10
Joan Acker, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies’, 146.
11
Ibid., 11
12
Quotation from interview, woman, 30, married.
13
Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
(Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1988), 4.
14
This is also the mandatory line of the Italian Department of Health Care.

Bibliography
Acker, Joan. ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations’.
Gender and Society 4.2 (1990): 139-158.

Averett, Susan and Sanders Koreman. The Economic Reality of the Beauty Myth,
National Bureau of Economic Research, November, Working Paper No. 4521,
1993.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Chernin, Kim. Womansize: The Tyranny of Slenderness. London: The Women’s

Press, 1983.

Hamermesh, Daniel S. and Biddle, Jeff E. Beauty and the Labour Market, National
Bureau of Economic Research (November 1993) Working Paper No. 4518.

Harper, B. ‘Beauty, Stature and the Labour Market: A British Cohort Study’.
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 62 (2000): 771-800.

Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our
Age. London: Penguin, 1993.
 Ambrogia Cereda 109
__________________________________________________________________

Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 2003.

Webster, Murray Jr. and James E. Driskell, Jr. ‘Beauty as Status’. American
Journal of Sociology 89.1 (1983): 140-165.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used against Women.
New York: Doubleday Dell, 1990.

Ambrogia Cereda is Post-doctoral Fellow at Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona,

where she is developing research issues related to gender identity and emotions.
She also collaborates with Modacult, Centre for the study of Fashion and Cultural
Production at UCSC (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).
 Electrolysis and Ethnicity: The Commodified Star Body in
Classic Hollywood

Kerry McElroy
Abstract
In the first several decades of the twentieth century, the processes of new and novel
ways of controlling the female body began to solidify with cinema, just as they had
with the emergence of each new medium that came before. With the big business
of selling new mass entertainment that happened to be visual, combined with the
ultimate strategic success in the commodification of female beauty to sell films and
products, women's looks and physical standards were scrutinized, policed, and
controlled as never before. Beauty standards became far more rigid, new
technologies allowed a painful pursuit of perfection, and a complicated dance of
‘self-improvement’ for career success versus outright coercion went into full
swing. This chapter meets at the nexus of social control of the female body and
policing of beauty from a perspective of feminist theory and a materialist narrative
of cultural, film, and women's history. The goal is to explore the actress body in
early classical Hollywood. Upon arriving in Hollywood, there were a rigid set of
tasks to literally, turn the woman into someone new and then firmly keep her there.
Once she was a star, the importance was to maintain the illusion of the goddess at
all costs. Numerous autobiographical narratives and histories of the film business
contain the common story of the young woman newly arrived in Hollywood and
‘acquired’ by a studio, which would immediately set about drastic and oft-times
painful changes to her appearance. Early forms of plastic surgery and electrolysis
could be painful or unsuccessful; names were changed and strict diets enforced.
Racial and ethnic features, accents, or idiosyncrasies were amongst the first
elements of identity to go. The actress was reborn and thus transformed into a new
product who could sell anything from stockings to whiteness to proper American
womanhood.

Key Words: Beauty, female body, cinema, history, Hollywood, stars, cosmetic
surgery.

*****

We are all aware of the archetypal figure of the young, hopeful ingénue newly
arrived in Hollywood—innocent, malleable, manipulated into becoming someone
else through name change, crash diet, capped teeth, dyed hair, and new features.
Using historical primary source evidence and taking the approach of cultural and
women's history, however, I sought to shift focus instead to the second act of the
familiar Hollywood story: the one that occurred when the woman was no longer
young, hopeful and fresh, but aging and competing desperately with new talents to
112 Electrolysis and Ethnicity
__________________________________________________________________
maintain her fragile career. The maintenance of the illusion of the goddess at all
costs was nothing less than mandatory, and new medical means to do so were
quietly becoming the order of the day even in the silent era. Whether newly arrived
or hanging on for dear life, what I am particularly interested in, in regards to the
actress in classical Hollywood, is a laying out of a genealogy of the cosmetic
procedure in her progression, and particularly in the process of transformation
undertaken not by either the young ingénue or aging star, but rather imposed upon
her by the studio system and the individuals within it.
Looking at the persona and cultural practice of the classical Hollywood star,
whether in relation to ethnic erasure or cosmetic procedures, represents an attempt
at revitalizing the star theory of the 70s and 80s and successfully merging it with
concerns about race, culture, the body, and spectatorship that became more
prevalent into the 1990s and 2000s. Approaching the persona of the star from a
historical and sociological perspective rather than a psychoanalytic one is
somewhat novel today. Modelled after Maggie Humm’s approach of materialist
attention to the socio-cultural, this envisions ‘spectatorship as a cultural moment’, 1
rather than as a complex inner psychological process common to the traditional
feminist theoretical recourse to the psychoanalytic.
Taking a materialist approach allows us to frame discussion of the body of the
star in classical Hollywood in two intriguing ways: firstly, situating women as
Marxist commodity products exchanged by men, and secondly, as examples of
elements in a Foucauldian power structure and social regime. The first part of the
argument can be borne out by economics, statistics, and anecdote. The second is
evocative of Wolf’s seminal argument in The Beauty Myth that society has a vested
interest in keeping women enslaved to the ideal of physical beauty, with film acting
as a conduit for delivering these values of enforced perfection to the audience, and
as a social policing agent.
With the aforementioned doubled approach, what can we specifically say about
the era of classical Hollywood? Discussion of the female body in film is no less
relevant in any era up to the present day, but there is particular richness in the run-
up to the high classical era of cinema. Wolf dates the era of the beauty myth as
truly kicking into gear with the rise of mass technologies in visual culture. World
War II shifted societal concerns and anxieties, which were then evidenced in film.
Content reflected a shift from 1930s class conflict to 1940s gender concern instead,
which makes a feminist film historical approach between these two periods all the
more relevant.
Taking a feminist approach, however, is not to say that the male star in classical
cinema was unaffected by the unrelenting quest for aesthetic improvement and
perfection. The male star was equally a part of the body reconstruction capitalist
complex—their faces and bodies used to sell not only the films they were in but
products and lifestyles to the audience of consumers. A male star was not equally
likely to see his career dissipate at the first sign of aging, but the emphasis on the
 Kerry McElroy 113
__________________________________________________________________
physical and virility still meant a great deal of insecurity and body sculpting on the
part of male stars as well. There is and was a great deal of anecdotal evidence in
regards to the many surgeries and physical modifications male stars undertook in
this era. A particularly candid and historically valuable contemporary source on the
phenomenon as it affected both genders is a 1930 article in the fan magazine
Photoplay by Harry Lang entitled, ‘Hollywood Discovers Plastic Surgery’.
As Lang bluntly states in the article in regards to the new surgery craze, ‘And
the men go for it, too.’ 2 He cites several examples of famous actors and details
their surgical procedures. Valentino fixed his ‘mad elephant’ 3 ears. Later
biographies and memoirs provided ample evidence of Hollywood’s leading men
having work done. Stories abound about Clark Gable’s teeth, Dean Martin’s nose,
and John Wayne’s toupees, face lifts, and even primitive liposuction. Gary Cooper
had a somewhat unsuccessful face lift that left him yet more displeased with his
aging looks. As his own daughter reported after his death, ‘The aesthetics of aging
drove him nuts.’ 4 Clearly in many ways Hollywood was the archetypical rat race
for both male and female actors. Desperate to stay competitive, aging stars felt
obligated to modify their appearance in order to keep working. As child of classic
Hollywood and satirist Carrie Fisher presciently remarked, ‘We don’t eat our
young, we spit out our old.’ 5
But if we have established that this oppression strikes across both genders,
what, after all, is the value of a feminist approach? What in the role of the
Hollywood star is singular, and singularly more traumatic and challenging, for
women than for men? Obviously, the pressures surrounding aging or flaws for
women were far greater, as they still are today. A leading man could have a
pronounced physical flaw which might be described as ‘rugged’ or ‘unique’ rather
than ‘ugly’ or ‘imperfect’. Women in film have rarely been afforded that luxury.
Similarly, leading men have had successful careers into their fifth and sixth
decades paired with leading ladies who remained the same nubile ages. Female
actors, no matter how talented, typically see their offers dry up, save the occasional
grandmotherly role. As this is still the case today in an age of omnipresent plastic
surgery, one need not guess at how much more dire this situation was for the
working actress in a period of dangerous and not always effective anti-aging
procedures. As Lang wrote, ‘It’s safe to say,’ admitted one of Hollywood’s
foremost plastic conjurers, ‘that the majority of women over 30 in pictures have
had facial adjustments of some sort’. 6 Remembering that this article was written in
1930, this demonstrates a desperate willingness to be guinea pigs on the part of a
large portion of early film actresses.
An intriguing peripheral psychoanalytic argument to our concrete cultural
history here would contend that one glaringly gendered element lay in the dynamic
of sadism and masochism evident in the gender relations of star, film industrialist,
and spectator. There is the implicit masochism of women willing to self-inflict
dangerous new technologies and large amounts of pain in order to meet societal
114 Electrolysis and Ethnicity
__________________________________________________________________
standards of beauty and thus have professional success and public adulation. As
Lang already recognized in 1930’s Photoplay, ‘The suffering that is undergone in
Hollywood in this endless quest for greater beauty is beyond estimation.’ 7 Sadism
on the part of these male cinematic authority figures has been well-documented, as
in the case of Rita Hayworth and studio mogul Harry Cohn, which will be revisited
later, or Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary torturing of Tippi Hedren during the filming
of The Birds.
Beyond contemporary theory and approaches to these historical phenomena, a
cultural approach provides much context to the use of early and experimental
plastic surgery amongst Hollywood actors. Forms of crude cosmetic surgery have
been recounted back to ancient historical texts. In 1818, Carl van Graefe performed
the earliest modern and successful cosmetic surgery, but with neither anaesthetic
nor antibiotics, surgeries were extremely dangerous, incredibly painful, and
definitely unlikely to become popular in an elective context.
It took the cataclysmic carnage and subsequent medical advances of World War
I to give birth to the modern field of plastic surgery. Dr Harold Gilles, a New
Zealander who served on the Western Front in 1915, began to work on the horrific
injuries inflicted by technology in the war and became known as the father of
plastic surgery. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the doctors who advanced the
field and made successful careers for themselves were touted for their wartime
experience. One such doctor who hit the jackpot in early Hollywood, as it were,
was Dr Josif Ginsburg—described as ‘a young Russian, a war-taught plastic
surgeon’ who agreed to be an integral part of Lang's Photoplay article. 8 Lang
describes him as one of the ‘Beauty-Makers of Hollywood’ who has ‘remodelled
more than two thousand faces for the screen’. 9In a confiding tone apropos of a
gossip magazine, Lang writes, ‘You’d be surprised at the famous names whose
screen beauty is synthetic’ created ‘at the hands of these specialists at putting
beauty where it isn’t’. 10
Dr Ginsburg then speaks for himself within the article, outlining his philosophy
and perspective on the patients he sees—although with the Hollywood gossip
machine cranking up to full force at this time, we cannot take verbatim quotes from
him at face value. As Ginsburg explains, when sound came in, Hollywood no
longer needed observable, passive beauty alone but singing and dancing talent,
from the stage. ‘The screen found them on the stage—but found, too, that God had
given them talent but forgotten about their faces.’ 11 Thus, one unnamed surgeon
‘confides’, they ‘come to us and buy our services in the hopes that, beautified, they
may attain screen fame.’ 12 This matter-of-fact, positive rationalization of the
industry is mirrored in the editorializing on the ethics of cosmetic surgery done
within the article by the author. Photoplay’s narrative simply frames the discussion
in terms of gender-free, democratic choice to advance one’s career:
 Kerry McElroy 115
__________________________________________________________________
Are these people wrong? By no means. They are right. Their
faces and their voices are their stock in trade. They have as much
right to try and protect their faces for their business as they have
to take voice culture. 13

Similarly, Lang helpfully points out that ‘the average movie close-up presents a
star‘s face fourteen times magnified! 14
Photoplay even provides a helpful example of the choice faced by two talented
but aesthetically challenged actresses:

Belle Baker thought it over, and decided to do nothing about it.

She’s not in pictures anymore. Vivienne Segal, on the other hand,
decided that no nose was going to cheat her out of success. She
went to Dr Ginsburg. He took a piece of cartilage out of her ear,
and put it where her nose was swaybacked. Now she has
contracts for five pictures ahead. 15

Clearly from this article, a quite cheery picture is painted of a symbiotic

relationship between heroic doctors and professional stars taking steps to work on
their successful careers.
The problem with this feel-good narrative is that historical evidence simply
does not bear it out. There are countless instances of degradation, coercion,
experimentation, extreme pain, disfigurement, and lawsuits. Even Lang’s largely
positive piece cannot help but include prurient details of lawsuits caused by
surgeries gone wrong. He describes cases where ‘face-ruined’ patients went to
court. 16 One such cited example in the article is of Charlie Chaplin’s sister-in-law,
an actress who filed a $100,000 suit alleging that her looks were ruined by a
botched surgery. The article contains an unattributed urban legend of a starlet who
awoke from surgery with a freakish smile that could never be erased. The article
also acknowledges that some doctors would occasionally attempt extremely risky
surgeries outside of the mainstream of medicine, describing actress Mollie O’Day’s
primitive and dangerous 1928 liposuction. As Lang wrote breathlessly, there were
‘pounds of excess tissue carved from her hips and legs! This is one of the most
difficult and dangerous operations in plastic surgery.’ 17 Later reports talk of Mary
Pickford looking ‘mummified’ after a 1920 facelift, and stars like Lucille Ball
having similar problems even in later decades as technologies advanced. 18
Fears about botched surgeries were certainly prevalent, as another anecdote
from Carrie Fisher recounts:

My mother was made to have her ears pinned back and they
wanted her to have a nose job; but she refused the nose job
because they were really butchering them back then. 19
116 Electrolysis and Ethnicity
__________________________________________________________________
In this sense, it seems obvious that women in Hollywood were often used as guinea
pigs for a growing tertiary capitalist industry with ever-closer ties to the primary
capitalist industry that was exploiting them in the first place.
Even a surgery that proved ‘successful’ might have been commanded by a
studio boss on pain of losing a contract. In a fully patriarchal business in which
men made decisions about which women would make vast sums of money for
them and accept their own sort of indentured servitude, how much can we see the
decision to have surgery as belonging to the actress?
There is an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence found in memoirs on the
cruel, misogynistic, financially and sexually exploitative behaviour of powerful
men in Hollywood against both aspiring actresses and established stars. Marilyn
Monroe was called a ‘chinless wonder’ and had an implant in her jaw which, ten
years later, was dangerously reabsorbed into her body. 20 Louis B. Mayer
consistently criticized Judy Garland as fat and unattractive and only allowed her to
maintain a contract if her appearance remained the same after a dramatic diet. This
pressure led to methamphetamine prescription by studio doctors, which in turn led
to a life of drug addiction and eventual death from overdose. It was standard
behaviour to blackmail women into sexual availability. Oftentimes, the lines
between an entertainment career and prostitution were blurred, much as we see
with the pornography and strip club industries today. The slippage of the term
‘casting couch’ into the vernacular snappily sums up the climate of quid pro quo
and coercion in early Hollywood.
In this climate of harassment and misogyny, we can see, to borrow a later filmic
term, the directors, producers, and studio heads as the auteurs of women’s bodies.
Wolf takes this point to a radical conclusion framed in economic terms when she
writes:

Employment demand for cosmetic surgery brings women into an

alternative work reality based on ideas about the use of human
beings as workers, ideas that have not applied to men since the
existence of slavery, before which a slave-owner had a right to
inflict physical mutilation on his workforce. The surgical
economy is no slave economy, of course; but in its increasing
demand for permanent, painful, and risky alteration of the body,
it constitutes ... a category that falls somewhere between a slave
economy and a free market.... The employer, with this
development, can, in effect, cut off parts of a woman’s face. 21

Understanding the commodification of women in the film industry, specifically

in classic Hollywood but in ways that carry on to the present day, can largely be
reduced to questions of capitalist markets. At best, an actress sold her image and
physical labour on the Hollywood market. At worst, she was fully entrenched in
 Kerry McElroy 117
__________________________________________________________________
exploitation. Within the studio system, the emphasis was never on artistry,
innovation, or creative growth. The film industry was an exploitative business
concern which favoured a palatable, manageable product in the form of the
actress—one that could consistently and reliably sell product, whether product was
herself, the film she was in, lifestyle, or actual commercial accoutrements through
outside advertising and testimonials. Large proof of this was how much of a brand
the successful actresses became. What became part of their iconic appeal in later
generations—things like Harlow’s hair, Grable’s legs, Crawford’s shoulder pads, or
Monroe’s curves—were more accurately considered hallmarks of a commercial
brand as far as the studios were concerned.
From a film history perspective, we will conclude with the 1930s as the height
of the power of the Hollywood studio system. Hollywood had completely mastered
the art of harnessing both the woman consumer—the spectator, and the actress to
sell to the women consumer. The spectator is addressed through gossip in the
tabloid magazines, just as today. Addressing the spectator directly in the title of the
Photoplay article, Lang asks, ‘Would you like a new nose?’ 22 The members of the
Hollywood press machine were quite aware of what they were doing in bringing
the audience into one giant metaphorical beauty contest. The film The Two Mrs
Carrolls provided a press kit that suggested contests at local theatres:

All women fall into two general classifications from a beauty

point-of-view. By analysing the attractions of the two beautiful
stars of The Two Mrs Carrolls, contestant should be able to
evaluate her own charms at the same time. 23

With this example it becomes evident that even by the 1920s and 30s there was
something to Wolf’s hypothesis of the beauty myth. The star system and the
commodity system for the average woman consumer parallel one another. As
Doane writes:

Effective operation of the commodity system requires the

breakdown of the body into parts—nails, hair, skin, breath—each
one of which can constantly be improved through the purchase of
the commodity. 24

The visual effect on the screen of the human advertising that was the actress
worked implicitly and tirelessly to do just that. The pressures of commodification
successfully moved from the women of the display professions to the woman in the
theatres.
Suffice it to say that in the myriad methods of exploitation as regards visual
cultures—clearly there has always been a great deal of ugliness in the business of
teaching, standardizing, and attempting beauty: both in coercing showpiece women
118 Electrolysis and Ethnicity
__________________________________________________________________
into, not just commodification, but physical alienation from themselves, and then
their in-turn selling of beauty standards to ordinary women.

Notes
1
Maggie Humm, Feminism and Film (Indiana: Bloomington: 1997), 119.
2
Harry Lang, ‘Would You Like a New Nose? How Hollywood Submits to the
Knife of the Plastic Surgeon in the Name of Beauty’, Photoplay (August 1930): 58.
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Early_Cosmetic_Surgery_IN_HOLLYWOO
D_pdf.
3
Ibid.
4
Andrew Wilson, ‘Hollywood Knives’, Daily Mail Weekend, http://www.daily
mail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-436/Hollywood-Knives.html, Accessed 25 July 2011.
5
Ibid.
6
Lang, ‘Would You Like a New Nose?’, 102.
7
Ibid., 59.
8
Ibid., 58.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 59.
12
Ibid., 102.
13
Ibid., 58.
14
Ibid., 59.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 58.
17
Ibid., 102.
18
Andrew Wilson, ‘Hollywood Knives.’
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used against Women
(New York: Harper: 2002.)
22
Lang, 58.
23
Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
(Bloomington: Indiana: 1987), 30.
24
Ibid., 32.
 Kerry McElroy 119
__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography
A Woman’s Face. Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and Elliott Paul. Directed
by George Cukor. Performances by Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, Conrad
Veidt. MGM, 1941.

Ardmore, Jane Kesner. A Portrait of Joan: The Autobiography of Joan Crawford.

Doubleday: New York, 1962.

DiBattista, Maria. Fast Talking Dames. Yale: New Haven, 2003.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire. Indiana: Bloomington, 1987.

Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 2008.

Gilda. Screenplay by Marion Parsonnet. Directed by Charles Vidor. Performances

by Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready. Columbia Pictures, 1946.

Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington, Indiana University Press,

1997.

Lang, Harry. ‘Would You Like A New Nose? How Hollywood Submits to the
Knife of the Plastic Surgeon in the Name of Beauty.’ Photoplay. (August 1930):
58-60. http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/.

The Lady From Shanghai. Screenplay by Orson Welles. Directed by Orson Welles.
Performances by Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane. Columbia Pictures,
1947.

Leaming, Barbara. If This Was Happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth. New

York: Random House, 1992.

McLean, Adrienne L. Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Idenitity and Hollywood

Stardom. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Ovalle, Priscilla Pena. Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Riviere, Joan. ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’. International Journal of Psycho-

Analysis 10 (1929): 3-13.
120 Electrolysis and Ethnicity
__________________________________________________________________

Thomas, Bob. King Cohn: The Life and Times of Hollywood Mogul Harry Cohn.
Milwaukee: New Millenium, 2000.

Trouble in Texas. Screenplay by Robert Emmett Tansey. Directed by Robert

Bradbury. Performances by Tex Ritter, Rita Cansino, Yakima Canutt. Boots and
Saddles, 1937.

Williams, John. Chasing Pig’s Ears: Memoirs of a Hollywood Plastic Surgeon.

Bloomington: Trafford, 2008.

Wilson, Andrew. ‘Hollywood Knives’. London Daily Mail Weekend. April 28,
2001. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article 41436/HollywoodKnives.html.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. New York: Harper, 2002.

Kerry McElroy is a doctoral candidate at Concordia University, Montreal,

Canada. A student within the doctoral program in the humanities, she focuses on
cinema, women’s cultural history, feminist theory and specifically a genealogy of
the filmic female body in early film. She is currently preparing her dissertation on
the phenomenon of suicide in the emergent tabloid era of the early twentieth
century, focusing on silent film actresses and depictions of female suicide in early
film.
 The Immanent Splendour of Soul: Manifesting Beauty in
‘Pulse Spiral’

Timothy Allen Jackson

Abstract
As the author(s) of Hippias Major surmised, beautiful things are difficult. 1
Beautiful objects are often perceived outside of contextual indexes of meaning.
What we consider beautiful in things are often ideological projections. Interactive,
immersed sensory encounters provide a more dynamic situational context for
beauty to be experienced. The experience of beauty is a rich aesthetic
manifestation of meaning through the interplay of perception and cognition—in the
immanent context of here and now. The idea of beauty localized in objects has
produced an idolatrous illusion that attempts to isolate an object of desire from its
immanent environs. Beautiful systems of being in immanent time and space may
allow for the manifestation of beauty through more dynamic forms of human
engagement in explicit contextual situations. Such systems for human experience
may therefore provide an immanent ground for meaning to manifest. The
Pythagoreans manifested beauty through mathematical ruminations upon harmony.
This practice suggests the possibility for a cybernetics of beauty today, an analysis
of beauty through the experience of aesthetic prosthetics such as works of art.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive installation ‘Pulse Spiral’ is an example of a
beautiful system of meaning. 2 ‘Pulse Spiral’ is a three-dimensional spiral
paraboloid made up of 300 light bulbs arranged according to Fermat's equations.
The piece records and responds to the heart rate of participants who hold a sensor. I
interpret this work as manifesting an immanence of soul through the experience of
splendour—a word from the Latin root meaning brilliance or to illuminate. I apply
Plotinus’ assertions on beauty in my analysis of ‘Pulse Spiral’ in terms of the
relationship of his metaphysical triad of one/intellect/soul. 3

Key Words: Art, beauty, soul, meaning, aesthetics, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse
Spiral, Plotinus.

*****

The soul has to proceed by unknowing rather than knowing.

- St. John of the Cross. 4

…what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from
the soul?
- Plotinus. 5
122 The Immanent Splendour of Soul
__________________________________________________________________
What causes us so much trepidation about the experience of beauty? I suggest it
springs from at least three foundational flaws in Western Philosophy. The first is
the assumption that beauty is intrinsic to ideas, objects, and other isolated entities
and abstractions. The second is the ideological manipulation of human sensory
experience based upon the first assumption using logic and rhetoric into the
production of standards of taste, behaviour, religion, and laws, et al. The third is
the illusion that beauty can be epistemologically understood through
categorization, analysis, and other forms of the scientific method employing
atomization and de-contextualization. These three false axioms manifest in many
forms, from the frame that suggests a painting has a border to the artificial
boundaries of nations, the concept of race, and the illusion of monetary value in
currency. I invite the reader to consider how his or her conception of beauty relates
to power and how so-called standards of taste may indeed serve as a form of
ideological oppression.
Beauty is a human experience of meaning. Meaning cannot exist without
context. Therefore, beauty is by definition generated through our subjective as well
as our environmental context in time and space. The dynamic confluence of
self/situation/environment provides an immanent ground for our experience of
existence—including the experience of beauty. By these precepts, beauty is a verb
since it is an experience, rather than something that resides intrinsically in objects
or concepts. The ancient search for a Principle of beauty is therefore doomed, since
it is the multivariate context that allows for the experience of beauty in human
beings. A critical history of beauty provides a lineage of the abuse of the miracle
that is the experience of beauty.
Fundamentally, the epistemic search for the meaning of beauty is humanistic
rather than scientific. Beauty is an experience of consciousness rather than the
result of reductionist instrumentalist reason. Although the relationship of beauty to
knowledge is problematic in light of my three previous points, the experience of
beauty may result in knowledge. One may experience beauty as an epiphany that
may in turn become knowledge, yet beauty is part of a much more complex
process in this case which may involve intuition as opposed to information
processing. Such exploration requires the analysis and interpretation of elements
bound by a wide range of relationships rather than the pursuit of elemental
particles in isolation.
A cybernetics of beauty is suggested which offers a dynamic system as the
matrix of meaning rather than the search for intrinsic qualities or universal
characteristics of kind in the form of ideas and/or objects. Beauty as experience is
perhaps better served by aesthetics than epistemology.
Though Plotinus may be considered responsible for perpetuating the Platonic
ideals that establish these dangerous assumptions about beauty, he also asserts in
On Beauty that: ‘[o]nly a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of
parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but
 Timothy Allen Jackson 123
__________________________________________________________________
only working together to give a comely total.’ 6 It is reductive in the extreme to
assign beauty to an object or idea since such suppositions deny ontology and
render merely ontic qualities to beauty. In short, meaning through the experience of
beauty is denied being by such trivial language, thus policing our experience of
beauty by improper usage of the term. Beauty ultimately is connected to a
heightened aesthetic encounter with being in a singular time/space.
While these three problematic assumptions that shape our conception of beauty
are far from exhaustive, I must avoid a more extensive critique of the foundations
of beauty for the moment. Nor do I suggest that a contextual awareness of how our
experience of beauty occurs is somehow mutually exclusive with such experiences
serving ideological constructs. Nevertheless, if we consider beauty a multivariate
force upon human experience we may liberate our consciousness from the
insidious slavery that the idealized and de-contextualized notions of beauty render
meaningless to our soulful being. My project is to serve as a witness to the
systemic and contextual nature of the experience of beauty through an
interpretation based upon personal experience of a work of art.
I offer here analysis and interpretation of Rafael Lozano Hemmer’s ‘Pulse
Spiral’ based upon these premises of beauty. I suggest that this work of art
manifests Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital (vital impetus or life force) and
metaphorically explores Plotinus’ metaphysical triad of one/intellect/soul. I refer
here explicitly to the installation of ‘Pulse Spiral’ at the Pei Ling Chan Gallery as
part of the 2011 deFINE ART Program at the Savannah College of Art and Design
in Savannah, Georgia. The exhibition was described as:

… an immense hanging sculpture composed of hundreds of light

bulbs that illuminate the gallery by responding to visitors’
heartbeats. As is signature of Lozano-Hemmer’s work, this
spectacular piece links technology, often considered cold and
impersonal, to an unexpectedly joyful, personal and even
spiritual experience. 7

A more technical description is offered on the artist’s website in the following

passage in reference to an earlier installation of the work in Moscow:

Pulse Spiral is a three-dimensional spiral paraboloid made up of

400 light bulbs arranged according to Fermat's equations, an
efficient spatial distribution along a surface which is found in
plant phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves and cells in roots for
example). The piece records and responds to the heart rate of
participants who hold a sensor underneath. 8
124 The Immanent Splendour of Soul
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The installation in Savannah was similar to previous installations except that
300 bulbs were used and the interactive participant stood in front of the sculpture
rather than in under it. I should also mention that the room was smaller than in
previous installations and included a metal plate in the ceiling, which offered a dull
reflection of the work above, which appeared to dissolve into a golden haze. A
further description will be provided as needed in my analysis of the work.
It is important to acknowledge that in all cases of attempting to communicate
aspects of the experience of beauty, one is removed from the experience in time
and space as well as imprisoned by the linguistic confines of this medium. This
undertaking therefore attempts a poetic engagement with beauty through my
personal and shared experience with this work as an aesthetic interactive witness.
‘Pulse Spiral’ may be interpreted as an aesthetic prosthetic in the form of a
soulful memento vitalis. Unlike the memento mori reminding us of our own
mortality, a memento vitalis suggests the powerful gift of living in this moment.
The work is only possible through the offering of a sample of our unique vis viva,
or living force—our pulse. Each person who enters their pulse into the system
becomes invested in the work, their unique, and usually hidden signature of life
given form in this intimate, yet monumental transient social sculpture. ‘Pulse
Spiral’ is a sculpture that, with our participation, manifests traces of our collective
residual moments of being alive. This suggests Heidegger’s concept of dasein
(being-there). 9
‘Pulse Spiral’ is richly Catholic in form and process, involving a participatory
ritual communion with the reflection of a larger manifestation of life, a subtle
acoustic presence, and brilliant and dynamically fluctuating illumination. The
flickering bulbs conjure the votive or vigil candles of remembrance and prayer
found in Catholic churches. While vigil candles are burning in the present they
refer to life in the immediate past or future, an immanent extension of being
beyond now. ‘Pulse Spiral’ suggests a vigil by offering a moment of communion
with the living force of the last three hundred members who participated in this
communion of life ritual.
The biometrically transcoded representation of the participant’s living force
rises in a spiral assent as others enter their pulses in a sequential procession. This
process culminates in your transfiguration from light into the beyond as a
transcendent metaphoric force of Henri Bergson’s élan vital impelling life to
overcome the downward entropic drift of matter, instead to be released into the
cosmos as energy in the form of light and heat. This work translates our explicit
life force as a pulse into a code that in turn is visualized as light and produces a
subtle sound as each light’s incandescent filament glows as a representation of a
single heart.
While ‘Pulse Spiral’ is intensely visual and auditory, the haptic interface is
unexpectedly rich. The initial entrance from the unseasonably cold winter in
Savannah into the warm glow of the gallery is beckoning. The metal handles which
 Timothy Allen Jackson 125
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gather the biometric data from each participants pulse is cold, hard, and slightly
rough to the touch. Yet in a matter of seconds, the work goes dark and the bottom
bulb begins to cycle the pulsing glow mirroring the rhythm and force of the
heartbeat of the participant holding the handle interface at that moment. This
produced a strange sense of a cybernetic merger of my living force (élan vital) with
this sculpture. This experience embodies one of the most compelling aspects of
great interactive works of art, the sense of permeability between our mind, body,
and soul with the world around us.
Through our immersive interactive engagement with ‘Pulse Spiral’ we may
come to a deeper awareness of our being intricately bound to this dynamic world
rather than apart from it. We are not merely material objects but dynamic entities
of energy with mysterious connections to the cosmos. This is not an epistemic
closure in the sense of knowledge but rather an opening to understanding. We are
faced with the impact of reductionist, materialist instrumentalist reason upon
human consciousness. Beauty as a state of being thus awakens an awareness of our
human autonomy, agency, criticality, and universality—explicit core values of the
Enlightenment.
This awareness was made deeper in my experience of the work because of the
spatial location of the work. In order to see the spiral nature of the progression of
the sculpture, the visitor is invited to lie down on the floor beneath the spiral. As in
many works that involve a prone posture, we are more likely to relax and begin to
experience the work more cinematically and even in a more socially playful
manner. What I found most compelling in this position was how my body was
literally feeling the work. By extending my hands toward the work, I could feel the
warm glow of the bulbs as a fluctuating atmospheric current. Slowly, I was able to
sense the pulse thermally, through the multisensory visual, auditory, and tactile
perceptions merging into an intimate Gesamtkunstwerk of the collective élan vital.
The work was dynamically porous, a being-there where my biological energy
collaborates as osmotic gradient to the energy produced by the work. While my
experience of the work was unique based upon my location in time and space
(which indeed is universally true of all experience) there were rich experiential
overlays shared with others having the sensory encounter, a social aesthetic
experience of revelation and transformation as a communion to/of/with life.
Such moments are manifestations of beauty precisely for producing the feeling
of humanistic unity, metaphysical wholeness, and an immanent integrity of
presence. Intuitive perception probes the flow of duration in its concreteness, from
education to analysis, which shatters the continuity of being into static fragmentary
concepts, as sublime seas crashing into the linguistic shards of a coastline.
Aesthetic experiences are intuitive in the sense that the rushing together of
elements seems to leap to meaning in a manner that defies sequential or logical
analysis. Nevertheless, I hold there to be a metaphorical and philosophical calculus
126 The Immanent Splendour of Soul
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of sorts at work in the mystery of beauty, and it is the essential distinction of logic
and reason as articulated by artist Robert Irwin in the following passage.

Reason/individual/intellect/feeling: Reason is the processing of

our interface with our own subjective being.

Logic/community/intellect/mental: Logic is the processing of our

interface with our objective constructs, our social being. 10

Beauty as a human experience of meaning uses reason. Meaning cannot exist

without context, which is often structured by Irwin’s association of logic with our
social being. As a cognitive intuition, the experience of beauty is reasoned through
our subjective sensations in response to the logic of our environmental context in
time and space. It is in this manner that an immanent ground for our experience of
beauty emerges. The meaning of metaphors seems to emerge from a similar hybrid
structure of subjective and social relationships.
My mysterious yet ontologically true experience of beauty through the interface
of ‘Pulse Spiral’ also suggests Plotinus’ curious enfolding metaphysical unity of
the concepts One/Intellect/Soul. Plotinus relays the Platonic idea that the One is the
omnipresence of Good in essentially cosmological terms. We may trace this
concept back to our immediate source of all that is good in the sun as the ultimate
source of life on this planet. The concept of intellect is ontology, the realm of being
which included the Platonic Forms as well as all we can experience through our
senses. Plotinus’ concept of the soul is a metaphysical triad of three types of soul
that differentiate roughly according to cosmology, ontology, and psychology.
Plotinus also considered the universe as a living being:

This universe is a single living being embracing all living beings

within it, and possessing a single Soul that permeates all its parts
to the degree of their participation in it. Every part of this
sensible universe is fully participant in its material aspect, and in
respect of soul, in the degree to which it shares in the World
Soul. 11

In ‘Pulse Spiral’ we are offered a portal through which to momentarily merge

with this single living being. As we flow through this portal we have a chance to
experience this manifestation of enfolding soul as a matrix for humanism. Our
participation in the work is not a representation or a simulation, but rather a
manifestation of life by entering our heart beat as élan vital, an intimate
communion of our presence with 299 other individual souls. Upon careful visual
observation, we see the unique signature of each individual pulse in each
fluctuating light bulb. We also perceive the emergence of complexity out of a
 Timothy Allen Jackson 127
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multiplicity of relatively simple reactions, indeed a strong emergence. In such
cases, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It is also revealing
that each bulb in the work also reflects all other bulbs in the system. This suggests
an interpretation of our individual soul as held in a reflexive, and indeed reflective
relationship with the world soul as suggested by Plotinus. What we experience is
the emergence of life extended beyond the loneliness of human bodies into the
splendour of social aesthetic being.
In art, science, and philosophy strong emergence defines the interconnectivity
of systems in a manner that produces an irreducible outcome due to the reactive,
adaptive, or interactive relationships of elements as a whole system. ‘Pulse Spiral’
merges the individual/world soul(s) into a monumental manifestation of Bergson’s
concept of élan vital. This emergent meaning resonates sympathy and/or empathy
of life, manifesting beauty as individuated perception of the social system.
Plotinus’ ruminations on the notion of a single living universe seem to parallel this
thought in the following passage.

A sympathy pervades this single universe, like a single living

creature, and the distant is near ... Like parts lie not in contact but
separated, with other parts between, yet by their likeness they
feel sympathy … and in a living and unified being there is no
part so remote as not to be near, through the very nature that
binds the living unity in sympathy. 12

In Constantin Brâncusi’s ‘Endless Column’ the force of life is passively

suggested as rising up beyond the top of the sculpture. However, unlike ‘Endless
Column,’ there is no static suggestion of élan vital in ‘Pulse Spiral.’ Instead, life is
manifest through this aesthetic prosthetic as the immanent splendour of soul. A bit
of our energy flows upwards with others in a transfiguration of being, a metaphoric
journey of vital impetus into the cosmos.
Finally, as our illuminated pulse moves up the spiral to inevitably exit the
database body of this social sculpture there may be a moment of sadness, a sense of
loss for the inevitable end of our individuated life force. Yet we might also wonder
of our transcoded illuminations projecting into the cosmos as a gentle rustle of
light and heat.
In the humanistic search for Socrates’ meaning of the care of the soul, Plato
mistakes a knowledge of the forms to be also a knowledge of the good. Plato’s
analogy of the ideal chair as a disembodied virtual construct thus still leaves us
without a place to sit. Socrates care of the soul would seem to suggest that beauty
is not in the eye or even idea of the beholder but rather in the being of beauty,
which arises with our experiences with these forms—in context. The concept of
Platonic Heaven thus offers only idols without meaning since these forms float in
128 The Immanent Splendour of Soul
__________________________________________________________________
isolation without context, in existential crystalline perfection. To know the ideal
chair requires us to take a good sit.
A moral philosophy of beauty is not premised upon forms for our meaningful
existence, but rather how and why we form and are formed by our experience of
existence. ‘Pulse Spiral’ reveals some of the rich mystery we may experience as
part of our care of the soul. By connecting our hearts in this ‘Pulse Spiral’ we come
to know something of meaning through this metaphor of life. This work of art
provides a vehicle for mind, body, and soul that takes you to the destination of life
—and provokes wonder of what mystery awaits us after life.

Notes
1
Plato, Hippias Major, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Volume 9, trans. W. R. M. Lamb
(London: Harvard University Press, 1925), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0180:text=Hipp.%20Maj, accessed 12 June 2011.
2
Documentation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s ‘Pulse Spiral’, 2011,
http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/pulse_spiral.php, accessed 22 June 2011.
3
Hazard Adams, Critical Theory since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 105-113.
4
St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. 1. Ch. 4. #5, http://www.inner
explorations.com/chmystext/stquotes.htm, accessed 2 June 2011.
5
Plotinus, On Beauty (Ennead I, 6), http://books.google.com/books?id=DcbIznjj
HWcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q
&f=false, accessed 5 June 2011.
6
Ibid.
7
Documentation of Pei Ling Chan Gallery Exhibition as part of the 2011 deFINE
ART Program at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia,
http://www.scad.edu/exhibition/rafael-lozano-hemmer.cfm, accessed 22 June 2011.
8
Documentation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Spiral.
9
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: Doubleday, 1961), x, xi, 8.
10
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A
Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (London: University of California Press,
1982), 135.
11
Paul Harrison, Plotinus: Union with the One, http://www.pantheism.net/paul/
plotinus.htm, accessed 14 June 2011.
12
Ibid.
 Timothy Allen Jackson 129
__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography
Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1971.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston:

Beacon Press, 1969.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York:

A.S. Barnes, 1944.

———. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by

Mabelle Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946.

Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P. F Collier and Son,
1909.

Deborg, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Dissanayake, Ellen. Homoaestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New
York: Macmillan, 1992.

Harrison, Paul. Plotinus: Union with the One. http://www.pantheism.net/paul/

plotinus.htm. Accessed 14 June 2011,

Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph

Manheim. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Translated by Charles Bennett. New York:

Walter J. Black, 1946.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin

Smith. London: Routledge, 1998.

Plato. Symposium. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Walter Black, Inc.,
1942.

———. Hippias Major, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Volume 9. Translated by W. R.

M. Lamb. London: Harvard University Press, 1925.
130 The Immanent Splendour of Soul
__________________________________________________________________

Plotinus. On Beauty. http://books.google.com. Accessed 5 June 2011,

Ranciere, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Stephen

Corcoran. New York: Continuum, 2010.

St. John of the Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel. http://www.innerexplorations.com/

chmystext/stquotes.htm. Accessed 2 June 2011.

Virilio, Paul. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Translated by Philip Beitchman.

New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.

Weschler, Lawrence. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life
of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin. London: University of California Press,
1982.

Timothy Allen Jackson is Professor of New Media Art in the Art History
Department of the School of Liberal Arts at Savannah College of Art and Design in
Savannah, Georgia USA.
 Section 6

Beauty in Culture and Community

The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion

Mariette Julien
Abstract
The various manifestations of fashion present an excellent indicator of the
prevalent values in communities and sub-cultures, and even in society at large.
Feminine fashion is one of the most telling—indeed revealing—cultural
manifestations of our time. It reveals of our epoch the way relations among people
and things are organized. With regards to contemporary fashion, you can observe
the dominant trends of individualism, consumerism, as well as potentially more
egalitarian relations among people. It also acts as a mirror of the communal ethics
apparent today, an ethics not tied to duty or collective well-being, but an ‘ethics
corresponding to a specific apprehension of the lived world’ 1 —in other words, an
ethics of authenticity. This text proposes to demonstrate that the ethics of
authenticity is instrumental in determining the rebellious, sporty, and sexual nature
of contemporary femininity.

Key Words: Ethics and aesthetics, democracy and aesthetics, hypersexuality and
fashion, feminine fashion, rebellious fashion, teenage culture.

*****

1. Introduction
We are currently witnessing a general attraction among women towards various
marginal styles: rebellious, sporty, playful and even fetishist fashions. Similarly,
we can see that the trends of the last couple of decades have valorised these
adolescent behavioural stereotypes: rebellious (appearing not to care about
clothing), playful (sporty, athletic and ludic clothing), and sexually enthusiastic
(hypersexual clothing). It’s difficult to deny the rebellious and youthful signature
of contemporary style and also to dissociate it from the current postmodern trend
among many adults to remain for as long as they can within the indeterminate and
carefree world of the young.
Since the 1950s and the emergence of the Rockers, who were the first
adolescents to fully display their insouciance and desire to indulge in life’s
pleasures, the conception of a full and meaningful life has totally changed—so
much so that the ‘juvenile delinquent’ is one of society’s most glorified
behaviours, described by Ève Boissonnault as expressing what is on one’s minds,
letting oneself be guided by emotions, escaping social constraints, having fun,
being open to all forms of experimentation, taking risks, not compromising, being
different, and living in the moment. 2 With the prominence of youth culture, it has
become trendy to behave playfully, boldly, and without restraint. As well, Damien
Le Guay has underlined how rudeness, disobedience, and total disclosure are now
134 The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion
__________________________________________________________________
perceived as natural and authentic attitudes. 3 This basically represents a return to a
more primal state, before people learned the rules of socially accepted behaviour—
in other words, before they become adults. And certainly, this continual concern
with being disobedient has implications for appearance. It leads people to choose
particular clothing, hairstyles and body ornaments formerly reserved for the
rebellious. With regards to feminine fashion, consider the fetish clothing, stiletto
high-heels, piercings and suggestive tattoos that have infiltrated mainstream culture
through the formerly marginalized worlds of prostitution, sado-masochism, and
pornography.
Contemporary feminine fashion, whether casual or formal, strives above all for
sexiness and rebelliousness, such that contemporary Western women are exposing
more of their bodies than women at any other time in history. Accordingly, this
text will attempt to show that this desire to appear sexy and rebellious reflects the
primary contemporary ethical stance towards the world. It is an ethics unrelated to
duty or collective well-being, but rather an ethics corresponding to a way of
perceiving the lived world—an ethics founded in aesthetics, and an ethics of
authenticity.

2. A Fashion Inspired by more Equal Human Relations

However, in addition, contemporary women’s fashion from the fetishistic to the
sporty is underpinned by the same logic: the logic of democracy. Like other types
of social organization that preceded it, the forms of democracy that have developed
over the last two centuries in Western society have had a significant influence over
mores and behaviours. Democracy has given rise to a certain individual freedom
and has given great value to personality and individuality. As Gilles Lipovetsky
has remarked, fashion can be considered as one of the prime manifestations of this
concern over the particularity of the individual. 4
Democracy has promoted the adoption of more equal human relations, which
has led to a re-evaluation of moral, religious, and civic codes. The consequent
disappearance of prohibitions and the dissolution of hierarchies are reflected in
today’s appearances. Hypersexual fashion inspired by pornography, casual clothing
replacing more traditional styles, and ethnic symbols worn out of context all
suggest the detachment of the individual from a previous submission to religious,
institutional or political power. However, even if we no longer dress to explicitly
challenge the rules established by such an authority, the abundant signifiers
associated with fashion have created a standard discourse of appearance. Take
tattoos and piercings, for example. Even though they reflect individual choices,
these days they exemplify what Michel Maffesoli has called an invisible force that
fosters a sense of belonging and creates social bonds. 5 As well, despite the fact that
outfits increasingly stand out for what they expose, they are generally based in a
static sartorial lexicon that hasn’t changed in some time: jeans, t-shirts, visible
underwear, tight pants, leggings, etc.
 Mariette Julien 135
__________________________________________________________________
The postmodern individual constructs her look starting from subtle variations
that makes her feel original, even marginal. This is the distinction sign that allows
the individual to convey uniqueness even while hairstyles, outfits, and body
decorations are neutralized through their participation in a common discourse. This
search for originality reflects the importance given to the Self in Western society,
and it has also encouraged the eroticization of the body. For David Le Breton, 6
tattoos, scarification, and piercing are not only the function of a playful new
approach to the body, but also a form of auto-eroticization, an interesting
phenomenon particularly related to women. While body adornment used to attract
a variety of adherents from diverse social backgrounds, today it has become more
popular among women. A recent Canadian study reports that women have more
piercings (69%) and tattoos (61%) than men, and that they are also generally more
interested in getting tattoos. 7 These statistics attest to the new freedom that women
have used to take ownership of their bodies and create their own identities.
Presumably, the attraction among women to tattooing—until recently in Western
society associated primarily with marginality and masculine aggressiveness—
derives in part from perhaps unconscious aspirations towards equality.
Certainly, the rebellious style, once limited to men, is now attracting women:
from shaved heads to shaggy, messy hairstyles to the bad girl look. At the same
time, jeans and the t-shirt, the two most famous fashion icons of adolescent revolt,
have become the favourite items in women’s closets, and sometimes the only
things found there.
As first announced by Alexis de Tocqueville, 8 democratization has created
among individuals an increasing concern with equality, while at the same time left
them isolated and subject to their own desires. Increasingly self-centred,
individuals today feel obliged to reassure themselves in terms of the tastes, and the
desires, of others. Psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron speaks of the current phenomenon
of extimacy, whereby each person needs to be noticed by others in order to feel
legitimated. 9 One of the most eloquent manifestations of extimacy, as well as the
democratization of fashion, is street fashion. Followers of this broad trend claim to
be inspired by fashion without really following it, and they create their own looks
by drawing on diverse influences from pretty much anywhere. More and more
street fashion blogs are appearing, and their goal is to ‘humanize fashion by
showing real people living real lives.’ 10 But looking at these provocatively dressed
real people, we have to wonder whether the essential criteria for appearing real and
authentic are not sex-appeal, originality, or even eccentricity.
In any case, Lipovetsky has said that in trying to be true and authentic, ‘the Self
becomes a floating space with neither moorings nor reference points, a pure
openness, adapted to accelerated combinations, to the fluidity inherent in our
systems.’ 11 Indeed, doesn’t the great variety of styles available today represent the
indeterminacy and hesitation that Le Guay calls the ‘collapse of personality.’ 12
136 The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion
__________________________________________________________________
And in searching to be true and authentic, don’t women pass from the desire to
become somebody to a desire to be themselves?
Exposed thongs, midriff-baring shirts, low-cut jeans, high heels, plunging
necklines, thigh-high boots, miniskirts, tight jeans, leggings, jeggings: it’s
undeniable that contemporary fashion above all else proclaims the sexual
availability of women. Some critics, such as Florence Montreynaud, 13 have
denounced these fashions as exhibitionist and lacking reference points, valorising a
trashy or rebellious style; others see them as a way to confront prudishness and the
values instilled by Christianity. However, the fact remains that the bad girl image
does attract women. Valérie Steele attributes this attraction to the fact the sexy look
simultaneously combines sex and power. 14 It thus seems difficult to deny the
connection between women’s sexualized appearance and their quest for freedom
and authenticity.

3. Authenticity through Nudity

Theodor Adorno felt that the increasing search for authenticity among
individuals in the 1950s could be described objectively as ‘an ideology that
encourages the treatment of men [and women] as objects’. 15 For Adorno, the
notion of a pure self is a sham because human beings do not exist in themselves.
Instead, as Le Guay posits, people become human through conversation, discussion
and interaction: ‘cultural conversations, interior discussions with the self, and
interactions with one’s alter egos’. 16 For Le Guay, the continual concern with
being authentic or as natural as possible leads to proximity. He believes
authenticity to be close, massive, brutal, and violent, whereas artifice introduces
distance. For him, the contemporary desire to be natural, the need to be authentic,
the predominance of the visual in our society, and the current imperative to be
transparent are all interdependent. Eugène Enriquez agrees, pointing out that the
contemporary world is made to be seen, not understood; in such a context, the
watchword is transparency. 17 Reality TV is a good example of this phenomenon,
but it’s not the only arena where people expose their intimacy without wondering
whether others are interested—it is a widespread phenomenon throughout society.
Indeed, ‘the display of the Self has become a contemporary fashion practice […
and] the exhibition of our privacy seems to prove our uniqueness,’ writes Henri-
Pierre Jeudy. 18
As well, the contagion of sartorial immodesty that some have severely
denounced is founded in the obligation to be transparent, which is connected to the
desire to appear authentic. Showing as much of their body as possible, and thus
symbolically pretending to have nothing to hide, women, and also increasingly
men, are under the impression that they are coming closer and closer to reaching
their natural states.
However, the women who see exhibition as a way to display their
independence are not entirely mistaken. History shows us that men have long been
 Mariette Julien 137
__________________________________________________________________
deciding how women are able to display their bodies. By dressing in a sexy way,
women are announcing that it is they who decide whether or not to expose
themselves with regard to others. At the same time, this is connected to their
freedom to choose sexual partners. 19
In opting for a provocative style, and adopting tattoos and piercings, women
are signifying that they own their bodies and thus feel freer and more real. As an
illustration, most women over 40 who get tattoos are in fact recently divorced. 20
These women doubtless have the impression that they are taking back possession
of their bodies and recovering their freedom. Marking the body thus becomes proof
of their freedom, as well as a personal statement that they are proud to exhibit.
The sociologist Jean Baudrillard certainly wasn’t wrong in stating that women
become liberated in proportion to the degree that their bodies are liberated. 21 It
seems that the unveiling of a new female body part, which has been occurring
steadily since the 1920s, is associated with a new form of liberty: access to public
life, a better paying job, control over pregnancy, sexual pleasure, education,
independence and access to influential jobs. 22
For at least the last decade, we have witnessed the exposure of yet another part
of the female body, this time one of the most intimate—the midriff. Is not the
display of this part connected to the increasing freedom among women to have
many sexual experiences with multiple partners over the course of their lives? The
sociologist Serge Chaumier reports that the younger generation is opting for
independence in greater numbers, rather than the traditional romantic union for
life. 23 In any case, by wearing midriff-baring tops, see-through shirts, exposed
underwear, women both young and old are challenging conventions, shocking
others, and pushing the limits of announcing their sexual availability. At the same
time, they are denigrating bourgeois mores and adhering to rebellious appearances
based on authenticity.

4. Authenticity as an Ethical Value of Feminine Fashion

The valorisation of self-expression and the search for authenticity now seem to
characterise the contemporary mentality and are establishing new behavioural
trends. For Élyette Roux, these two imperatives can only be associated with an
ethical attitude, that is to say, an approach to the world and an aesthetic that exalts
the sensuous realm. 24
For Roux, we cannot dissociate an ethics that is founded in personal will or
desire from an aesthetic approach to the world based in sensory knowledge. The
original, novel way that each person organises its sensory world in order to
communicate her vision of the world corresponds squarely with an ethical position.
This is similar to what Michel Maffesoli argues, with his creation of the term
aesthetic to describe the post-modern style that connects ethics (as a manner of
being) with aesthetics (as shared feeling or experience). 25 And indeed, the ethics
138 The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion
__________________________________________________________________
that Paul Ricoeur describes as the profound desire for a fulfilling life can hardly be
dissociated from aesthetics. 26
By approaching ethics as a mode of apprehending the lived world, 27 it is
possible to consider authenticity as the ethical foundation of contemporary
feminine fashion. However, due to the controversial nature of the fashion, the use
of the term ethical can be a bit shocking. This is because ethics and morals
generally refer to ‘that which is considered good’ 28—personal will in the case of
the former, and duty in the case of the latter. 29 But, it is important to remember
that the quest for authenticity, one of the consequences of individualism, initially
began with such a good intention: approaching the most natural and real state of
being.
In addition, the need to be authentic is increasingly on display in Western
society, in many different ways. It is doubtless a function of the decline of religion
and the collective questioning of institutions and morals, as Western society seems
intent on further progress, calling for more reality, sincerity and more of the
natural. And fashion certainly cannot escape these currents. It has become an
ethics, a way of being in the world, a response to the obligation to be authentic.
Whether or not we are conscious of it, authenticity nonetheless plays a strong
role in determining the rules of how we live together in society. Indeed, ‘the
relatively recent ethics of authenticity belong to modern culture’. 30 This idea has
developed since the end of the 18th century, when the West began to believe that
each person possessed his own particular way of being. 31 It has since become
deeply engraved in the collective consciousness, so much so that these days it
guides social relations and, moreover, favours the individual over the community.
Since respect for the individual today has acquired such deep moral significance,
social regulation cannot easily be imposed by any authority, and ethics thus
provides an alternative that fills in the gaps.
Whether critics make parallels between hypersexual fashion and the
resurgence of sexual stereotypes after decades of feminist struggle, 32 worry about
the impact of the eroticization of young girls on their adolescence and adulthood, 33
or denounce the ignorance of the dangers of not respecting modesty, 34 they all
want to think that they are developing tools to help better the lives of others. But,
taking a step back, as long as the quest for authenticity and self-expression guide
the actions and thoughts of individuals, it will remain difficult to promote
behaviours and attitudes that require a concern for the other.
The primary imperative behind ethics is not to consider it as an obligatory and
universal reference system. 35 Ethics should serve more as a guideline that we
adhere to and create through our choices, and an isolated system of ethics has no
other foundation than itself; 36 it depends on the social and historical conditions that
gave rise to it. 37 Thus, it’s not surprising to see that the same system of ethics can
lead to entirely different interpretations, especially with respect to the search for
identity. For example, some women will see in hypersexual fashion a way to
 Mariette Julien 139
__________________________________________________________________
display their liberty and approach their essential being, while others associate it
with a form of enslavement that undermines women’s integrity. The same ethics of
authenticity has thus come to justify two diametrically opposed perceptions. This
makes sense, considering that the quest for truth and for the natural is always
accompanied by a blurring of identities, which can only be expressed in paradox.
Indeed, to witness this you need only to take one look at contemporary women’s
fashion: adolescent styles for adult women, adult styles for adolescents, and the
prostitute look for liberated women.

Notes

1
André Lacroix, ‘L’éthique à la croisée des chemins’, in Sociologie de l’éthique
(Montréal: Liber, 2008), 69.
2
Ève Boisssonnault, ‘Le portrait du masculin dans le cinéma américain de genre
‘délinquance juvénile’ des années 1950’ (M.A. diss., Université du Québec à
Montréal, 1998).
3
Damien Le Guay, L’empire de la télé-réalité (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance,
2005).
4
Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide: essai sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris:
Gallimard, 1996).
5
Michel Maffesoli, ‘Le devenir mode du monde’, Métaphysique de la mode
(Bruxelles: Amis de la Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2007).
6
David Le Breton, Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercings et autres marques
corporelles (Paris: Métailié, 2002).
7
Bernard Andrieu, ‘Piercings, tatouages et implants’, Cerveau & Psycho 22
(2007): 44-47.
8
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, trans. Eduardo Noll
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1990).
9
Serge Tisseron, ‘Les nouveaux visages de l’extimité : l’artiste et le délinquant’,
Esse, arts + opinions 58 (2007): 5-7.
10
‘Ces blogues qui décryptent la mode’, Elle Québec. http://www.ellequebec.
com/mode/style-de-rue/ces-blogues-qui-decryptent-la-mode/s/#ph_21699. Viewed
25 May 2011.
11
Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide, 83-84.
12
Le Guay, L’empire de la télé-réalité, 32.
13
Florence Montraynaud, Amours à vendre, les dessous de la prostitution
(Grenoble: Glénat, 1993).
14
Valérie Steele, Fétiche: mode, sexe et pouvoir (Paris: Abbeville, 1997).
15
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: réflexions sur la vie mutilée, trans. Éliane
Kaufholz and Jean-René Ladmiral (Paris: Payot, 2003), 207-208.
140 The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion
__________________________________________________________________

16
Le Guay, L’empire de la télé-réalité, 175.
17
Eugène Enriquez, ‘L’idéal type de l’individu hypermoderne: l’individu
pervers?’, L’individu postmoderne (Ramonville-Saint-Agne: Érès. 2005).
18
Henri-Pierre Jeudy, L’absence de l’intimité (Belval: Circé, 2007), 10.
19
Mariette Julien, ‘La mode hypersexy mise à nu’, Médiane 2.1 (2007): 27-32.
20
According to the documentary ‘Tatouage, in ou out’ by Marie-Élaine Chénier for
Radio-Canada (RDI), January 2010.
21
Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation, ses mythes, ses structures (Paris:
SGPP, 1970).
22
Julien, ‘La mode hypersexy mise à nu’, 31.
23
Serge Chaumier, La déliaison amoureuse. De la fusion romantique au désir
d’indépendance (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2004).
24
Élyette Roux and Gilles Lipovetsky, Le luxe éternel, de l’âge sacré au temps des
marques (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).
25
Michel Maffesoli, Aux creux des apparences. Pour une éthique de l’esthétique
(Paris: Plan, 1990).
26
Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 202.
27
André Lacroix, ‘L’éthique à la croisée des chemins’, 83.
28
Ricoeur, Soi-même, 43.
29
Roux, Le luxe éternel, 166.
30
Charles Taylor, Grandeur et misère de la modernité (Canada: Bellarmin, 1992),
39.
31
Ibid.
32
Pierrette Bouchard, Natasha Bouchard and Isabelle Boily, La sexualisation
précoce des filles (Montréal: Sisyphe, 2005).
33
Lilia Goldfarb, ‘L’hypersexualisation des fillettes ou le sort de Méduse’, Actes
du colloque Le marché de la beauté… un enjeu de santé publique (Montréal:
2006), A5-A11.
34
Yves Jacquet, ‘Adolescents et adultes : des corps en présence’, Pro-Ado 9.3
(Montréal: ACSA 2000) : 21-29.
35
Lacroix, ‘L’éthique à la croisée des chemins’, 82.
36
Edgar Morin, Éthique (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
37
Ibid.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: réflexions sur la vie mutilée. Translated by
Éliane Kaufholz and Jean-René Ladmira. Paris: Payot, 2003.
 Mariette Julien 141
__________________________________________________________________

Andrieu, Bernard. ‘Piercings, tatouages et implants’. Cerveau & Psycho 22 (2007):

44-47.

Baudrillard, Jean. La société de consommation, ses mythes, ses structures. Paris:

SGPP, 1970.

Boissonnault, Ève. Le portrait du masculin dans le cinéma américain de genre

‘délinquance juvénile’ des années 1950. Master’s Communication Thesis.
Montréal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 1998.

Bouchard, Pierrette, Natasha Bouchard and Isabelle Boily. La sexualisation

précoce des filles. Montréal: Sisyphe, 2005.

Chaumier, Serge. La déliaison amoureuse: De la fusion romantique au désir

d’indépendance. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2004.

De Tocqueville, Alexis. De la Démocratie en Amérique. Translated by Eduardo

Noll. Paris: J. Vrin, 1990.

Elle Québec. ‘Ces blogues qui décryptent la mode’ (‘Blogs That Decode Fashion’).
http://www.ellequebec.com/mode/style-de-rue/ces-blogue-qui-decryptent-la-mode.

Enriquez, Eugène. ‘L’idéal type de l’individu hypermoderne: l’individu pervers ?’

In L’individu postmoderne. Edited by Nicole Aubert, 38-57. Ramonville-Saint-
Agne: Érès Sociologie clinique, 2005.

Goldfarb, Lilia. ‘L’hypersexualisation des fillettes ou le sort de Méduse’. Paper

presented for Le marché de la beauté… un enjeu de santé publique, Montréal:
November 23-24, 2006, A5-A11.

Jacquet, Yves. ‘Adolescents et adultes: des corps en présence’. In Pro-Ado 9.3

(September 2000): 21-29.

Jeudy Henri-Pierre. L’absence de l’intimité. Belval: Circé, 2007.

Julien, Mariette. ‘La mode hypersexy mise à nu’, in Médiane 2.1 (Montréal, 2007):
27-32.

Lacroix, André. ‘L’éthique à la croisée des chemins’. In Sociologie de l’éthique.

Edited by Stéphanie Gaudet and Anne Quiénart, 69-86, Montréal: Liber, 2008.
142 The Ethics of Authenticity and Contemporary Feminine Fashion
__________________________________________________________________

Le Breton, David. Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercings et autres marques

corporelle. Paris: Métailié, 2002.

Le Guay, Damien, L’empire de la télé-réalité. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance,

2005.

Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’ère du vide : essai sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris:

Gallimard, 1996.

Maffesoli, Michel. ‘Le devenir mode du monde’. In Métaphysique de la mode.

Edited by Frédéric Monneyron, Virginie Devillers and Jacques Sojcher, 81-86.
Bruxelles: Amis de la Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2007.

———. Au creux des apparences. Pour une éthique de l’esthétique. Paris: Plon,
1990.

Montreynaud, Françoise. Amours à vendre, les dessous de la prostitution.

Grenoble: Glénat, 1993.

Morin, Edgar. Éthique. Paris: Seuil, 2004.

Steele, Valérie. Fétiche: mode, sexe et pouvoir. Paris: Abbeville, 1997.

Ricoeur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

Roux, Élyette and Gilles Lipovetsky. Le luxe éternel, de l’âge sacré au temps des
marques. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Taylor, Charles. Grandeur et misère de la modernité. Canada: Bellarmin, 1992.

Tisseron, Serge. ‘Les nouveaux visages de l’extimité: l’artiste et le délinquant’.

Esse, arts + opinions 58 (2007): 5-7.

Mariette Julien (PhD. Communications) is professor at École supérieure de mode

de Montréal at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Her research
interests include the symbolism of contemporary clothing and body aesthetics as
well as the ethics of fashion.
Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere: Fantasies of Art and Beauty in
Israeli and Palestinian Films

Igal Bursztyn
Abstract
‘The promise of happiness’ bequeathed by art and beauty (Stendhal) does not seem
to have much political or social relevance in the grim perspective of the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict today. For most Palestinians happiness probably
depends on getting rid of the Israeli occupation if not of the Israelis themselves; for
most Israelis happiness may consist of being relieved of Arab threats if not of the
Arabs. Artifacts of both cultures, especially their respective cinemas, tended to
reflect this irrelevance till the late 20th Century. Recent developments in Israeli
and Palestinian film share a new theme: an outspoken yearning for high-art and
beauty. In Atash (Thirst) by Tawfiq Abu Wa’el, an Arab village girl, oppressed and
almost raped by her father, obsessively reads classical poetry; in Rafi Bukai’s
Avanti Popolo an Egyptian soldier captured by Israelis in the 6 Day War Sinai
quotes Shylock’s monologue to save his life; in Elia Suleiman’s Divine
Intervention a beautifully stylized fashion-model causes a military checkpoint
watch-tower to collapse; in Yoav Shamir’s documentary Checkpoint Israeli
soldiers and Palestinian civilians in a routine search are accompanied by a beautiful
Italian opera tune coming from a radio-transistor. These (and many more) works
juxtapose art and beauty with bleak, everyday reality creating an un-anticipated,
almost utopian vision in which art and beauty transcend reality thus becoming
critical (and self-critical) comments on their respective Israeli and Palestinian
societies. They ‘help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be
said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible’
(Jacques Rancière).

Key Words: Cinema, poetry, aesthetics, politics, ideology, Israel, Palestine, Egypt,
utopia.

*****

In 1899 Shaul Tshernichovski published ‘Facing the Statue of Apollo’, one

of the most influential poems in modern Hebrew literature:

Youth-God, sublime and free, the acme of beauty …

I came to you—do you recognize me?
I am a Jew, your eternal adversary …
I bow to life and courage and beauty … 1
144 Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere
__________________________________________________________________
The outspoken idolatry of the poem scandalized the orthodox Jewish
communities and still outrages many to this day. The God of Jews, emasculated by
by rabbis—‘the rotten seed of men’ who ‘bound Him by straps of phylactery’—
needed to be freed by ‘conquerors of Canaan by storm’. 2 The anticipated storm to
‘conquer Canaan’ would save the Jews from the pogroms raging in Eastern Europe
and alleviate the threats of the Dreyfus affair. Once the storm blew over (or seems
to have blown over) one wonders what is left of Tshernikhovski’s and his
contemporaries’ vision of beauty.
In 2006 as the IDF conducted reprisals on the West Bank, not far from his
house in Ramallah, Mahmoud Darwish wrote:

The critics kill me sometimes:

They want a particular poem
A particular metaphor
… if I see the rose in spring as yellow
They ask: ‘Where is the blood of our homeland in its petals?’ 3

The poet refused to be ‘assassinated’ by demands for patriotic messages: ‘If I

write love poems I resist the conditions which don’t allow me to write love
poems’. 4 Elsewhere he wrote: ‘Whoever writes the story of the place—will inherit
the place, and own its meaning’. 5 This story must be well-written: ‘Who is the
owner of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?’ 6
The vision of ‘better writing’, of freely chosing the ‘particular metaphor’, was
never, till quite recently, shared by cinemas, neither Zionist (later to become
Israeli) nor Palestinian. In a manifesto published on the occasion of the 1935
premiere of the first Hebrew speaking film This is the Land (by Barukh Agadati
and Avigdor Hameiri) the filmmakers stated their purpose in a military fashion:

This is not an acted play, a well plotted story but a slice of most
dramatic life, whose heroes are determined to transform dead
nature into blooming fields and woods… They will not desert the
battle-front. This is a struggle for a homeland and not for a
living…. 7

38 years later, in a statement published by the Palestinian delegation on the

occasion of the 1973 Tashkent Film Festival:

Film’s success is evaluated by the same criteria as military

success: both strive to attain political goals … Revolutionary
films strive for the same tactical and strategic goals as the
revolution. 8
 Igal Bursztyn 145
__________________________________________________________________
In terms of cultural priorities, both Israelis and Palestinians considered
cinema inferior to other artistic media. For the Zionists the most important arts
were verbal, contributing to Hebrew, the new/old language to be shared by the
ingathering of fugitives. For the Palestinians, according to the Palestinian artist
and critic Kamal Boullata:

True to its Semitic roots, visual expression had over the centuries
been generally relegated to a minor status in Arab culture …
poetry continued to be revered as the supreme form of self
expression’. 9

Films were expected to express national movements and public institutions. As a

result, both Israeli and Palestinian, with few exceptions, were either forced by their
respective funding institutions to think and speak in clichés or accepted them
voluntarily. Clichés necessarily impoverish the language. In the realm of
filmmaking—its stylistic and expressive capacities: plots are solved arbitrarily,
acting becomes explanatory and stagy, dialogue literary and artificial, the
cinematography decorative, the music pompous, editing at its best covers up for the
flaws of the rest. In This is the Land the happy pioneers of Rishon Le Zion
celebrate the 60th Anniversary of their flourishing settlement and reflect on the
hardships of their heroic past in a manner reminiscent of Soviet social-realism. A
pioneer dying of malaria comforts his tearful wife:

Don’t cry! … I am dying, but land is reborn. My short life, my

burning hope to dry these malaria swamps have been realized
and this will be my crop for eternity.

Compare this sentimental scene and narration scripted by Avigdor Hameiri to ‘The
Pioneer’, a powerful poem written approximately at the same time by the same
author:

There are no clothes, there is no home.

Oh my friend,
Tell me, where have God and beauty gone?
… And the spirit shivers in the frost—
Oh my friend,
Tell me what is the word ‘homeland’ worth? 10

The sincerity, urgency and pain of the poem are missing from the film. Similarly
earliest Palestinian films dutifully obeyed the directives of their ideologues and
sponsors: Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan’s Visit of King Saud to Palestine, probably the
earliest Palestinian film, was commissioned by the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin El-
146 Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere
__________________________________________________________________
Husseini (the Muslim leader of Palestinian Arabs in 1920-1940) ‘to follow the
King from Lydda to Jaffa and from Jaffa to Tel-Aviv’ while ‘El-Husseini would
suggest what to film: meals, tours, important meetings’. 11 Among the works Sirhan
produced and directed was a lead which preceded all films presented in the theatres
of Palestine: the Mufti next to the Palestinian flag.
In Israel’s national epic of what Israelis call the Independence War of 1948 and
the Palestinians call Nakbah (Disaster), Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Thorold
Dickinson, 1955, co-produced with Britain) a brave, blond Israeli fighter captures
an Egyptian prisoner in the Negev, who happens to be a German mercenary—
Artur von Riebenhoff an ex-Oberstrumpfuhrer in the Waffen SS. The scene
abounds in endless explanatory dialogue, obvious and trivial visuals like the
shadow of the outstretched arm in a Nazi salute, over-acting as if the actors were
frantically and desperately trying to convey a truth or hide a lie. The only Arabs
present in Hill 24 are disciplined, well-trained soldiers of the Jordanian Arab
Legion, Egyptian soldiers shot (in both senses) from afar, Muslim oil magnates,
and German Nazis who serve them. Like in This is the Land Palestinians do not
exist in the film, the hysterical SS oberstrumpfuhrer has been given the thankless
task of representing them. The excessive sound and visual symbolics cover up for
this omission, like the voice of an argument raised in bad conscience. Produced
just before the 1956 Sinai Campaign, Hill 24 was inspired by an urgent need to
explain and justify the case of Israel. Thus it had to visualize and verbalize its
unequivocal messages. Kitsch, ‘the evil element of art’ in Herman Broch’s famous
definition 12 is always transparent, unambiguous and at its bluntest in the art—or
lack of art—of film.
A scene in J. L. Godard’s 1976 Ici et Ailleurs supported by the PLO and
commissioned by the Arab League, tries to incorporate patriotic poetry into film.
Among ruins of the Carame village destroyed by Israelis in 1968 a little girl
emphatically waves her hands and shouts lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish
‘I shall resist’. Despite Godard’s obvious empathy for the plight of the Palestinians
one senses a certain embarrassment at the pathos of the scene which Godard tries
to touch up with an intellectual commentary:

You could talk first about the setting, and about the actor in this
set, that is about theater. This theater—where does it come from?
It comes from 1789, from the French Revolution and from the
pleasure that the delegates of 89 took in making large gestures
and reciting their claims publicly. This little girl is acting for the
Palestinian Revolution of course; she is innocent but maybe not
this form of theater.

I find Godard’s commentary condescending and smug. It is as if the

complacent, self-satisfied European, got an intellectual kick from the Middle East’s
 Igal Bursztyn 147
__________________________________________________________________
desperate, existential struggle for survival. He re-colonizes Palestinian rhetorics
by attributing them to French cultural roots. Wasn’t it Mahmoud Darwish
(whom the little girl recites so emphatically) who remarked ironically ‘Oratory
is the execution of meaning in the public square?’ 13
One of the first attempts to undermine and transcend Israeli cinema’s
rhetorics and contents was Avanti Popolo (Rafi Bukai, 1986). It takes place in
Sinai during the 1967 Six Days War. Two Egyptian soldiers (acted by
Palestinian actors Salim Daw and Suhel Haddad) lost in the desert without
water, discover two bottles of whiskey in a UN abandoned jeep, which they
drink to survive. Khaled is an aspiring actor in Cairo fringe theatre. He would
love to act Hamlet but instead has been given the part of Shylock, the Jew, in
Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’. As the two wander, thirsty and drunk
in the desert, they run into an Israeli patrol. Their captors refuse to share a can
of water with them. Khaled stuns them as he desperately quotes Shakespeare
tinged with an Arab accent ‘I am a Jew! Has a Jew not eyes? Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same
food...’
An article by the Palestinian poet and critic Anton Shammas has brought to
my attention that

the two allegedly Egyptian soldiers lost in the desert talk and
behave like typical Palestinians. They represent the Palestinian to
the Israeli cognition through the back door, through a brilliant,
humane, humoristic and most of all clever cinematic distraction.
Bukai, maybe intuitively, felt that the only way in which the
Palestinian could touch Israeli conscience and raise his interest
would be through a softened, retouched image of the ‘Egyptian’,
who has existed significantly in this awareness since the days of
the Bible. 14

What strikes me about Avanti Popolo, is its yearning for a disinterested and
universal ‘promesse du bonheur’ according to Stendhal’s famous definition of
beauty, for Shakespeare, capable of transcending Israeli/Arab differences and
conflicts. Avanti Popolo was followed by a veritable avalanche of fresh and
unexpected visual, narrative and stylistic approaches generated a decade later
by Israeli and Palestinian feature, documentary and experimental films.
Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (2007) closes a circle of Israeli-Egyptian
relations opened by Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer and continued in Avanti Popolo.
The Alexandria Police Symphonic Orchestra has just arrived in Israel to
celebrate the opening of an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikva. Tunes of Chet
Baker, Gershwin and a beautiful Oriental melody by Habib Shehada Hana unite
throughout the film, like Shakespeare in Avanti Popolo 20 years earlier, women
148 Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere
__________________________________________________________________
and men of different ethnicities and cultures. Like Avanti this is not a record of
reality, nor a mirror to life, but sheer utopia. In reality an Arab cultural center could
could be established in Nazareth, Haifa, even Tel Aviv, never in Petah Tikva with
with its numerous orthodox inhabitants. One could imagine a visit of an Alexandria
Police band, but it would be surrounded by cordons of police and Mossad agents;
not to mention Egyptian secret agents. But Kolirin’s film, like the best works of the
last decade does not copy reality—it questions it. This time—through the prism of
beautiful music.
In Atash (Thirst, 2004), directed by Um-el-Fakhem born Tawfik Abu Wa’el,
Abu Shukry, a tyrannical father forces his family to live in an abandoned IDF
military camp. There is a sexual tension, almost incest, between the father and
daughter. While her younger sister builds mobiles made of bullet cartridges and
hand grenade safety pins, Jamila reads pieces of poetry (or philosophy). The silent,
slow-paced and static mises-en-scene remind one of the ceremonial style of Greek
tragedies in which horrors were talked and sung about—but never shown.
Similarly they exist in Atash but only by implication, the scarce dialogue is silent
about them. The spectator’s imagination has to complete the unsaid and the
unshown. Yet the characters’ yearning for culture, for beauty in the midst of
nowhere, is stated clearly and unequivocally. Leaning against the wall of concrete
in the drab military compound in which they dwell, Jamilla reads to her brother
fragments of poetry: ‘The world’s beauty is fading and vanishing—I heard this
truth from a mute’.
This same yearning, though presented with irony, pervades the works of the
Nazaret born Elia Suleiman. In his Divine Intervention (2002), the protagonist
(acted by the director) and his girlfriend (Manal Khader) live in separate cities and
must meet near an Israeli checkpoint. As Manal Khader, beautiful and elegant like
a fashion model straight out of the Rome-Paris-London-New-York scene, steps out
of her car to join her lover, and soldiers watch her with amazement through the
sights of their rifles, the steel watchtower overlooking the checkpoint miraculously
collapses and smashes into pieces.
One can interpret this scene as a satire on Israeli militarism and lack of
humanity, or as a satire on Palestinian day-dreaming and lack of will and capacity
to act. Both interpretations are probably right and wrong since many more
meanings can be ascribed to this and other scenes and films presented in this
chapter. In our context it is an ironic vision of beauty solving the the Mid-East
conflicts.
Whatever the interpretations, the point I wish to make here is the films’
ambivalence and equivocation. The films are made at a price: Eliah Suleiman’s
Chronicle of Disappearance was condemned by many Israeli and Western critics
as anti-Israeli. When shown at the 1997 Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia it was
booed by the audience as an act of treason and Zionist collaboration. The Band’s
Visit was severely criticized in Israel as condescending, artificial and flattering
 Igal Bursztyn 149
__________________________________________________________________
Western tastes at the expense of the oppressed Oriental communities of the
Israeli peripheries. The titles of these reprimands summarize their contents:
‘How to Sell the Middle-East’, ‘Stereotypes in The Band’s Visit’. 15
George Orwell remarked in the early 1940s that novels about the 1st World
War were on the whole better than novels about the Spanish Civil War because
the former asked questions while the latter supplied answers. He was alluding
to British left-wing writers who conformed to the artistic demands of the
political movements with which they identified and felt obliged to follow in
party line. His conclusion was: ‘Good novels are written by writers who are not
frightened’. 16 The outstanding filmmaking in the Middle East, which has
recently gained international attention, is critical of its own respective societies
and also of itself as an aesthetic object. Darwish’s self-reflexive question,
formerly limited to literature: ‘who writes the place better?’ is now shared by
cinema. ‘Are they [Palestinian films] appreciated because they are Palestinian
or because they are good films?’ asks rhetorically the Palestinian filmmaker
Omar Al-Qattan. 17 The Ghaza born Rashid Mashrawi provides an answer:
when at a screening of his film in Cairo the audience began weeping before the
screening started the director reacted furiously—‘They damage Palestinian
cinema’. 18 It is not the subject matter which should have moved them to tears,
but the film itself as a work of art.
‘True peace between nations will never be legitimate if not based on a
common cultural denominator’, 19 said Mahmoud Darwish in an interview to the
Israeli Ha-Aretz. The recurrent theme in recent Middle-East cinema: passionate
desire for ‘universal culture’, or for ‘better writing’ or for ‘beauty’—whatever
one choses to call it—can be viewed as part of that ‘common cultural
denominator’ suggested and shared by Shaul Tshernichovski, Mahmoud
Darwish and their filmmaking followers of the last two decades. To the best of
my knowledge it has neither been suggested nor shared by Mid-Eastern
politicians.

Notes
1
Shaul Tshernichovsky, ‘Facing the Statue of Apollo’, in Gender Ironies of
Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2000).
2
Ibid.
3
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Assassination’, in A River Dries of Thirst (London, St Paul
Minnesota, Beirut: Saqi, 2009), 69.
4
Ibid., 18.
5
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘MeNosea laNosea (From Passenger to Passenger)’, in Why
Have You Left the Horse Alone (Tel Aviv: Andalus, 2000), 73.
6
Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst, 15.
150 Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere
__________________________________________________________________

7
Moshe Zimerman, Signs of Movies (Tel Aviv: Dionon, 2001), 146.
8
Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema (Tel
Aviv: Am Oved, 2006), 26; Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema,
Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
9
Kamal Boullata, Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present (London: SAQI, 2009),
28.
10
Avigdor Hameiri, ‘The Pioneer’, in Anthology of Modern Hebrew Poetry, ed. S.
Y. Penueli and A. Ukhmani (Jerusalem: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew
Literature, 1966 .
11
From an interview with Sirhan, quoted in Space and Memory in Palestinian
Cinema, 16.
12
Hermann Broch, ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’, in Kitsch (London: Studio
Vista, 1970), 63
13
Darwish, A River Dies of Thirst, 133.
14
Shammas Anton, ‘He Confused the Parts’, in Avanti Popolo (Kinneret
Publishing House, 1990).
15
Mati Shmueloff, ‘Stereotypes in The Band’s Visit’, Maaravon 3-4 (Spring 2009);
Kfir Cohen, ‘How to Sell the Middle East’, Ha’Aretz (October 26, 2007).
16
George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays (NY: Mariner Books,
2009).
17
Omar Al-Qattan, ‘The Challenges of Palestinian Filmmaking’, in Dreams of a
Nation, On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006), 128.
18
Kay Dickinson, ‘The Palestinian Road (Block) Movie: Everyday Geographies of
the Second Intifada Cinema’, in Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2010), 148.
19
Darwish interviewed by Batia Gur, Ha-Aretz (10.1.1997).

Bibliography
Al-Qattan, Omar. ‘The Challenges of Palestinian Filmmaking’. In Dreams of a
Nation, On Palestinian Cinema. London: Verso, 2006.

Boullata, Kamal. Palestinian Art from 1850 to the Present. London: SAQI, 2009.

Broch, Hermann. ‘Notes on the Problem of Kitsch’. In Kitsch. London: Studio

Vista, 1970.

Cohen, Kfir. ‘How to Sell the Middle East’. Ha’Aretz (October 26, 2007).
 Igal Bursztyn 151
__________________________________________________________________

Darwish, Mahmoud. A River Dries of Thirst. London, St Paul Minnesota, Beirut:

Saqi, 2009.

———. Why Have You Left the Horse Alone. Tel Aviv: Andalus, 2000, Hebrew.

———. ‘Each Wants to Write the Place’. Interview with Batia Gur, Ha-Aretz
(10.1.1997).

Dickinson, Kay. ‘The Palestinian Road (Block) Movie: Everyday Geographies of

the Second Intifada Cinema’. In Cinema at the Periphery, edited by Dina
Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belen Vidal. Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2010.

Elam, Yigal. An Introduction to Zionist History. Tel Aviv: Levin Epstein, 1974,
Hebrew.

Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi. Space and Memory in Palestinian Cinema. Tel
Aviv: Am Oved, 2006.

Halachmi, Yosef. Fresh Wind. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009.

Orwell, George. All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays. NY: Mariner Books,
2009.

Penueli S. Y. and A. Ukhmani (eds). Anthology of Modern Hebrew Poetry.

Jerusalem: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1966.

Shammas, Anton. ‘He Confused the Parts’. In Avanti Popolo. Tel Aviv: Kinneret
Publishing House, 1990.

Shmueloff, Mati. ‘Stereotypes in The Band’s Visit’. Maaravon 3-4 (Spring 2009).

Zimerman, Moshe. Signs of Movies. Tel Aviv: Dionon, 2001.

Filmography
Atash (Thirst). Directed by Tawfik Abu Wa’el. Memento Productions, 2004.

Avanti Popolo. Directed by Rafi Bukai. Independent Film, 1986.

152 Promesse de Bonheur in Nowhere
__________________________________________________________________

Chronicle of a Disappearance. Directed by Elia Suleiman. Centre National de la

Cinématographie, 1996.

Divine Intervention. Directed by Elia Suleiman. Gimages Studios, 2002.

Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. Directed by Thorold Dickinson. Israel Motion Pictures

Studios, 1955.

Ici et Ailleur. Directed by Jean Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville and Pierre
Gorin. Gaumont Productions, 1976.

Kafr Kassem. Directed by Borhane Alaouié. Arabe National Film Organization,

1973.

The Band’s Visit. Directed by Eran Kolirin. July August Productions, 2007.

This Is The Land. Directed by Barukh Agadati. AGA Films, 1935.

Igal Bursztyn is Professor at the Tel-Aviv Film and TV Department. He is also a

filmmaker (script-writer and director), currently working on a feature film Tabac.
 The Event of Art: Immanuel Kant and Arthur Danto on the
Experience of Beauty in Art

Christopher Hromas
Abstract
Art has historically been linked very closely with beauty, and it was not until the
beginning of the 20th Century that serious challenges to this connection began to
arise in the form of the Dadaists, Duchamp, and the Pop Art Movement. There are
two prominent theories concerning the relationship of art and beauty I will
examine. The first is exemplified by Immanuel Kant. It emphasizes the universal
nature of beauty as a sensus communis which all human beings share. We already
share a rational world of concepts, and beauty extends this shared world beyond
rational discourse to shared feelings. Beauty, for Kant, is the universal ability of
human beings to experience common pleasure in a beautiful object. The second
approach to the role of art in community is that it is a means of expressing ideas
which are important to that community. Arthur Danto, one of the more recent
proponents of this view, subordinates beauty to the expressive function of art. In
order for an object to be taken as art, it must be intended as an artistic expression
by its creator, and beauty can enhance or detract from this intention depending
upon the intended expression. I will argue that Danto’s approach to art relies too
heavily upon authorial intention to classify objects as art and that he leaves out an
essential component of any work of art: the aesthetic experience evoked by that
work. I will then suggest that Kant’s description of art as an experience of the
beautiful better defines artistic objects and that it ultimately provides a better
communal foundation than Danto’s theory.

Key Words: Aesthetic experience, art, Arthur Danto, beauty, Critique of

Judgment, Immanuel Kant, sociability.

*****

There are two prominent approaches to the relationship of art and beauty which
I want to consider. The first is exemplified by Immanuel Kant. It emphasizes the
universal nature of beauty as a sensus communis which all human beings share. We
already share a rational world of concepts—concepts like table, rock, chair, etc.—
and beauty extends this shared world beyond rational discourse to shared feelings.
Kant calls beautiful art ‘humaniora’ because it refers to ‘the universal feeling of
participation and … the capacity for being able to communicate one’s inmost self
universally, which properties constitute the sociability that is appropriate to
humankind.’ 1 It is thus the experience of the beautiful in art which is most proper
to human sociability.
154 The Event of Art
__________________________________________________________________
The second approach is an inheritance of Georg Hegel, and takes art to be
primarily an expression of ideas. Beauty is subordinated to the expressive function
of art, as Arthur Danto, one of the more recent proponents of this view, writes: ‘If
the aim of a painting is to arouse desire, it is appropriate that it be beautiful. If it is
to arouse loathing, it is perhaps more appropriate that it be disgusting.’ 2 Beauty is
appropriate in art only insofar as it contributes to the idea behind the work, what
Danto calls ‘embodied meaning’.
These two positions are the result of differing presuppositions about the nature
of art. Because Danto begins with a question concerning the ontological status of
art, he emphasizes characteristics associated with the production of artworks in an
effort to differentiate them from quotidian objects. By contrast, Kant is more
interested in legitimating universal judgments of beauty, thus his concern is with
the reception of an artwork by an audience. I will argue that Danto’s position is
problematic for two reasons: it relies too heavily upon authorial intention and
requires a conceptual engagement which, for some works of art, is simply
inappropriate. Then I will suggest that Kant, while himself not unproblematic,
provides a better foundation for formulating definitions of art and beauty as a
starting point for exploring the significance of these phenomena both in our
personal lives and the life of the community as a whole.
There are two main indicators in the Critique of Judgment that a principle of
sociability underlies Kant’s conception of taste. The first is Kant’s claim that taste
is a ‘sensus communis’ or common sense. He arrives at this conclusion by noting
that we ascribe beauty to objects as if it were a property of that object, ‘the flower
is beautiful’, whereas in merely subjective judgments of preference, we refer the
object back to ourselves, ‘I like the flower’. This semantic attribution of beauty as
a property of objects leads Kant to believe that we expect the agreement of others
when we call something beautiful in a way that we do not when we express our
personal preferences. Judgments of beauty include a normative claim for common
assent than is absent from mere likes and dislikes, and when there is disagreement
concerning beauty, we often attempt to resolve it as if it were a dispute. These
tendencies imply a similarity between aesthetic and theoretical judgments – both
involve a claim to universality. However, despite the fact that beauty makes a
universal claim as if it was a logical property of an object, it is not something that
inheres in the object like logical properties do. When I say that the grass is green, I
can offer evidence about an external object that proves the grass to be green for
everyone who looks at it, but when I say a flower is beautiful, there are no
characteristics about the flower that I can appeal to in order to prove that it is
beautiful. No amount of proof will cause someone to feel aesthetic pleasure in an
object.
Kant uses the term subjective universality to describe this phenomenon which
claims universal validity but is only universal by reference to the subjects who
judge rather than the external object being judged. Beauty is found solely in the
 Christopher Hromas 155
__________________________________________________________________
way that ‘the subject feels himself, [namely] how he is affected by the
presentation,’ and this feeling of our own state manifests itself as a ‘feeling of life
[beleben].’ 3 Taste, as a sense of beauty, shares with others what is by nature most
private—the feeling of our own subjective state—and it is shared not merely with a
specific community or society (those who have similar preferences) but with
humanity in general. Thus Kant calls taste a sensus communis because it is ‘the
idea of a sense shared [by all of us]…a power to judge that in reflecting takes
account (a priori) … of everyone else’s way of presenting [something].’ 4
The second indicator of a principle of sociability in Kant’s Critique of
Judgment relates to a prescription of communicability: art and thought in general,
must be universally assessable and accessible. We have seen that taste is the ability
to judge whether objects are beautiful, and it is an ability anyone can possess,
although not everyone actually does possess it. However, Kant recognizes that not
everyone able to judge beauty is also able to produce beautiful things. Moreover,
there is a difference between someone who possesses the skill to reproduce a
beautiful work of art, and the genius that originally creates the work of art. Even if
a painter is able to produce an indistinguishable copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night,
we do not on that basis alone consider that artist to be equal to Van Gogh or that
copy to be equal to the original. Works of art require originality to be considered
great, and we always privilege those artists who found epochs in art over the
subsequent artists who merely develop their innovations. Thus Kant introduces
another ability which he calls genius, and he assigns it the role of producing
beautiful works of art which are ‘rich and original in ideas.’ 5
Whereas taste is a sense which strives for universality, genius is a talent which
is rare and private—it ‘cannot be communicated,’ thus it dies with the genius. 6
Taste and genius are, to a certain extent, opposed to one another insofar as genius
produces unique aesthetic ideas while taste judges what is universal in the
presentation of these ideas. When Kant considers their conflict in works of art, he
argues that taste is more important because it ensures the potential intersubjectivity
of the work. Genius can produce concepts which cannot be shared, which are not
‘fit for approval that is both lasting and universal.’ 7 Richness in expression does
not entail that anyone else will understand or appreciate the work. Kant even writes
that mere originality is a property that genius shares with insanity; the difference is
that works of genius are tempered by a form of presentation suitable to everyone. 8
Genius always has the danger of falling into private originality and producing ideas
which are not accessible by others.
Thus far I have explained that for Kant beauty turns us toward others and
reinforces sociable feelings in two ways. First, it is something held in common
which reminds us of a shared human heritage. Kant writes that aesthetic pleasure is
unique to human beings unlike sensible or moral pleasure: ‘[sensible]
agreeableness holds for nonrational animals too; beauty only for human beings,
i.e., beings who are animal and yet rational … the good, however, holds for every
156 The Event of Art
__________________________________________________________________
rational being as such.’ 9 Second, beauty incites discourse; it ‘furthers … the culture
of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communication.’ 10 We want to share
those things we find beautiful with others. In using sociability as a touchstone for
judgments of taste, Kant privileges the position of the audience which experiences
a work of art; his aesthetic theory constantly returns to the commonality of
aesthetic experience. Art’s purpose is not merely to express something, but to
express something to someone, and since expression does not entail that anything
is communicated, Kant introduces criteria for art that assure it is at least potentially
shareable.
I now want to consider the second approach to art and beauty. Warhol’s Brillo
Box, like Duchamp’s ready-mades, readily motivates the question ‘What is art?’ If
ordinary objects like soap pad boxes or bicycle wheels stuck in stools can be
exhibited as art, then it would seem that anything can be art, and, since not
everything is beautiful, beauty need not have anything to do with art. However we
are then confronted with the question why we consider Warhol’s Brillo Box art and
not the Brillo boxes sitting in a grocery stockroom. This question is the starting
point for Danto’s philosophy of art. 11 If beauty is not the defining characteristic of
art, as it clearly is not in the case of Warhol, Duchamp, the Dadaists, Guston, etc.,
then a new definition of art is required in order to provide criteria for
distinguishing good art from bad art. If there are no possible criteria for art, then
the notions of good art and bad art are purely subjective notions, and Bach is no
better than Justin Bieber.
Danto’s suggestion is that we look at the meaning of the artwork; for him the
defining characteristic of art is that ‘it be about something,’ what he calls an
‘embodied meaning.’ 12 There are two conditions that must be met for something to
be an embodied meaning. First, it must inhabit a context which supplies criteria for
it to be taken as a work of art. Warhol’s Brillo Box could not have been considered
an artwork during the 18th century because the criteria for an artwork being
admissible as art were restricted to certain media such as painting, sculpture,
poetry, and music and there was still the belief that art should be beautiful. Rather
the prevailing theory of art sets the criteria for which works are incorporated into
an art world. Even artworks which initially challenge aspects of the prevailing
theory can be accorded a place in terms of their reaction to or exaggeration of
various criteria the theory propounds. 13
The second condition for an object to be taken as a work of art is that the
creator of the work must intend for the object to fall within (or possibly expand)
the current theory of art. Artworks are always more than ordinary objects because
they ‘externalize a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural
period.’ 14 Ordinary objects also possess meanings, but they are not expressions;
they are not intended to be about something or to say anything. Artworks
incorporate ordinary concepts into their expressive meaning, but their meaning
surpasses the concept of the object allowing the artwork to individuate itself from
 Christopher Hromas 157
__________________________________________________________________
others of its kind. 15 Warhol’s Brillo Box includes the concept and connotations of
an ordinary Brillo box as a commercial object, but it incorporates this concept into
its meaning as a work of art. Thus, it is able to comment upon the meaning of art,
art’s relationship to commercialism, and reveal that relationship in a new light,
something which normal Brillo boxes are unable to do.
These two characteristics of artworks, expression and context, are summed up
by Danto as the content of an artwork, which he contrasts with the mode of
presentation of the work. Beauty is restricted to the domain of the latter and is
somewhat autonomous from the content in that different subject matters can be
presented more or less beautifully. One famous example is Robert Mapplethorpe’s
controversial photographs depicting ugly content such as coprophagia in a highly
stylized, often beautiful manner. The beauty of the light and shadows, the lines of
the nude bodies, and arrangement of the photographs are quite independent of the
ideas which they present. The photographs do not appear ugly merely because have
an ugly content. However, because beauty for Danto is ‘a device for enhancing the
appetite,’ and content that is presented as beautiful engenders a positive disposition
toward that content, it might be inappropriate for some contents to be displayed as
beautiful. 16 Thus beauty is relegated to the minor role of supporting certain artistic
ideas.
Danto’s definitions of art and beauty arise from his original presupposition that
there is some characteristic of an artwork which differentiates it from an ordinary
object. Ironically, his theory fails to provide anything unique to the artwork itself
which separates it from an ordinary object; instead he looks toward the intention of
the creator to fix the object within the art world. However, Danto is similar to Kant
in that both have a notion of communication which underlies their aesthetic theory.
For Danto the content of the artwork ‘goes from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s
mind’, and the artwork is the medium for this communication. 17 But he differs
from Kant in privileging the moment of transmission, when the content is
expressed by the artist rather than the moment of reception, when the artwork is
experienced.
I want to end by suggesting two problems with Danto’s theory. The first
problem is Danto’s reliance upon the intention of the author to define the object as
art. There are many cases in which the definition of an object as art is opposed to
the intentions of the author. Damien Hirst once exhibited an artwork which
consisted of garbage lying in the middle of the room, and, when the night janitor
saw it, he proceeded to clean it up and throw it away. In this case neither the object
nor the context revealed the object as art to the janitor; he had to be told by
someone else that it was art. Despite the intention of the author that the object was
to be an artwork, it did not appear as art to the janitor. In this case the intention of
the author was not a sufficient condition for the object to appear as art. A second
example is the poetry hoax of Ern Malley during World War II in Australia. Two
young, aspiring poets who thought little of surrealist poetry created a fictitious poet
158 The Event of Art
__________________________________________________________________
named Ern Malley and published some 16 poems which they wrote over the course
of a single afternoon. ‘They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on
their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the
breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and
misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a
coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse.’ 18
When they revealed their hoax the surrealist publisher they were targeting was
ruined, but, despite their intentions to write bad poetry, their works went on to gain
some level of fame and came to be considered legitimate examples of the very
thing the young poets were attempting to satire. In this case, the intentions of the
authors were irrelevant to the actual artwork which has since been accorded a place
in the art world. This example, alongside the other example above, seems to
suggest that authorial intention is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for an
object to be considered art.
The second problem is that Danto’s definition of art as embodied meaning
assumes that in order to appreciate a work of art one must discover its intellectual
content. Danto writes that when he first saw Robert Motherwell’s Elegies for the
Spanish Republic, he was stopped in his tracks by their beauty. 19 He then goes on
to explain that ‘when I grasped their thought, I understood that their aesthetic
beauty was internal to their meaning,’ and it was at this point that he recognized
their artistic goodness. 20 The idea he finds behind the works is that ‘they are visual
meditations on the death of a form of life,’ and it is necessary to grasp this meaning
in order to be transformed by the work. 21 He immediately recognized their
aesthetic beauty, but only came to appreciate their artistic beauty when the work
had been suitably explained and understood. But the fact that he had been stopped
in his tracks and that he wanted to learn more about the Elegies suggests that he
had already been transformed. The course of his life had been altered and he had
been drawn to incorporate this work of art into his life. Danto’s preoccupation with
intellectual content leads him to entirely overlook the fact that something can be
deeply significant for us without being conceptual. There are many works of art,
i.e. Kandinsky, in which a conceptual engagement entirely misses the point of the
work. Kandinsky’s color fields are designed to frustrate cognition and instead
produce what he calls a vibration of the soul rather than provide a coherent
intellectual content to the viewer.
A theory of art which privileges aesthetic experience has neither of these
problems. Because the work of art does its work as a mutual participant with us in
an aesthetic experience, it plays an essential role and requires nothing outside of
itself (such as authorial intention) to fix its definition as art. This implies that the
working of a work of art is an event; the artwork is dynamically involved in our
aesthetic experience rather than existing as a passive object which we contemplate.
It is not the author speaking to us through the artwork, rather the artwork itself
speaks to us. Moreover, this activity of the artwork alongside us explains its
 Christopher Hromas 159
__________________________________________________________________
transformative power: how the Elegies could stop Danto in his tracks and change
the direction of his life. Thus I want to suggest that an object deserves to be called
an artwork only insofar as it evokes an aesthetic experience.
Kant restricts aesthetic experience to beautiful artworks, and although I think it
is likely that the event of art is broader than merely an experience of the beautiful,
beauty undoubtedly plays a major role. 22 However, Kant is correct to emphasize
the sympathy and communication that occurs in the event of art: as an event it
includes others and provides a space within which we can commune with one
another. In this sense aesthetic experiences play a fundamental role in reinforcing
human sociability. Instead of forming our artistic paradigms on the basis of objects
and intentions, a return to aesthetic experience and the beautiful may provide a
better communal foundation than mere expression.

Notes
1
Paul Guyer, trans., Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 5-355.
2
Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing
Company, 2003), 120.
3
Guyer, Critique of Judgment, 44.
4
Ibid., 160.
5
Ibid., 188.
6
Ibid., 177.
7
Ibid., 188.
8
Robert Louden, ed., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 113.
9
Guyer, Critique of Judgment, 52.
10
Ibid., 173
11
Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 64.
12
Ibid., 65. See also Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 194-195.
13
Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 581.
14
Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 208.
15
Danto, Abuse of Beauty, 66-67.
16
Ibid., 114.
17
Ibid., 121.
18
David Lehman, ‘The Ern Malley Hoax an Introduction’, Jacket 17 (June 2002),
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-dl.html, viewed 27 October 2011.
19
Danto, The Abuse of Beauty, 109.
20
Ibid., 110.
21
Ibid.
160 The Event of Art
__________________________________________________________________

22
The sublime is one example of an alternative aesthetic experience to beauty.

Bibliography
Danto, Arthur. The Abuse of Beauty. Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing
Company, 2003.

Danto, Arthur. ‘The Artworld’. The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964): 571-584.

Danto, Arthur. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1981.

Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, edited by Robert

Louden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Christopher Hromas is currently a Ph.D. student at Fordham University. He

works primarily on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and the role of
beauty in ethics.
 Section 7

Searching for Beauty through Literature

 The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty in
‘The Artist of the Beautiful’

Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis

Abstract
American Transcendentalism represented a complex answer to the
democratization of American life, the growth of science and technology, and a
new kind of industrialism—to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of
the relationship between the individual and both nature and other individuals that
was being demanded by the course of history. Although Hawthorne is widely
considered a Dark Romantic, we claim that in ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ he
endorses American Transcendentalism by presenting an artist who embodies the
quest for the self through the artistic process in a Transcendentalist experience of
beauty, resisting the materialistic and utilitarian New England society in the first
decades of the nineteenth century. The clocks in this short story constitute the
metaphor of the machine as the artificial mechanism intended to regulate time in
the world of individuals who, in their yearnings of material progress, have broken
up their connection with nature: individuals who deny the spirit that guides the
natural flow of time in connection with what is transcendental. Just as Owen
Warland in ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ contests a utilitarian society through his
art, so does Hawthorne oppose modern trends and beliefs by turning his short
story into an instrument of Transcendentalist resistance.

Key Words: American Transcendentalism, Hawthorne, experience of beauty.

*****

American Transcendentalism represented a complex answer to the

democratization of American life, the growth of science and technology, and a
new kind of industrialism—to the whole question, in short, of the redefinition of
the relationship between individuals and both nature and other individuals that
was being demanded by the course of history. In the first decades of the
nineteenth century, the United States was experiencing the decline of rigid
Calvinist principles and the growing secularization of modern thought under the
impact of numerous scientific and technological advances, which in turn gave
momentum to an increasing industrialism. On the other hand, Unitarians tried to
reconcile Locke's empiricism with Christianity, emphasizing what happened
outside the individual conscience more than what happened in the realm of the
mind, giving prominence to the material over the spiritual sphere in the formation
of the mind. American Transcendentalism, inspired by Kant’s transcendental
forms, found in idealism an instrument of moral and social criticism against the
164 The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty
_________________________________________________________________
materialism underlying the Unitarian alliance of commercial and religious
interests.
Alluding to the Platonic triad, Transcendentalist mentor Ralph Waldo
Emerson spoke of the oversoul, eternal source of beauty, truth, and good, and
exhorted individuals to search for that spirit or fundamental principle that rules
nature and of which individuals partake. 1 The quest for this spiritual state that
transcends the physical and empirical world is only possible through intuition
and the subordination of humankind to the eloquence of nature, and not through
established religious doctrines or through reason or sensory experience alone.
Thus, the exaltation of nature and the contempt for conformism and imitation in
favour of individual independence and self-reliance 2 are deemed necessary to
achieve this ‘original relation with the universe.’ 3
According to Emerson, even though all human beings are called to a profound
communion with nature in their search for the oversoul, the artists are the ones to
fulfil this search by giving new forms to beauty in nature, beauty being the herald
of the triad. 4 Thus, art is the ‘result or expression of nature, in miniature, a nature
passed through the alembic of man.’ 5 Then, the more artists submit and lend
themselves to be interpreters of this superior principle manifest in nature, the
closer they are to truth, good, and beauty combined in the work of art. In a search
which is strictly personal, artists pursue independence, faith in themselves, and
self-reliance, and endeavour to achieve the best version of the self in communion
with the superior and transcendental Being, the divinity that lies in every natural
fact and in every individual, believing in the need for establishing an intimate
relationship between the self and the universe in terms of a search both for self-
knowledge and knowledge of the world.
Though Hawthorne is widely considered a Dark Romantic and cannot be
considered a Transcendentalist author, in ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ 6 he creates
an artist who embodies the quest for the self through the creation of his work of
art, exploring the Transcendentalist experience of beauty as a way of resisting the
materialistic and utilitarian New England society in the first decades of the
nineteenth century. According to Thompson, Dark Romantics differ from
Transcendentalists in three different ways. First, these writers questioned the idea
of perfection and inherent human value by exalting the tendency of all
individuals to sin and self-destruction. Second, they asserted that nature could be
a sinister power and not always a benevolent and universal mediator between
humankind and God. Finally, while Transcendentalists were optimistic about
social reforms, Dark Romantics tended to give life to characters who failed in
their attempts to overcome their weaknesses. 7 In the short story, on the contrary,
Hawthorne gives life to a protagonist who finds his inherent human value is
sheltered and inspired by nature and finally triumphs over his limitations.
Owen Warland is a young man who, after working as a watchmaker
apprentice, is left in charge of his master's clock shop when he retires. His only
 Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis 165
_________________________________________________________________
wish is to make the clocks he is entrusted with more beautiful, disregarding the
precision of their machinery. Driven by a deep love for Annie, his master's
daughter, he starts creating a strange and extremely fragile mechanism which
imitates a butterfly. Although his attempts are often frustrated, nature always
succeeds in inspiring him, until he finally achieves his goal.
When Owen finds inspiration in nature to create with ‘delicate ingenuity’
little figures of flowers and birds, such talent seems ‘aimed at the mysteries of
the hidden mechanisms’ 8 that give life to them. The choice of the words
mysteries and hidden undeniably allude to that mystical mission of the artist to
find in nature the secret of the beautiful, which is both the principle and the
explanation of all things and the whole of humanity: Emerson’s oversoul. His
‘new development of the love for the beautiful’ 9 is based on the exploration of
the ultimate principle that begets movement and activity: the spirit which gives
life.
Owen, a clear recreation of the Transcendentalist artist, is not content with the
‘inward enjoyment of the beautiful’ 10 but strives to capture its mysterious and
elusive essence with ‘material grasp’ 11 when giving it material form in a work of
art, guided by his intuition. He is imbued with the oversoul; the universe
conspires so that this search leads the artist to fulfil his goal when he submits
completely. In his artistic being, Owen embodies the concept of genius which lies
at the basis of Transcendentalist aesthetics, rooted in the Romantic tradition.
Kant defines genius as the ‘innate mental disposition through which nature gives
rule to art.’ 12 In other words, just as happens to Owen, the spirit present in nature
at a meta-sensory level literally inspires him, and informs him with the rules
through which he will give form to his work of art. Thus, Hawthorne's artist
embodies Emerson's conception of artistic inspiration: art cannot be apprehended
systematically, rationalized, or explained, but in solitude and in intimate contact
with nature: ‘Thou shall leave the World, and know the muse only.’ 13
Even though Owen seems to be fragile and vulnerable, Hawthorne, faithful to
his allegorical style, meaningfully names his character Owen Warland, which
becomes the locus where a long and arduous process of search takes place: a
battlefield where he is made to confront conflicting feelings and forces which
make him doubt. To pursue his transcendental destiny, Owen counts on ‘the
innate disposition of his soul,’ 14 which ‘accumulates renewed vigour during its
apparent idleness’ 15 and takes him back to the forest where he eagerly studies the
movement of the butterflies and other insects. With Owen, Hawthorne explores
the obstacles in this thorny process. Gradually, Owen becomes spiritually
stronger, to overcome the difficulties that arise. His genius must gather strength
to rise above failure and start again. He feels misunderstood but that does not
stop him. He knows, as the individual described by Emerson, that he should be a
‘nonconformist,’ 16 that ‘imitation is suicide,’ 17 and that he must blindly rely on
himself and accept his destiny although it may entail effort and pain.
166 The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty
_________________________________________________________________
Owen’s complex artistic process has been analysed by Brocious in terms of
exoteric and esoteric alchemy. Exoteric alchemy refers to the infusion of
spirituality into material things, whereas esoteric alchemy refers to the
transmutation the artist also undergoes, the transformation which takes place in
their selves, the character and spiritual growth that comes when the artist
experiences beauty. 18 In all agreement with the Romantics, Transcendentalists
also regard the work of art as a living organism: ‘It is not meters, but a meter-
making argument, that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like
the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own.’ 19 Here
Hawthorne takes this idea to its highest expression, for, when achieved, the
butterfly ‘has gone forth out of thy [Owen’s] master's heart. There is no return for
thee;’ 20 the work of art has to fly on its own, is alive and independent. On the
other hand, the artist’s transformation is a process in search of the oversoul. Such
process becomes relevant it gives significance to the very experience of beauty
over the final product. ‘When the artist raised high enough to achieve the
beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of
little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the
reality.’ 21 This is how the allegory of the butterfly attains its true dimension: the
artist, as his butterfly, has suffered a metamorphosis, a key concept for
understanding the artistic process. The artist’s surrender to the creative genius
turns him into Emerson’s ‘alembic,’ 22 through which the spirit of nature infuses
life into the work of art and illuminates the artist’s own transformation.
Hawthorne’s decision to place Owen in a clock shop is not a random choice,
for the clock shop is the symbol of the transition of the United States from an
agricultural country to an industrial nation. New England was rushing into what
was later called the Second Industrial Revolution, and its rural profile would give
way to the development of big, prosperous and modern metropolis which
celebrated the new scientific, technological, and economic developments that
promised progress. Thoreau would say: ‘Most of the luxuries, and many of the so
called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to
the elevation of mankind,’ 23 and would denounce that ‘men have become tools of
their tools.’ 24
In Hawthorne’s story, the clocks are the metaphor of the machine as the
artificial mechanism that intends to regulate time from the material and utilitarian
world of individuals who, in their yearnings of material progress, have broken up
their connection with nature and its times: individuals who distance themselves
from nature and deny the spirit that guides the natural flow of time in connection
with what is transcendental. Instead, they measure and conceive time in terms of
what is useful, practical, and concrete, self-imposing an order which is different
from the natural order. The description of the clock shop in the first paragraph of
the story presents the clocks ‘turned from the streets,’ 25 as if they wanted to show
their indifference to the world outside and let a different kind of power guide
 Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis 167
_________________________________________________________________
them. This is why Owen ‘forgot or despised the grand object of a watchmaker’s
business, and cared no more for the measurement of time than if it had merged
into eternity.’ 26 As a watchmaker, Owen is useless ‘to lead old blind Father Time
along his daily course.’ 27 Being ironic, Hawthorne refers to the fact that the
closer the artist is to the spirit of nature that inspires him, the closer he is to
experiencing beauty, but the more useless he seems to be in the eyes of the
world. The artist intends to let wise Nature’s time guide him, as represented in
the artistic cycles to which Owen seems to submit, and which are
incomprehensible for his community. Old watchmaker Hovenden asserts that if
Owen possessed more talent, ‘he would turn the sun out of its orbit and derange
the whole course of time.’ 28 Indeed, Owen proves to have an invaluable gift, but
he uses this talent by surrendering to the natural flow of time and not to the time
his utilitarian society conceives. The community’s assertion that ‘time is not to
be trifled with’ 29 turns out to be Owens conviction: he does not agree with the
concept of time held by the rest of the community. This also explains the artist’s
disdain for the perpetual movement, for should he ever attain it, the world would
swiftly use it for practical ends.
The Transcendentalist artist believes in his own potential, in his being called
to share his own experience of the beautiful with the world, and in his mission to
illuminate the world with his discovery. Owen must go back to his community,
and he offers his butterfly to the community in hope that they ‘know, and see,
and touch, and possess the secret.’ 30 The artist is aware that he cannot explain
beauty, but that he can only make it available for others to experience it.
Nevertheless, in this materialistic society, the experience of the beautiful is for
them cut short, thwarted: without intuition, without a spiritual search, it is not
possible to comprehend beauty. However, Owen, transformed by his profound
artistic experience, is no longer disturbed when he confirms that he is not
understood; he knows that the butterfly is a simple symbol of his own
transformation, and that ‘the reward of all high performance must be sought
within itself, or sought in vain.’ 31 Therefore, and contrary to what most critics
assert interpreting Owen as a Transcendentalist failure, 32 the end of this short
story is far from tragic, given the fact that what is really important for Owen is
his own transformation after his Transcendentalist experience of beauty, and it is
from here that, fortified, he is able to resist a hostile materialistic and utilitarian
society.
Although Hawthorne’s relationship with Transcendentalism was not always
friendly, as evidenced, for instance, in his description of his Giant
Transcendentalist in the ‘The Celestial Railroad,’ 33 or in his scepticism towards
the Transcendentalist communitarian experiment Brook Farm in The Blithedale
Romance, 34 it is clear that here he endorses the Transcendentalist position that
asserts the individual search for the spiritual dimension of all humankind and
nature. Hawthorne explores the Transcendentalist search for beauty and the
168 The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty
_________________________________________________________________
individual self in the artistic creation, and presents it as the locus where the artist
resists the materialism and utilitarianism of the New England of his time. In the
same way that Owen Warland makes use of his artistic experience to resist those
who try to disturb him, Hawthorne turns ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ into an
instrument to oppose modern trends and beliefs which, while promising progress,
urge individuals to deny their own spiritual essence.

Notes
1
Ralph W. Emerson, ‘The Over-Soul’, in Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo
Emerson (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 186-212.
2
Ralph W. Emerson, Self Reliance (Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2007),
http://books.google.com/books?id=IqU3YwfgzZUC&pg=PA5&dq=Ralph+W.+E
merson,+Self+Reliance+Rockville,+Maryland&hl=en&ei=bzgnTu7QNcbVgQfm
_rVc&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-#v=onepage&q&f=false, viewed 19 July
2011.
3
Ralph W. Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Honolulu, Hawai:
University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 9.
http://books.google.com/books?id=rPEjBYL1u3AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=e
merson+%2B+nature&hl=en&ei=fl9ajvBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&r
esnum=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false, viewed 19 July 2011.
4
Ibid., 30.
5
Ibid., 29.
6
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’, in Mosses from an Old
Manse (New York: A. L. Burt Company Publishers, n. d.), 358-381.
7
Gerry R. Thompson, ed., ‘Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition’,
in Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman, WA: Washington
State University Press, 1974).
8
Ibid., 360.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 367.
11
Ibid.
12
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (N.
p: Forgotten Books, 2008), 127. http://books.google.com/books?id=StH9wYgm4
ZgC&pg=PT3&hl=es&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q=&f=f
alse, viewed 19 July 2011.
13
Ralph W. Emerson, ‘The Poet’, in Essays Second Series (Kessinger Publishing,
2004), 18. http://books.google.com/books?id=svLxEFFhu7IC&printsec=front
cover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, viewed 19
July 2009.
14
Hawthorne, ‘The Artist’, 366.
 Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis 169
_________________________________________________________________

15
Ibid.
16
Emerson, Self Reliance, 17.
17
Ibid., 14.
18
Elizabeth Brocious, ‘Transcendental Exchange: Alchemical Discourse in
Romantic Philosophy and Literature’ (MA diss., Brigham Young University,
2008).
19
Emerson, ‘The Poet’, 217.
20
Hawthorne, ‘The Artist’, 381.
21
Ibid.
22
Emerson, Nature, 29.
23
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, or The Life in the Woods (Plain Label Books,
1930), 24. http://books.google.com/books?id=xrksNAzWatEC&printsec=frontco
ver&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, viewed 19 July
2011.
24
Thoreau, Walden, 65.
25
Hawthorne, ‘The Artist’, 358.
26
Ibid., 361.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 359.
29
Ibid., 362.
30
Ibid., 376.
31
Ibid., 379.
32
Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
1976); Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1962); Nicholas K. Bromwell, ‘The Bloody Hand
of Labor: Work, Class, and Gender in Three Stories by Hawthorne’, American
Quarterly 42 (1990): 542-564; David V. Urban, ‘Evasion of the Finite in
Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful”’, Christianity and Literature 54
(2005): 343-357.
33
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Celestial Railroad’, in The Celestial Railroad: and
Other Stories (Elibron Classics, 2005), http://books.google.com/books?id=ik53z
FvdQZoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage
&q&f=false, viewed 19 July 2011.
34
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Rockville, Maryland: ARC
Manor, 2008), http://books.google.com/books?id=1j=0#v=onepage&q&f=false,
viewed 19 July 2011.

Bibliography
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1976.
170 The Transcendentalist Experience of Beauty
_________________________________________________________________

Bell, Millicent. Hawthorne’s View of the Artist. New York: State U of New York
P, 1962.

Brocious, Elizabeth. ‘Transcendental Exchange: Alchemical Discourse in

Romantic Philosophy and Literature’. MA diss., Brigham Young University,
2008.

Bromwell, Nicholas K. ‘The Bloody Hand of Labor: Work, Class, and Gender in
Three Stories by Hawthorne’. American Quarterly 42 (1990): 542-564.

Emerson, Ralph W. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Honolulu, Hawaii:

University Press of the Pacific, 2001. http://books.google.com/books?id=
rPEjBYL1u3AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=emerson+%2B+nature&hl=en&ei=hr
8lTsfFNIWugQfl9ajvBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0
CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false. Viewed 19 July 2011.

———. ‘The Over-Soul’. In Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 186-
212. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.

———. ‘The Poet’. In Essays Second Series, 1-18. Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
http://books.google.com/books?id=svLxEFFhu7IC&printsec=frontcover&source
=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Viewed 19 July 2011.

———. Self Reliance. Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2007.

http://books.google.com/books?id=IqU3YwfgzZUC&pg=PA5&dq=self+reliance
+%2B+emerson+%2B+manor&hl=en&ei=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=false. Viewed 20
July 2011.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’. In Mosses from an Old

Manse. New York: A. L. Burt Company Publishers.

———. The Blithedale Romance. Rockville, Maryland: ARC Manor, 2008.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1jIEtn7S8nwC&printsec=frontcover&source
=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Viewed 19 July 2011.

———. ‘The Celestial Railroad’. In The Celestial Railroad: and Other Stories.
Elibron Classics, 2005. http://books.google.com/books. Viewed 19 July 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed

Meredith. Forgotten Books, 2008. http://books.google.com/books?id=StH9wYg
 Mariana Mussetta and Andrea Vartalitis 171
_________________________________________________________________

m4ZgC&pg=PT3&hl=es&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q=&
f=false. Viewed 19 July 2011.

Thompson, G. Richard, ed. ‘Introduction: Romanticism and the Gothic

Tradition’. In Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman, WA:
Washington State University Press, 1974.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden, or The Life in the Woods. Plain Label Books, 1930.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xrksNAzWatEC&printsec=frontcover&sourc
e=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Viewed 19 July 2011.

Urban, David V. ‘Evasion of the Finite in Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the

Beautiful”’. Christianity and Literature 54 (2005): 343-357.

Mariana Mussetta is Assistant Professor of English and Anglo-American

Literature at Universidad Nacional de Villa María, Argentina, and she is also
currently taking part in a multidisciplinary research project on the relationship
between justice and culture, while working on her MA Thesis project on the
exploration of the graphic surface in contemporary fiction.

Andrea Vartalitis is Assistant Professor of English Language II at Universidad

Nacional de Villa María, Argentina. While interested in literary and cultural
studies, she is currently devoted to her MA Thesis on an African-American
reading of the American Dream, and has recently finished a book on Hawthorne
and Transcendentalism, co-authored with Mariana Mussetta (Universidad
Nacional de Villa María, forthcoming).
 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty in Daniel Alarcón’s
Short Fiction

W. Michelle Wang
Abstract
The abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman announced in the mid-twentieth
century: ‘The impulse of modern art is to destroy beauty.’ Yet the twentieth
century’s cultivation of this ‘anti-aesthetic sensibility,’ Matthew Kieran observes,
has been met by beauty’s resurrection in other quarters. In ‘both artistic and
theoretical circles, interest in the notion of beauty and the aesthetic more generally
has been reawakened,’ Kieran writes, ‘within the last five years or so there has
suddenly been a rash of books on the subject and galleries are once more putting
on exhibitions like the 1999 Regarding Beauty at the Hirshorn in Washington.’ In
this chapter, I likewise argue for beauty’s significance in literary studies and
address what I perceive to be literature’s role in the larger aesthetics project. My
chapter is premised on what Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman
call an ‘interactionist perspective,’ which marks both objectivist and subjectivist
approaches to the study of beauty—an integrated approach indebted to Immanuel
Kant, which continues to be fostered by contemporary aesthetic philosophers. My
own allegiance in the beauty debate is dominantly a formal one and I explain my
reasons for this position. I also suggest that the age-old contention between
objectivist and subjectivist approaches to beauty offers a way to consider how
different academic disciplines contribute to the wider study of aesthetics. I use a
short story from the Peruvian author, Daniel Alarcón, as a case study to practically
demonstrate the workings of analyzing beauty in literature.

Key Words: Aesthetics, affective, Alarcón, beauty, context, formal, Kant,

literature, objectivist, subjectivist.

*****

1. Studying Beauty
Evidenced partly by the makeup of participants and chapters at this conference,
the study of beauty is a massive interdisciplinary undertaking drawing on work
done in branches of (art) philosophy, art history, literature, and, more recently, the
neurosciences, amongst others. Philosophical aesthetics, in a sense, sets the broader
stage for studying beauty by defining art and providing a coherent structure for
understanding how the ancients and moderns conceive of beauty and, as Battin et
al. point out, assist us in defending these standards, but they are ultimately ‘of no
help in determining whether an object actually meets them.’ 1 Meanwhile, the
neurosciences clarify the mental processes involved in our appreciation of beautiful
art objects and ‘enhance our understanding of certain features of art’ by identifying
174 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
‘neural ‘sources’ for the author’s act of production or the audience’s act of
reception.’ 2 Like philosophical aesthetics, however, it ‘cannot help explain why we
like or dislike a particular work, or help us to evaluate it. […] it remains for
traditional aesthetics to grapple with the meaning’ of artworks. 3 Neuroaesthetics
thus offers a contemporary means of empirically verifying subjectivist theories of
beauty, concerning itself with the mental processes involved in art appreciation.
And so it remains for disciplines such as art history and the literatures to study
the specific art object in order to answer objectivist questions about the properties
and characteristics of beautiful objects: their formal and structural components, and
how these formal characteristics relate to its content or subject-matter. Critical
interpretations of the art object (be it a painting, a poem, or a work of fiction) in
turn allow us to determine if existing standards of beauty set forth in philosophical
aesthetics remain pertinent or if it is necessary to reassess these parameters of
beauty in order to accommodate the ever-evolving forms of art.
The integral role arts 4 critics and scholars play in the overarching aesthetics
project has even been implied in neuroaesthetics. Studies document ‘profound
differences in the aesthetic preferences of novices and experts’ and
neuroaestheticians, using psychological experiments to examine the relationship
between aesthetic variables and processing fluency, found that ‘the more fluently a
receiver processes an art object, the more positive his/her aesthetic response.’ 5
They thus propose that training in the arts facilitates increased ‘processing ease’
and ‘higher perceptual fluency,’ which accounts for why experts are likely to
prefer complex works of art, even though these would appear to rank low in
fluency processing. 6 The role arts critics and scholars therefore assume in the
larger aesthetics project—whether in the disciplines of art history, literature or
other fields devoted to the study of its respective art object—is using their specific
expertise (as a result of their heightened processing fluency) to identify and
interpret what makes particular works of art worthy of attention in terms of their
artistic/aesthetic merit.
Classical aestheticians remark that we become aware of beauty only by the
attendant pleasure 7 we experience in apprehending the art object; it is our only
means for recognizing the beautiful. Our only means of articulating the beautiful,
however, is by pointing to the work’s artistic form, 8 which, after the tradition of St.
Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant (and their successors, Jacques Maritain,
Étienne Gilson and Kieran, amongst others), invariably has to do with the
‘artistically constructed design features’ 9 of the text, with literature’s formal
properties, as I demonstrate using Daniel Alarcón’s ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979.’

2. ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979’

‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979’ is a twelve-page short story describing an art
student-turned-terrorist, Pintor’s recollection of the night’s events leading up to
Independence Day. Alarcón’s narrative operates within the historical context of
 W. Michelle Wang 175
__________________________________________________________________
Peruvian civil strife in its capital city of Lima in 1979. ‘Lima’ is an interesting case
study not only in terms of the relationship between the work’s artful form and its
historical context, but also in that a comparative analysis can be made with an
earlier version of the text published in the Virginia Quarterly Review (2004), a year
before it appeared in Alarcón’s short story collection, War by Candlelight (2005).
The story remains largely identical, but the later version is over 700 words shorter.
The distillation of the aesthetically-improved 2005 version is significant in that it
exhibits a more tautly-wrought formal integrity, which, I argue, is very telling of
Alarcón’s process of artistic creation/refinement, a point to which I shall return.
Pintor and his compañero spend the night butchering stray black dogs and
stringing them up on the city’s streetlamps as a revolutionary act to denounce ‘Die
Capitalist Dogs.’ 10 The narrative centres on Pintor’s first-person account of
pursuing and being caught in the act of slaughtering a dog by a policeman. Pintor
then attempts to account for his savagery by fashioning an elaborate lie about the
dog’s potential rabidity and how it had bitten his (fictitious) little brother. The
situation is almost amicably resolved when the unexpected appearance of Pintor’s
compañero butchering another dog causes the story to fall apart, leading to a tragic
turn of events.
A third-way through his relation of the night’s events, Pintor unexpectedly
begins a biographical narration, recounting his father, his art, and a beautifully
evocative account of his relationship with Lima.

I followed along the narrows of central Lima, beneath her ragged

and decaying balconies, past her boarded buildings, her
cloistered doorways, her shadows. [. . .] Lima was known then
for swallowing lives, drawing people from their ancestral homes,
enveloping us in her concrete and noise. I became one of those
people. I saw the city and felt its chaos and its energy; I couldn’t
go home.

I have lived through Lima’s turbulent adolescence and her

unbounded growth. She is mine now. I am not afraid of her, even
as I am no longer in love with her. 11

Readers experience the passage’s centripetal forces as we are enveloped in Lima’s

‘narrows,’ where her disintegrating balconies collapse into her shrinking streets,
while the inward-curving arches of her cloistered doorways swallow us into the
womb-like embrace of Lima’s shadowy beauty. The homodiegetic narration then
switches back to the night’s events and reaches its tragic climax.
176 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
3. Formal Constructions, Representational Content
A central issue underlying aesthetics is the oft-heard complaint that theories of
beauty neglect representational content in the work of art—a point especially
pertinent in the case ‘Lima,’ where the title’s specificity of location and exactitude
of date strongly suggest the significance of its historical, social and political
contexts. Kant for instance, Kieran explains, is mistakenly assumed to submit to
the view that ‘judgements of beauty are devoid of context, content or purpose.’ 12
Kant’s notion of dependent beauty (as distinct from free beauty) ‘does depend
upon attending to a work in terms of particular determinate concepts. […] most
representational works, where they are beautiful, will be cases of dependent
beauty.’ 13 So it is, I argue, with most beautiful works of fiction, where appreciation
of the literary art object involves ‘delighting in its form as an aesthetically artful’ 14
means of portrayal—thematic or otherwise.
Distinct thematic concerns evident in ‘Lima’ include the senseless futility of
perpetual violence (‘Like a drug, each time the adrenaline rush [from the terrorist
act] is less powerful, and each culminating boom means less and less’) 15 and the
sacrifice of innocent lives to the revolutionaries’ ‘peculiar mania [and] worship of
frivolous violence,’ 16 as Pintor himself admits. Aesthetic interest in the narrative,
however, cannot be reduced to such thematic concerns. As Kieran explains, we
need to keep the ‘historical status of a work, its content or meaning as such’
conceptually distinct from its aesthetic aspect:

A work isn’t any better as art just because it is abstract,

representational, subverts bourgeois values, extols the glories of
human nature or condemns its depravities. What matters
aesthetically speaking is whether we derive pleasure from
attending to how artfully the content of a work, where it has any,
is conveyed. 17

In ‘Lima,’ this artful construction is conveyed through the story’s compositional

structure, where characters serve as symbolic foils for one another. The black dog
is not only a literal symbol for ‘Die Capitalist Dogs’ that Pintor and his compañero
rage against, but functions more specifically as the misplaced site of Pintor’s (self-
aware) inadequacies:

I knew that there was little chance of catching it and—I’ll admit

—it angered me to know that a dog might outdo me […] the poor
dog slowed on the far sidewalk and turned to look at me, its head
turning quizzically to one side, a look I’ve seen before, from
family, from friends, or even from women unfortunate enough to
love me, the look of those who wonder at me, who expect things
and are eventually disappointed. 18
 W. Michelle Wang 177
__________________________________________________________________
These inadequacies resurface as Pintor frenetically spins his wild tale to fend
off the policeman’s suspicions.

I was afraid that he might see through me. So I continued. I told

of my brother, the terrible bite, the awful scream I had heard, the
red fleshy face of the wound. His innocence, his shining eyes, his
smile, his grace. I gave my brother all the qualities I lacked,
made him beautiful and funny […]. And then I gave him a name:
‘Manuel, but we call him Manolo, Manolito,’ I said, and the
officer, gun in hand, softened.

‘That’s my name. […] I’m Manolo too,’ he said […]. We faced

each other in the still of the broad avenue and shared a smile. 19

Fictitious little Manolito serves as a foil for both the policeman (his namesake) and
the slaughtered dogs, since they are all innocent victims of a senseless violence.
Pintor’s imaginary brother is bestially mangled, the city’s dogs are viciously
slaughtered, while Officer Manuel Carrión likewise suffers the dogs’ unjust fate at
the end, when his decision to let Pintor go costs him his life. ‘Carrión acted:
forgave me, inexplicably spared me, struck me with the butt of his gun and ran off
in pursuit of my comrade—sealing his own fate. He died that night.’ 20 Both dog(s)
and policeman are victims of injustice, standing for innocent blood spilled as the
revolutionaries’ collateral damage.
Alarcón’s fiction is an instance of superior literary writing not simply because
it illustrates the thematic concern of terrorism’s tragic consequences, but gains its
effectiveness as an art object from the ‘interrelations between the work’s formal
qualities and its content’ 21—in this case, the evident paradoxical perpetuation of
injustice. To Pintor and his compañero, ‘terrorism offers the only solution to
poverty and injustice’; 22 yet the acts of terror they employ to protest against the
injustices they perceive in their lives endlessly perpetuates injustice itself against
countless other innocent victims, as both man and dogs become sacrificial lambs in
their war against the capitalists.
To paraphrase Kieran, illustrating beliefs or attitudes about violence or
terrorism alone is insufficient to constituting good art; ‘what matters is the
interpenetration of a work’s content with the distinctively aesthetic experience it
affords in shaping how we respond’ 23 to the work of art. ‘Where the point is worth
making and conveyed well through the experience afforded, it is better art for it.’ 24
Using Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 as an example, Kieran explains
that our interest in and aesthetic appreciation of the painting cannot be reduced to
mere historical interest: ‘We aesthetically appreciate Goya’s depiction in a way in
which we would not appreciate a clumsy, ham-fisted representation of the same
event.’ 25 Likewise, ‘Lima’ effectively conveys its thematic concerns by virtue of
178 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty
__________________________________________________________________
the aesthetic experience it offers us in the precise shaping and nuanced rendering
of Alarcón’s short story. The formal parallels and paradoxical cycles of injustice
Pintor and his comrades perpetuate are what give the narrative its powerful
affective impact.
A certain ‘splendor of intelligibility […] according to all the ancients,’ Maritain
explains, is the essential characteristic of beauty, for ‘beauty is the splendor of the
form on the proportioned parts of matter […] it is a flashing of intelligence on a
matter intelligibly arranged.’ 26 The moment of splendor, of flashing intelligence—
when the text’s formal relations click into place in our appreciation of the
compositional whole—occurs when readers identify Officer Manuel Carrión and
the butchered dogs as analogous symbols of innocence slaughtered. United by their
misplaced trust in Pintor and their roles as sacrificial victims in the war of
violence, they are a universal symbol of the innocent lives claimed in two historical
decades of Peruvian civil strife after 1979. 27 The moment of flashing intelligence
or crystallization in readers’ (and arguably, Pintor’s) awareness of relations
between the fictitious Manolito, the slain police officer, and the dogs, heighten
both Pintor’s and readers’ sense of the night’s tragic end. In this way, the text’s
formal relations lead readers to a heightened affective and aesthetic appreciation of
Alarcón’s narrative.

4. Aesthetic Adjustments
The story’s conclusion underscores Pintor’s unspoken regret: ‘I have not
painted since that night of the dogs. Not a stroke of black or red, not animal or
canvas. And I will not paint again. Only the walls of my cell—if they catch me—a
shade recalling sky, so my dreary last days can be spent in grace.’ 28 The sorrow
implicit in such sentiment is never explicitly articulated; in fact, between the 2004
and 2005 versions of the text, Alarcón systematically eradicates explicit emotional
referents, keeping the narration largely focused on the events themselves. 29
Nowhere is this more evident than in the complete elimination of the final five
paragraphs from the 2004 version, which paints the sorrowful Pintor in a much
kinder light. The distillation of these emotional referents (which I argue were a
crutch in the earlier version) in the move from explicit to muted sorrow shapes a
more nuanced aesthetic experience of the narrative for the reader.
A minor but highly significant revision between the two versions that allows
the narrative’s formal structure to work as effectively as it does has to do with the
two Manolos: in the 2004 version, the policeman Manuel Carrión tells Pintor, ‘My
little brother must be just like your Manolito, always getting into something’;
whereas in the 2005 version, Alarcón changes this to, ‘I used to be just like your
Manolito […] always getting into something.’ 30 This small but integral change
allows Alarcón to more effectively create the formal resonance he achieves in the
later version, where the fictitious Manuel serves as a foil for the real Manuel. Had
Alarcón not done so, the implicit structure of meaning would have been
 W. Michelle Wang 179
__________________________________________________________________
significantly altered; if Pintor’s Manolito is just like Carrión’s little brother (2004
version), rather than Carrión himself (2005 version), the policeman would then be
structurally aligned with Pintor rather than Manolito in the narrative’s formal
arrangement, destroying the structural parallel between the two Manolitos and the
symbol of innocence they stand for, undermining the taut interpenetrations Alarcón
has painstakingly built between the formal and thematic elements in his narrative.
Other aesthetic adjustments Alarcón makes are telling of his artistic ends. In the
2005 version, most references to Pintor’s politics (save those most pertinent to the
night’s events) are eradicated. 31 The change, I argue, is in keeping with Alarcón’s
concern with the taut formal integrity of the text. Alarcón himself explained,

I don’t simply want to write books that function as reports on the

developing world for American audiences. I want to write books
that advance the cause of story-telling. The books that I want to
write, the books I dream about writing, will be more ambitious in
terms of form, in terms of language, in terms of structure. 32

Though details about Pintor’s politics reinforce the story’s thematic and socio-
political underpinnings, Alarcón’s decision to shave any and all material that
detracts from a taut narrative structure highlights distinctly aesthetic concerns—
concerns with the formal constructions of storytelling, to which subject-matter
becomes subservient.
Having set out the role of literary scholars to be aligned with explicitly formal
concerns in the study of beauty, I’ve used Alarcón’s ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979’ to
demonstrate the workings of beauty in fiction by taking up the aesthetic issue of
how formal concerns interpenetrate with socio-historical contexts that fiction tends
to operate within. The formal integrity of a tautly-wrought narrative like Alarcón’s
heightens the affective and aesthetic effect of fiction, since it shapes a more precise
and nuanced experience of the literary art object for the reader. Such formal
operationalisations of beauty in literature, I suggest, function in tandem with the
work being done in aesthetics within other disciplines, to provide a more holistic
and in-depth insight into the study of beauty and other aesthetic values.

Notes
1
Margaret P. Battin et al., Puzzles about Art: An Aesthetics Casebook (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 37.
2
Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific
Approaches to the Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 16.
3
Ibid., 16-17.
180 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty
__________________________________________________________________

4
I use the word ‘arts’ broadly in reference to the major disciplines such as
painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, dance, theatre and literature.
5
Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman, ‘Processing Fluency and
Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?’
Personality and Social Psychology Review 8.4 (2004): 366. Aesthetic variables
investigated include figural goodness, figure-ground contrast and symmetry.
6
Ibid., 377.
7
While pleasure necessarily attends our apprehension of the beautiful, it is not the
only condition that the classical philosophers stipulated for beauty, nor is every
pleasurable sensation a definitive indicator of the beautiful.
8
Where beauty is, I argue, form is always present; where form is, however, beauty
may not necessarily always be present.
9
Kieran, Revealing Art, 68.
10
Ibid., 78.
11
Ibid., 79-81.
12
Kieran, Revealing Art, 54.
13
Ibid., 55.
14
Ibid.
15
Alarcón, ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979,’ 84.
16
Ibid., 77.
17
Kieran, Revealing Art, 89-90.
18
Alarcón, ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979,’ 78-79.
19
Ibid., 85; emphasis added.
20
Ibid., 88.
21
Kieran, Revealing Art, 55.
22
Marie Arana, ‘Crossing the Divide: Novelist Daniel Alarcón’s Writings Evoke
the Gritty, Compelling Landscape of Urban Latin America,’ Smithsonian (October
2007): n.p.
23
Kieran, Revealing Art, 59.
24
Ibid., 98.
25
Ibid., 65.
26
Jacques Maritain, ‘Art and Beauty’, in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From
Plato to Wittegenstein (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1969):
475.
27
The point emphasizing the senselessness of such arbitrary sacrifice becomes
even more salient when Pintor and his comrades begin hunting down dogs of all
colours when they ‘ran out of black dogs to kill.’
28
Alarcón, ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979,’ 84.
 W. Michelle Wang 181
__________________________________________________________________

29
Bald statements from the 2004 version, such as, ‘I realized it [the dog] had been
an innocent all along’ and ‘the whimpering of the wounded animal tugged at me
and, feeling pity […],’ disappear in the later version.
30
Alarcón, ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979,’ 86; emphasis added.
31
The 2005 deletions include references to Pintor’s political leanings: ‘The student
body was taken with the idea of change. Dramatic, violent, perhaps the only kind
that can stir souls in a nation like ours.’
32
Daniel Alarcón, ‘Author Interview: Daniel Alarcon on War by Candlelight’,
HarperCollins Publishers, accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.harpercollins.
com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=27412&isbn13=9780060594800&display
Type=bookinterview.

Bibliography

Alarcón, Daniel. ‘Author Interview: Daniel Alarcon on War by Candlelight’.

HarperCollins Publishers. Accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.harpercollins.
com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=27412&isbn13=9780060594800&display
Type=bookinterview.

———. ‘Daniel Alarcón’s Internal Migrations.’ Interview by Vinnie Wilhelm.

Loggernaut Reading Series. Accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.loggernaut.org/
interviews/danielalarcon/da2.php.

———. ‘Exclusive Tev Guest Interview: Daniel Alarcón’. Interview by Daniel

Olivas. The Elegant Variation: A Literary Weblog. Marksarvas.blogs.com, January
31, 2007. Accessed March 14, 2011, http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2007/01/
tev_guest_inter.html.

———. ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979.’ Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 2004):
4-13. Accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2004/summer/
alarcon-lima-peru-july/.

———. ‘Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979.’ In War by Candlelight, 77-88. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.

Thomas Aquinas. ‘Summa Theologica.’ Philosophies of Beauty: From Socrates to

Robert Bridges (Being the Sources of Aesthetic Theory). Edited by E. F. Carritt,
50-52. New York, London and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1931.
182 Formal Structures of Literary Beauty
__________________________________________________________________

Arana, Marie. ‘Crossing the Divide: Novelist Daniel Alarcón’s Writings Evoke the
Gritty, Compelling Landscape of Urban Latin America’. Smithsonian (October
2007): n.p. Accessed March 14, 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specia
lsections/innovators/alarcon.html.

Battin, Margaret P., John Fisher, Ronald Moore and Anita Silvers. Puzzles about
Art: An Aesthetics Casebook. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Freedberg, David and Vittorio Gallese. ‘Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic
Experience.’ TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 11.5 (2007): 197-203.

Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.

Maritain, Jacques. ‘Art and Beauty.’ 1962. Translated by Joseph W. Evans.

Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics: From Plato to Wittegenstein. Edited by Frank
Tillman and Steven Cahn, 474-483. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper &
Row, 1969.

Massey, Irving. The Neural Imagination: Aesthetic and Neuroscientific

Approaches to the Arts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Osbourne, Harold. Aesthetics and Criticism. New York: Philosophical Library,

1955.

Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwarz and Piotr Winkielman. ‘Processing Fluency and
Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?’
Personality and Social Psychology Review 8.4 (2004): 364-382.

Seeley, William P. ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Art and the Cognitive Neuroscience

of Vision.’ Journal of Visual Art Practice 5.3 (2006): 195-213.

Vice, Brad. ‘Street Kids, Maimed Dogs, Nudes on Stilts in a City in Peru’. Review
of War by Candlelight, by Daniel Alarcón. San Francisco Chronicle. April 17,
2005, C6. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/reviews/books/
WAR_BY_CANDLELIGHT.DTL.

W. Michelle Wang is a Ph.D student in the Department of English at The Ohio

State University. She earned her Bachelor (Communications) and Master of Arts
(English) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests
centre on formalism, aesthetic theory and the novel, and narrative theory. Her
 W. Michelle Wang 183
__________________________________________________________________

recent publication is an article in the special Flann O’Brien issue of the Review of
Contemporary Fiction, entitled ‘Lightness of Touch: Subtracting Weight from the
Narrative Structure of At Swim-Two-Birds.’
 Section 8

Sacralising Beauty
 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī

Hülya Alper
Abstract
This chapter aims to explore divine beauty and its relation to beauty of all living
creatures according to Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) who is one of the greatest theologians
and mystical thinkers in the history of Islamic thought, by examining his
masterpieces work which called the Revival of the Religious Sciences. It will focus
on divine beauty, which is one of the attributes of God in Islam, as an absolute and
perfect beauty. Thus, clarify that perfect is beautiful because God is absolute
perfect, he is absolute beautiful as well. Later on from this point we will discuss
the relationship between beauty and love emphasising on the famous quote ‘God is
beautiful and he loves beauty.’ Hopefully at the end of this research we will prove
that all beautiful things in this world are a reflection of divine beauty. 1

Key Words: Ghazālī, divine beauty, love, perfection.

*****

‘So blessed be Allah, the Best of Creators!’

Surah al-Mu’minūn 23/14.

‘The Most Beautiful Names belong to Allah. So call on Him by

them.’
Surah al-A’rāf 7/180.

This chapter, which aims to analyse the concept of beauty in the thought of Abū
Hāmid al-Ghazālī (d.505/1111), one of the most eminent thinkers in the history of
philosophy, will also attempt to examine the main idea of beauty in the tradition of
Islamic thought. There have been a great number of ideas put forth by Islamic
philosophers on this issue, which, although differing from one another in detail and
method of explanation, are similar in many important points.
As a matter of fact, in the tradition to which Ghazālī belongs 2 the nature of
beauty has been addressed on a metaphysical basis, while being discussed in the
course of debates about God and His attributes. 3 In this context, all of the Muslim
thinkers are in agreement on the idea that God is beautiful, the primary source of
this agreement being the divine Revelation. 4 According to the Revelation, God is
not only the ‘Best of Creators’ (ahsān al-khāliqīn), but also has the most beautiful
names (asmā al-husnā). The expression of the most beautiful names, ‘asmā al-
husnā’ in Arabic, which is mentioned in the Qur’an and the Hadith, has had a great
influence on Muslim scholars; as a result, a particular kind of writing has emerged
188 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī
__________________________________________________________________
on this subject; many books known by this name have been written throughout the
history of Islamic thought. 5
Ghazālī’s work, which is called el-Maqsad al-asnā fī sharh asmā’ Allāh al-
husnā, is one of the first and most important examples of this kind of writing.
Ghazālī mentions the beauty of God under the name of Majestic (al-Jalīl) in this
work; it is in this book that he analyses the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah.
The name Majestic (al-Jalīl) means that God is distinguished by the attributes
of majesty; such attributes are dominion, sanctification, knowledge, wealth, power,
etc. To describe God as the Majestic attests to the fact that He has perfect
attributes. Ghazālī also explains that this perfection is beauty, as the majestic
attributes are related to the intellectual perception that perceives them, they are
called beauty, and as a result, the one who has these qualities is called beautiful. 6
Consequently, Ghazālī, like many Islamic scholars, relates the perfection of God
and His beauty to one another.
In fact, there is not only a linear relationship between divine beauty and divine
perfection; there is also a linear relationship between every beautiful thing and its
perfection. This means that the more perfect something is the more beautiful it is.
Obviously, the opposite of this statement is also true; the less perfect something is
the less beautiful it is.
Ghazālī states: ‘the beauty of a thing means the presence of the perfection that
is possible and befitting it.’ 7 Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) acts, in a sense, as a pioneer of
Ghazālī on this subject, since Ibn Sīnā defines beauty as ‘The beauty and splendour
of all things consists in that everything has to be as it has to be.’ 8 As stated in
Ghazālī’s work, if all possible perfections are present, then the utmost degree of
beauty is present. If only some perfect attributes are present, then the object has the
quantity of beauty which is present at that time. 9
Then the beauty of all beings does not mean that all things have the same
qualities. The beauty of every being is of a degree that is related to the possible
perfection of it. For example, if we use the same example from Ghazālī, when we
say ‘a beautiful horse’, we are referring to features such as its form, colour and
gait. When we say ‘beautiful handwriting’, we are referring to the symmetry of the
letters and their proper arrangement.
Therefore, the beauty of everything varies depending on its possible perfection,
and each being has different criteria of beauty. Although the specific criteria of
beauty can change according to the possessor, the basic principle asserted by
Ghazālī does not change: ‘the beauty of a thing means the presence of perfection
that is possible and befitting it.’ 10
In this case, how are we to perceive the relationship of perfection and beauty
for the Necessary Being? Surely, we cannot accept any possible condition about
God; the only Necessary Being must be perfect in existence. Thus, the judgement
‘God is beautiful’ is also rationally necessary, as He has all forms of perfection,
such as being purely good, all wise, omniscient, omnipotent etc...; perfection
 Hülya Alper 189
__________________________________________________________________
includes beauty. Saying God is beautiful is another way of saying He has all of
these attributes.
How then is it possible to arrive at the idea that God is perfect or that He has
perfect attributes? 11 To try to answer the question of ‘why is God perfect?’ will not
be possible in the limited pages of this article. Nevertheless, it is possible to state
that the perfection of the Necessary Being in Himself, a being Who is in need of
nothing, is also logically necessary. 12 At this point, we should elaborate on the
relationship between perfection and beauty.
Before Ghazālī, divine beauty had been discussed in connection with divine
perfection and in Islamic thought a similar explanation on this subject was given.
For example, both Fārābī (d.339/950) and then Ibn Sīnā (d.428/1037) mentioned
that the First Cause, who is at the peak of the hierarchy of existence, is the most
beautiful because He is the most perfect being. 13 In fact, all of the attributes which
apply to God naturally articulate that He is the highest point of perfection; He is
apparently different from all living creatures, as mentioned in the Qur’an, ‘There is
nothing like unto Him.’ 14 He, who is the Necessary Being in Himself, is the most
perfect being, and consequently, He is the most beautiful being as well.
Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, two of the most notable figures in the Islamic
philosophical tradition who lived before Ghazālī, had particular influence on
Ghazālī’s approach to divine beauty, and they were sources for Ghazālī in some
way. Moreover, it is possible to trace Ghazālī’s thought in ancient Greek
philosophy; here there were very similar ideas. However, it should not be forgotten
that the original and main sources of Ghazālī 15 are the Holy Qur’an and the
ahadith. 16
Moreover, the metaphysics of the Qur’an have obviously designated the
concept of a transcendental and perfect God for Muslim thinkers. As mentioned
above, the development of the concept of asmāullah al-husnā, which means the
most beautiful names of God, in this thought system is also an important proof of
these designations. Moreover, indicating the hadith that ‘God is beautiful and He
loves beauty’, 17 Ghazālī, who narrates a number of verses and ahadith in his works,
exposes, in a sense, his main sources.
While the first part of the Prophet’s hadith emphasizes divine beauty, the
second part of it not only emphasizes the beauty of creatures, but also encourages
people to do those things that are beautiful; thus, achieving divine love depends on
good and beautiful deeds. In addition, Ghazālī proposes that every divine attribute
is reflected on human beings, who have been created of the best stature; 18 in this
context, he analyses the ninety-nine beautiful names of God, clarifying their
reflection on human beings. Ghazālī explains the reason of his method as:

‘You should know that it was the saying of the Messenger of

God-God’s blessing him and peace be upon him—which brought
me to mention these counsels following the names and attributes:
190 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī
__________________________________________________________________
‘you should be characterized by the characteristics of God most
high’; as well as his saying-may peace and blessing be upon him:
‘Given that God is characterized by the ninety-nine names
whoever is characterized by one of them enters paradise’ 19

In this sense, beautiful people are the people whose characters are good. A
person who characterizes the morality of the Qur'an receives this bounty from
God’s Majesty and Beauty. 20 Therefore many verses in the Qur’an dwell on the
fact that Allah loves Al-Muhsinūn (the good-doers).
Working from these verses alone it is possible to come to the conclusion that
there is a relationship between beauty and love. This judgment is introduced as a
clear fact in the thought system of Ghazālī. First of all, Ghazālī defines love as
‘(being) the heart’s inclination toward what it derives pleasure from’ and insists
that love forms in a heart that has knowledge and perception. 21 Another statement
by Ghazālī tells us, ‘love is the fruit of knowledge (ma‘rifa)’. 22 When knowledge
increases, love increases as well. Hence, Ghazālī establishes knowledge on the
ground of love. For this reason, the more human beings know about God, the more
they love Him.
Having posed such ideas, Ghazālī considers beauty to be one of the causes of
love. He states that it is possible to love something for its own sake and not for the
sake of pleasure, even if it is not beneficial. This indicates the love of beauty; 23
thus, when every beautiful thing is perceived, it is beloved for virtue itself (li-
dhātihi), because the perception of beauty is pleasure for its own sake. 24 For
example, running water and the green of the physical world deserve to be loved
just because of their beauty, not because they can be eaten or drunk. 25 It is human
worries that drive them away. Everything which gives pleasure is beloved, thus a
human being naturally loves every beautiful thing that gives a feeling of pleasure
when perceived. 26 If something is beloved dependent on a pleasure, because its
beauty has been perceived, once human beings become acquainted with God it is
impossible for them not to love God, Who is the most beautiful. 27
Then how is it possible for a human being, one who has been created and who
has limited abilities, to perceive God's beauty, which is transcendental and eternal?
If beauty is reduced to merely that which is perceived by the five senses, then it is
possible to conclude that God’s beauty is not perceivable. But this is not the case;
indeed, Ghazālī criticizes those people who think that beauty is limited to the
perception of sight and who believe that whatever cannot be perceived by the eyes
or the imagination and which is not composed of forms or colours cannot be
accepted as beautiful; he states that there is beauty beyond the five senses. Ghazālī
continues to explain his ideas as follows: Fine character implies good qualities and
behaviour, such as knowledge, intellect, chastity, courage, generosity and piety.
These cannot be grasped by the five senses, but rather are only perceived by the
light of inner perception (al-basīra al-bātina). 28
 Hülya Alper 191
__________________________________________________________________
Thus, Ghazālī separates beauty into two parts. While the first is external, that is,
that which is perceived by the physical eye or five senses, the second is internal,
that is, that which is perceived by the heart (qalb), intellect (‘aql) or the light of the
insight (nūr al-basīra); in all senses, the beauty of God is internal beauty. 29
There are two different types of pleasures that are affiliated with these two
beauties. Outward pleasures are obtained by the five senses, but inward pleasures
are obtained by the intellect; these include leadership, knowledge etc. Hence, to
limit human beings to only outward pleasure and love means to undermine their
status in the world.
In addition, to limit oneself only to outward pleasure would also mean
nullifying a sixth sense, that which is called the heart, intellect or the light (nūr); it
is this that makes human beings human. It is the heart or intellect has the ability to
understand meanings that are not perceived by the senses.

‘The beauty of concepts apprehended by the intellect is greater

than the beauty of forms visible to the eye. There is no doubt that
the pleasure of the heart in what it apprehends of noble, divine
matters too lofty to be grasped by the senses is more complete
and lasting.’ 30

As a matter of fact, the pleasure of the intellect, which has been created to
know the truth in all things, 31 essentially comes into being in relation to the
comprehension of knowledge. It is generally accepted that to have knowledge is
something that gives pleasure. Even simple or lowly knowledge, in a sense,
delights people. In addition, Ghazālī elaborates that the pleasure of knowledge can
change in relation to the subject of knowledge. As far as he is concerned, the
pleasure of knowledge changes in relation to the honour attributed to the field of
knowledge. The honour attributed to the field of knowledge is determined by the
subject that is being studied (ma‘lūm); and thus knowledge is honour, supreme and
perfect to the same extent as its subject. Hence, can there be knowledge more
honourable, supreme or perfect than the knowledge of God Who is the Creator of
the Heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, the Inventor of all things,
the Bestower of forms? Ghazālī asks ‘what can be superior to God in dominion,
perfection, beauteousness, value, majesty and tremendousness?’ The one who does
not hesitate in this will not hesitate in admitting that their knowledge of God and
His attributes is the most pleasant knowledge. 32
It is surely impossible for human beings who have limited sources of
knowledge to comprehend infinite divine beauty. God clearly has perfect
knowledge of Himself; the highest subject of love is identical with the highest
object of love. 33 As Ibn Sīnā asserts ‘He is Himself for Himself the greatest Lover
and the greatest Beloved’ 34
192 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī
__________________________________________________________________
For this reason, there is no ultimate end for human beings in their search of
knowledge of God (ma‘rifetullah); each time there is a further distance to run.
Naturally, the greatest pleasure for people who are spiritually mature is to know
about God in this world and to experience the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise.
If a person purifies their heart from physical enjoyment and desires, it is possible to
have pleasure of knowledge of God. In Ghazālī’s view, such a pleasure can occur
with knowledge through illumination (mukashafah). 35 Ghazālī, who generally uses
a form of Sufi terminology in his explanations, mentions the necessity of
abstaining from profane desires and the purification of the heart from all earthly
things (māsīvā) as a means of asceticism and piety to receive this illumination.
Moreover, it is also necessary to have pure thought, to cut one's self off from
everything which is other than Allah, to remember Allah always; that is to think of
Him, His attributes and His creation of the Heavens and earth. After this divine
manifestation (tajalli) can become apparent in a heart; thus a believer can arrive at
the pleasure of the knowledge of God. 36 Ghazālī indicates that every knower (‘ārif)
aims to reach God; when they attain their aim, all of their troubles and demands
disappear and their hearts are engaged with ardent blessings. Ghazālī gives an
example from a line of poetry to demonstrate how lofty this desire is: ‘While
separation from Him is more frightening than hell, meeting Him is more beautiful
than paradise.’ 37
As a matter of fact, the vision of God is the greatest of all the blessings that
have been promised in the Hereafter and a favour that is additional to Paradise for
the people who will dwell therein. The joy of seeing God for a believer will be the
ultimate joy. Ghazālī states: one who does not enjoy the pleasure of knowing God
will not see God in the Hereafter. 38
Ghazālī divides the people who acquire the knowledge and love of God into
two categories: one is strong, the other is weak. The strong people first know God,
then the creatures, but the weak people first know creatures then the Creator, which
means that strong people perceive the fashioned (masnu‘) through the Fashioner
(Sani‘), while weak people perceive the Fashioner (the cause) through the
fashioned (the effect) 39 Obviously, longing and loving the One who has All-Beauty
can cause people to realize the beauty in the world that are His works of art. At the
same time, the beauty of His works can make people aware of the Designer who is
the source of beauty.
In fact, all of God’s deeds are beautiful as He is the Omniscient, the
Benevolent, the Wise and the All-Powerful etc. For this reason all created things
are relatively beautiful, but not absolute like divine beauty. Therefore, beauty can
generally be differentiated into divine beauty and created beauty, or absolute
beauty and relative-accidental beauty. In this sense, the beauty of God is
considered to be absolute or spiritual beauty, as in Islamic Mysticism the beauty of
the universe is considered to be conditional or material beauty. 40 In any case, in the
end all beauty depends on God. 41
 Hülya Alper 193
__________________________________________________________________
Ghazālī highlights the beauty in all nature, the handiwork of God, saying that:

For the absolute and truly beautiful one is God alone-may He be

praised and exalted- since all the beauty, perfection, splendour,
and attractiveness in the world comes from the lights of His
essence and the traces of His attributes. There is no existing thing
in the world except Him which has absolute perfection with no
competitor, be it actual or potential. 42

As a result I must emphasis again that, as seen in the example of Ghazālī,

beauty and perfection are considered together with the transcendental in the
tradition of Islamic thought. Accordingly, Allah, Who is the absolute existent and
the absolute perfect being, is the sole absolute beauty as well. The other beings,
which are His creatures, reflect His beauty. 43 Therefore, the real beauty which
gives pleasure is divine beauty. The basic truth that gives meaning to people’s
existence and makes them happy is to perceive divine beauty.

Notes
1
I would like to thank to Scientific Research Project Commission of Marmara
University regarding their support on project number SOS-D-200611-0233.
2
This approach can be referred to as ‘meta-aesthetic’, see: Valérie Gonzales,
Beauty and Islam Aesthetics in Islamic Art (London-New York: I.B. Tauris
Publishers, 2001), 7.
3
Deborah L. Black, ‘Aesthetics in Islamic Philosophy’, in Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), I, 75.
4
E.g. Al-A‘rāf 7/180; Al-Isrā’ 17/110; Al-Mu’minūn 23/14.
5
For details, see: Bekir Topaloğlu, ‘Esmâ-i Hüsnâ’ in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islâm
Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995), XI, 416-417.
6
Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. el-Maqsad al-asnā fī sharh
asmā’ Allāh al-husnā, trans. David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge:
Islamic Texts Society, 2007), 112.
7
Ghazālī, Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn (Beirut: Dāru Sādır, 2000), V, 9.
8
Ibn Sīnā, al-Najāt, ed. Abd al-Rahman ‘Umayra (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1992), II,
101; Gonzales, Beauty and Islam, 14.
9
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 9.
10
Ibid.
11
This question is important for us, as we have established God’s beauty
dependent on His perfection. If God’s perfection is to be disproved, then His
beauty has been disproved as well.
194 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī
__________________________________________________________________

12
In this situation, it is possible to ask why the existence of God is necessary, but
this means proving the existence of God, and this falls outside our subject.
13
Ayşe Taşkent, ‘Fârâbî, İbn Sînâ ve İbn Rüşd’de Estetik (PhD diss., Marmara
University 2009), 68; Al-Fārābī, Al-Madìna al-fādila (On the Perfect State), ed.
and trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 83ff; Ibn Sīnā, The
Metaphysics of the Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo-Utah: Brigham
Young Press, 2005), 297; Ibn Sīnā, al-Najāt, II, 101.
14
Surah Ash-Shūrā 42/11.
15
Many Western researchers allege that the ideas of Muslim philosophers on
beauty were inspired by Neo-platonic sources. (See. Black, ‘Aesthetics in Islamic
Philosophy’, I, 75.)
16
Although it is true that Muslim philosophers gave a particular place to Greek
philosophy and adopted it, for the most part they were inspired by religious
sources, and thus Islamic thought developed based on the Qur’an.
17
Muslim ‘Iman’, 147; Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 8.
18
Surah Surah at-Tīn 95/4.
19
Ghazālī, Ninety-Nine, 149.
20
Surah al-Baqara 2/195; Surah Al-i Imrān 3/134, 148; Surah al-Māidah 5/13, 93.
21
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 6.
22
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 12.
23
Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Beauty in Arabic Culture (Princeton: Markus Wiener
Publishers, 1999), 23.
24
See: the idea that beauty is loved. Ibn Sīnā, al-Najāt, II, 101.
25
In fact, in Ghazālī’s view, every honest man accepts that looking at greenery,
flying birds, beautiful frescos or harmonious figures gives pleasure; it is human
worries that drive them away. Everything which gives pleasure is beloved.
26
It can be said that perception of beauty is identical to the very essence of
pleasure in Ghazālī’s view. See: Binyamin Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic
Mysticism (New York-London: Rutledge Curzon, 2003), 48.
27
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 8. Surely, love of God is not only related to divine beauty; as
Ghazālī explains in detail, all of the causes of love are joined to God in a real
sense, but because of the subject being discussed here we are focusing on beauty.
See in detail about love of God in Ghazālī: M. ‘Umaruddīn, The Ethical
Philosophy of-al-Ghazzālī (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1982), 145-154; Eric
Ormsby, Ghazali (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 133-138.
28
Carole Hillenbrand, ‘Some Aspects of al-Ghazālī’s Views on Beauty’, in God is
Beautiful and He Loves Beauty: Festschrift in Honour of Annemarie Schimmel =
Gott ist schön und er liebt schönheit: festschrift für Annemarie Schimmel, ed. Alma
Gies and J. Christoph Bürgel (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 256.
29
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 9ff.
 Hülya Alper 195
__________________________________________________________________

30
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 6-7; Hillenbrand, ‘Some Aspects of al-Ghazālī’s’, 254.
31
Ghazālī, Ihyā,V, 19.
32
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 20
33
Al-Fārābī Al-Madìna al-fādila, 89; Ibn Sīnā, Risālah fī al-‘ıshk, ed. Husayn al-
Siddīq -Rāwiyah Jāmūs (Dımasq: Dār Al-fikr, 2005), 54.
34
İbn Sīnā, al-Najāt, II,101.
35
This is an expression that designates the illumination which appears in a heart
after its purification from blameworthy qualities.
36
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 31.
37
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 24.
38
Ghazālī, Ihyā, V, 27.
39
There are verses in the Qur’an that imply these two categories. As an example,
Ghazālī, gives Āl ‘Imrān 3/18 for the first, al-Mulk 67/3-4 for the second.
40
Süleyman Uludağ, ‘Cemâl’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi
(Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1993), VII, 296.
41
‘All beauty that can be perceived in this world by sight, ear, or mind is,
according to him, a reflection of God’s light and his power.’ Abouseif, Beauty, 22.
42
Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine, 113.
43
Hillenbrand, ‘Some Aspects of al-Ghazālī’s’, 260.

Bibliography
Abouseif-Behrens, Doris. Beauty in Arabic Culture. Princeton: Markus Wiener
Publishers, 1999.

Abrahamov, Binyamin. Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism. New York-London:

Rutledge Curzon, 2003.

Black, Deborah L. ‘Aesthetics in Islamic Philosophy’. In Routledge Encyclopedia

of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig, I, 75-79. London and New York:
Routledge, 1998.

Fārābī. Abū Nasr Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-. .Al-Madìna al-fādila (On the
Perfect State). Edited and Translated by Richard Walzer. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985.

Ghazālī, Muhammad Ibn Muhammad al-. Ihyā ‘ulūm al-dīn. Beirut: Dāru Sādır,
2000.
196 Divine Beauty in the Thought of Ghazālī
__________________________________________________________________

–––, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God. el-Maqsad al-asnā fī sharh asmā’
Allāh al-husnā. Translated by David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher. Cambridge:
Islamic Texts Society, 2007.

Gonzales, Valérie. Beauty and Islam Aesthetics in Islamic Art. London-New York:
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2001.

Hillenbrand, Carole. ‘Some Aspects of al-Ghazālī’s Views on Beauty’. In God is

Beautiful and He Loves Beauty: festschrift in honour of Annemarie Schimmel =
Gott ist schön und er liebt schönheit : festschrift für Annemarie Schimmel, edited
by Alma Gies and J. Christoph Bürgel, 249-265. Bern: Peter Lang, 1994.

Ibn Sīnā, Abū ‘Alī Husayn. The Metaphysics of the Healing. Translated by
Michael E. Marmura. Provo-Utah: Brigham Young Press, 2005.

———. al-Najāt. Edited by Abd al-Rahman ‘Umayra. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1992.

———. Risālah fī al-‘ıshk. Edited by Husayn al-Siddīq -Rāwiyah Jāmūs. Dımasq:

Dār Al-fikr, 2005.

Muslim, Abū al-Husayn Muslim b. Haccāc. al-Cāmiu‘s-sahīh. Istanbul: Çağrı,

1992.

Ormsby, Eric. Ghazali. Oxford: Oneworld Publications 2007.

Taşkent, Ayşe. Fârâbî, İbn Sînâ ve İbn Rüşd’de Estetik. PhD diss., Marmara
University 2009.

Topaloğlu, Bekir. ‘Esmâ-i Hüsnâ’. In Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islâm Ansiklopedisi,

XI, 404-418. Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995.

Uludağ, Süleyman. ‘Cemâl’. In Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi. VII,

296. Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1993.

‘Umaruddīn, M. The Ethical Philosophy of-al-Ghazzālī. Lahore: Muhammad

Ashraf, 1982.

Hülya Alper is Associate Professor of Islamic Theology at Marmara University,

Istanbul. hulyaalper@hotmail.com.
 Beauty as Religion: Modern Answers to Modern Anxieties

Lena Nans
Abstract
Why do people spend so much time and money on altering their appearance to
become more ‘beautiful’? Why would a person do potentially risky or painful
things to their own body for the sake of ‘beauty’? My motivation in writing this
chapter is to explore the notion of beauty rituals as a coping mechanism for
anxieties caused by a modern age. This research intends to go beyond the
aesthetics of modern beauty, delving into the reasons why someone would put so
much effort into altering their physical appearance. To shed new light on possible
motives for these procedures, I view the individual’s quest for beauty within the
framework of religious and psychological theories. Of course, the works of
Radcliff- Brown and Malinowski discuss the role of anxiety on religious practices,
but I explain how they also shed light on beauty routines. Coupled with religious
theories, I use a psychological concept proposed by Ernest Becker which shows
how people’s actions are primarily driven by a quest for self-esteem. And then
there is the role of advertising on the individual—what does it take to attain
prestige and self-assurance in a media driven, technological society? As a result of
this study, I demonstrate how people use beauty rituals to boost their self-esteem as
a means of coping with their own personal anxieties. Looking at the larger scope,
people become increasingly engaged in conscious and unconscious, pervasive
images of beauty. Many are induced into an insecurity which compels them to
purchase more goods which may or may not compensate for any perceived
deficiencies. Beauty—and all of the routines involved in it- thus becomes a type of
witchcraft where the stylists are the witchdoctors and the members of the media are
the spirit guides.

Key Words: Beauty, advertising, Malinawski, Radcliff-Brown, Becker, ritual,

anxiety, Spiro, Geertz, Nacerima.

*****

1. Introduction
What if there is more to beauty than just what is on the surface? Certainly, we
all deal with the human condition; and throughout our lives, we end up spending
significant portions of time in dealing with it. Some people turn to established
religions to cope with uncertainties whereby a belief in a powerful god, a devout
following, rituals, and praying will deliver us in some way from our fears or
suffering. Does the pursuit of beauty serve a similar purpose? In this chapter, I
intend to look at beauty in modern day culture with a different approach.
198 Beauty as Religion
__________________________________________________________________
2. How Modern Consumption Elevates Beauty to Religion
Beauty, especially the pursuit of beauty in modern-day capitalistic terms, has
turned into something that encompasses the lives of many people. With growing
globalized interconnectedness- including massive media and advertising
campaigns, people constantly see advertisements that canonize new images for
reverence.
The companies have become a type of institution much like the one proposed
by Spiro which ‘consist[s] of culturally patterned interaction with culturally
postulated super-humans’. 1
In this case, the beauty industry creates icons that parallel what Spiro would
consider super-humans. Models or characters on television become superhuman
because most finished print ads and films we see on screen have been altered
beyond the humanistic sphere. They have been doctored by airbrushing or special
lights and camera angles. These people become canons for beauty and their images
are pervasive as we see them in magazines, on screens, buses, product
endorsements, etc. Because their lives on screen or in ads. are never fully candid,
the people we see in the media have their human imperfections removed. They are
deified and revered by their audience.
Perhaps the most thorough definition of religion which provided me with the
veritable list of requirements on which to base my whole argument is the definition
given by Clifford Geertz in his essay, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’.
In this writing, Geertz defines religion as,

(1) a system of symbols which acts to

(2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and
motivations in men by
(3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. 2

(1) If the beauty industry can be viewed as an institution, then this industry is
the one that is the source of symbols. Aside from the superhuman symbols we see,
there are a plethora of other symbols that the industry provides to persuade people
to buy their products. There is no doubt that we see ‘beautiful’ people everywhere
in print and on television. At the very least, these symbols are pervasive. And, their
purpose is also intended to be a motivation for the viewers. This motivation is of
course, to buy products displayed in the images.
(2) It creates moods by using common themes like ‘natural’ or ‘highly
fashionable.’ Make-up, as a beauty product, is a way to exhibit these moods
visually. For instance, women can manipulate their make-up application to deliver
different moods as well; for example: innocent, seductress, or business-like moods
among many others.
 Lena Nans 199
__________________________________________________________________
(3) The general order of existence which people tend to follow as proposed by
the beauty industry is that of visually pleasing other people. They would have their
followers believe that they will become more confident if they purchase the
products shown. They believe that a certain soap will make their skin softer, or that
it will even change their skin colour: the colour that they were naturally born with.
The people, who follow this ‘religion’ as I am calling it here, by believing in the
claims of these products, will constantly seek to beautify themselves with
potentially costly habits which take up much time and resources. A person very
involved in these values can easily be consumed with this pursuit as a deeper
meaning in their life.
(4) The factuality is established and reinforced with constant repetition. In a
single day, an individual will see thousands upon thousands of advertisements. If
the repetition does not suffice to establish factuality, another ‘third party’ or
‘authority’ will help to reinforce the claims of individual companies. The third
parties I am referring to here are studies by scientists that support claims made by
the beauty industry. On top of that, ‘specialists’ are occasionally located at ‘point
of sale’ locations. As an example, ladies in department stores will help sell
products by letting a person sample the merchandise and see exactly how it works
while repeating the claims made by the company.
(5) After the target audience has seen and heard the claims of these companies,
and once a ‘reality’ is established, the people have no trouble believing that they
look better with bigger, synthetic breasts, lighter skin, and different eye colours.
That they should take the risks involved with cosmetic alterations by ingesting
toxins and cutting themselves. It has become the reality in this culture that the risk
for the desired outcome is preferable to living with undesirable features.

3. How to Deal with Suffering and Anxiety: Cause or Effect?

When it comes to religion, one must wonder, are religious practices a source for
happiness and relaxation? Or do they cause stress and discomfort? Two
anthropologists in particular, Malinowski and Radcliff-Brown have opposing
viewpoints regarding these questions.
Radcliff-Brown is famous for his works with taboos or certain restrictions that
religious practices place on a society. The things that an individual should not do
are dubbed, ‘ritual prohibitions.’ He defines it as ‘…a rule of behaviour which is
associated with a belief that an infraction will result in an undesirable change in the
ritual status of the person who fails to keep to the rule’. 3 His focus is on the fact
that many ritual practices in society place restrictions on the individual which, if
not followed, would cause misfortune or suffering.
When a person pays particular attention to physical appearances, they must
perform many rituals. If rituals are not preformed properly, the visual effect is
quite apparent which can cause stress. Dying one’s hair badly or using the wrong
facial soap can have undesired effects which cause stress to the individual.
200 Beauty as Religion
__________________________________________________________________
Malinowski on the other hand explains that certain rituals are an answer to
stresses and thus, they make individuals happier. True, they might have the means
to acquire knowledge regarding the nature of causes and effects, ‘…however much
knowledge and science help man in allowing him to obtain what he wants, they are
unable completely to control change, to eliminate accidents, to foresee an
unexpected turn of natural events, or to make human handiwork reliable and
adequate to all practical requirements’. 4 Where knowledge leaves off, magic
compensates for any uncertainties in the future. It gives an individual a way to
‘actively affect’ the outcome of a situation. For this reason, rituals bring happiness
by bringing security to people.
In attempting to be beautiful, an individual in today’s culture now has the
ability to turn to many, many products and practices which can be used to make
them feel as though they are improving their appearance. These products and
clothing can be a basis for confidence which is quite satisfying for the individual.
Any positive attention a ‘beauty consumer’ will feel after a day out could possibly
be attributed to a new pair of pants or to some new fashion accessory.
Compliments people receive throughout the day could serve to reaffirm this
feeling, making them feel more secure and successful.

4. The Daily ‘Worship’ of the Body

Horace Miner in his ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ describes a particularly
industrial society, the Nacirema as being, ‘characterized by a highly developed
market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the
people's time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these
labours and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus
of this activity is the human body...’. 5 Of course this writing is a satire of American
consumer society where people invest much time in what he calls body rituals.
Among these rituals are, the ‘mouth-rite’ which takes place in a ‘shrine’ in one’s
home. The mouth rite is actually the brushing of the teeth and the shrine is one’s
own bathroom. This writing, more than any other I have seen illustrates my point
about how important beauty and aesthetic appearances have become industrialized
in market economies.
A morning and/or night ritual is important for people to keep up their
confidence. They want to fix any hair that is out of place, adjust clothing and make
sure there are no blemishes on their appearance. This way they feel that they will
be more presentable to others whether or not other people notice the effects of
these rituals at all. Putting on a certain wrinkle cream perhaps does not have the
same actual effects that one might hope. This ritual is particularly interesting
because of the mere fact that it is an action where the person doing the activity
seeks to defy some sort of inevitable nature of the human condition—they want to
stop aging. This way, they can attempt to extend their normal human abilities into
another realm for which many other religions have also created many practices.
 Lena Nans 201
__________________________________________________________________
In terms of daily routines, the difference between male and female rituals
pertaining to beauty is highly gendered in our modern society. Women are thought
to spend much more time in ritual preparation and they also tend to do things that
are much more harmful to their body. One example is how many women will wear
uncomfortable high-heeled shoes. As Jeffreys sees it, ‘Extremely pointed and
ridiculously high, they look like, and are doubtless, designed to be torture
implements’. 6 The painful ritual of wearing high-heeled shoes either daily or for
special occasions, shows just how far people will go in their pursuit of beauty. It is
more than just pampering oneself. It can often involve pain—pain which Jeffreys
believes is somehow intentionally inflicted on women.
Contrary to Jefferys’s belief, which state that women seek to beautify
themselves for the sake of males, women also do it to make themselves more
appealing to other women who are also prone to judge others. This is enculturated
from childhood throughout one’s life. The aforementioned rites of passage section
alludes to this fact. People will likely perform rituals out of habit. This shows that
beauty, like religion is socialized. Most religious people are born into a religion—
taught religious practices by their parents and mentors. Then some people will
perform the rituals regardless of whether they have actually considered their
beliefs.
Earnest Becker, in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning, explains that ‘We
must understand it … as a natural systematic continuation of the early ego efforts
to handle anxiety … the seemingly trite words, ‘self-esteem’ are at the very core of
human adaptation’. 7 Thus, conforming to social rituals and doing these rituals
correctly in the presence of others will likely generate positive affirmation as other
people might commend certain actions. For example, if a person is particularly
devout, if their peers notice them and commend them for their loyal religious
actions they will have a boost in self-esteem for being noticed in a positive way.
Likewise, when a person looks particularly beautiful and when they are
complimented for how they look, their self-esteem is affirmed. So, both a devout
following of religion and the pursuit of beauty through rituals are ways to deal with
anxieties in life. Self-esteem here will compensate for anxieties.

5. Conclusion
Through this exploration, I have come to see how beauty is more than
something that is only skin deep. People who are concerned with making
themselves look better ultimately seek to address a larger need than just looking
good. Beauty through the dedication of time, stress, and money has become more
involved and pervasive than some people are willing to acknowledge. In a society
driven by conspicuous consumption and a perceived need to make oneself appear
richer, more glamorous, the pursuit of beauty extends deeper than aesthetic
appearance into psychological, gendered, and enculturated levels of society.
202 Beauty as Religion
__________________________________________________________________
It is affirmed in every movie, magazine, and poster we see. Something
interesting has happened with globalization and consumption. People assume that
looking beautiful will make them irresistible to potential lovers. They think that
being beautiful will make their neighbours like them more or even envy them for
their lifestyle. The pursuit of beauty can be compared to a religion because it now
encompasses many societies throughout the world as they seek to deal with social
anxieties by looking beautiful. These social anxieties can come from the fact that
technology and urbanization has brought people closer together while
simultaneously estranging them from one another. We might be able to talk to one
another via phones and internet, but living in cities means that we no longer can
communicate with everyone around us. We no longer have tight-knit social circles.
Instead, we have to make a first and lasting impression on people who only see us
in passing. We want to make ourselves seem pleasant or desirable to the many
strangers we see every day.
Where genetics and natural appearances have ‘failed’ the individual, that is
where the magic of the beauty industry comes in to compensate for any
‘inadequacies’ the person sees in themselves—if they can imagine themselves as a
different-looking being, they can perhaps attain it through rigorous, devout practice
of the religion of beauty.

Notes
1
Melford E. Spiro, ‘Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation’, in
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock
Publications, 1966), 176.
2
Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, Reader in the Anthropology of
Religion, ed. Michael Lambek (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), 63.
3
Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Taboo’, in Reader in Comparative Religion: An
Anthropological Approach, ed. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt (NY: Harper
& Row, 1979), 48.
4
Malinowski, ‘The Role of Magic and Religion’, in Lessa and Vogt eds., 72.
5
Horace Miner, ‘The Body Ritual of the Nacirema’, American Anthropological
Association, http://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.html, accessed 9 May 2011.
6
Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Practices in the West (London:
Routledge, 2005), 54.
7
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
On the Problem of Man, 2nd Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 67.
 Lena Nans 203
__________________________________________________________________

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Lena Nans is a graduate student at San Diego State University in the Master of
Liberal Arts and Sciences program. Though her particular interests are in
anthropology and fine art, she finds extreme value in using interdisciplinary
methods while conducting research in cultural studies.