What is beauty

Beauty in the traditional sense is, despite general claims, a fairly easy thing to describe. In art terms (and the logic spreads to other forms of culture) it is the ability of a piece of work to fulfill a set of values which society has decided make something beautiful.

This issue only gets complicated when the rules change or their foundations are fundamentally attacked. The rise of postmodernism and the progression of various theoretical disciplines in the later half of the 20th Century seemed to have been the final nail in the coffin of beauty.

In painterly terms the Modernist Canon had (supposedly) neatly replaced the classical canon with a new model of beauty. Yet once its values were showed to be bankrupt its process of measuring beauty became vacuous.

It seems slightly ironic that in a time when so much is centred on superficial appearances that we have lost any real sense of what true beauty is. In effect we have been told such a concept is flawed. That no permanent notion exists, that it is merely fleeting attempts to justify what one particular segment of one particular society at one partoicular moment in time believes to be beautiful.

I would like to suggest that there are actually more permanentr values. That beauty does exist in more permanent forms. The essence of beauty lies in mankind itself. We are inherently selfish. OUr conception of reality is formed by the existence of matter in relation to the self. That more transient forms of beauty have existed merely reaffirms that it is a concept inherantly linked to our own phyche.

To find more eternal forms of beauty, therefore, we need to search for certain qualities that remain permanent in us...and from their we can find values which last.

I want to dash off on a tangent here. I want to give an example of what I see as beautiful Why is thom Yorkes wobbling voice with its breaks is beautiful...


I started to write the rest of this then realised how utterly self indulgent and pretentious it was. It seems worthwhile to leave it at this point.