What is Beauty?

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ This, one of the most trite and oft repeated phrases ever, handed as a sop to plain women, remains true nevertheless. Beauty, in reference to physical appearance – and art – interests me, principally because the notion is so entirely subjective, and because so many proclaim loudly against its validity.

The subject was recently brought back to mind after reading about software that was supposed to ‘beautify’ people. Pictorial examples were given, and one comment caught my attention: a reader asserted that the (supposedly) more beautiful version of the subject was bland and boring. The implication being that even naturally attractive people (with regular features) are bland and boring. What an insult to a large and lucky proportion of the population.

Beauty is of course not the be all and end all, but it is dishonest and utterly disingenuous to dismiss it as unimportant. There have been numerous studies done to attest that human beings are naturally attracted to symmetry, proportion, and balance. Most human beings pursue beauty in one form or another – if it was unimportant in our lives, we would not do so.

Equally, art that is beautiful is often sniffily dismissed as the merely ‘decorative’, appealing only to the untutored masses and should therefore be pooh-poohed by the serious art critic.

We do however live in a time of mass obsession with youth, beauty and artifice, when natural beauty and aging gracefully has gone by the board. Sadly, too many forget to tend to the beauty and spirit within, where true grace resides. A so-called ‘ordinary’ man or woman will suddenly become beautiful when they move, when their eyes light up, when joy animates them; still photos show so little of the subject they depict.

The original article from The New York Times is very interesting. An excerpt from it (wow, this professor said the same thing I did just above, and I promise I wrote it before I read the article! I feel smart …):

“The first reaction we have to faces will be based on face symmetry, health, averageness,” said Alexander Nehamas, a philosopher and professor of the humanities and comparative literature at Princeton, who has written about beauty. “But we never see a face like that in real life. We see faces in connection with people expressing emotions and ideas, all those aspects of the face are essential to our deciding whether a face or a person is beautiful.”

Here are some words and pictures on the topic from the book What is Beauty?, by Dorothy Schefer (Thames & Hudson, 1997). Click images for larger versions.