Beauty Is Stone Cold in the Arts, but Hot as a Consumer Product
The state of aesthetics in the 21st century is very, very strange
If I do a search for beauty online, where does Google send me?
Does it bring me to Michelangelo? Will it serve up the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon? Does it showcase a painting by Van Gogh or a nocturne by Chopin?
Nope. None of the above.
If I’m on a quest for beauty, Google will send me to a hair stylist or maybe a dermatologist. Those folks own beauty nowadays—not the artists.
And certainly not the critics.
And if I persist and do a search for beauty and aesthetics, the search engines will send me to some godawful plastic surgeon.
Here I am, an innocent Honest Broker seeking Platonic ideals and the Kantian sublime—and the overlords want to give me a new nose and a jolt of Botox.
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Welcome to the medicalization of beauty. It’s everywhere—and it gives me the creeps.
I recently met a young dermatologist. His skin had the pure even sheen of a wax mannequin. I wanted to touch it to see if it was as cold as it looked.
This is apparently common in the field. Nowadays physicians do heal themselves—or, at least, Botox themselves. I’m told that people who work in dermatology practices get free (or discounted) services—so some will undergo hundreds of beauty-enhancing procedures even before the age of 30.
That is the state of beauty in the current day.
And it’s all because the medical profession takes beauty more seriously than the humanists and the artists.
If you’re a painter or composer or poet, you can make dismissive comments about beauty—even say you hate it—and nobody is shocked. The audience even expects this hostility. But not if you’re a plastic surgeon or cosmetician or stylist or dermatologist.
Those folks believe in beauty with their heart and soul. Their whole world depends on it.
“Marketing campaigns for the beauty business make any culture critic’s views irrelevant. We’re a tiny needle in the haystack of filler syringes.”
They actually embrace the entire Renaissance ideal—the same stuff humanities professors mock in their lectures and seminars. That’s why your hair stylist calls himself Leonardo, when his real name is Irving. That’s why a photo of Michelangelo’s David is hanging on the wall of my local dermatology clinic.
Postmodernism had no impact on these people. I must say that I envy them, at least a bit.
The people running our culture businesses hardly notice any of this—but they really should.
For a start, if they hung out at my local dermatology center, they would understand how much people hunger for beauty. And they would certainly learn how much they’re willing to pay for it.
In case you’re interested:
Skin fillers cost from $550 to $1,200 per syringe.
Skin resurfacing (three sessions) starts at $1,200.
Skin tightening is $1,200 to $3,500.
Liposuction starts at $1,600.
Tummy tucks are $11,500
Etc. etc.
So stop bellyaching about Substack subscription prices. You’re getting off easy.
Yes, beauty is the most intangible thing in the world, but that doesn’t diminish its power in the least. Its influence and allure are only enhanced by its intangibility.
You can actually charge more for beauty because it’s so mysterious, so hard to pin down.
Maybe the arts world should meditate on that for a bit.
Alas, the culture power brokers gave up on beauty long ago. They don’t even use the word anymore. They now deal in content.
That feels like a step down.
Artists, for their part, have learned to be distrustful of beauty. They often get nervous when it gets mentioned—mostly because they have been taught to confuse it with prettiness or sentimentality.
I have a very different view of beauty—as I’ll explain below. But people like me have lost control of the discourse on beauty. And we have certainly lost influence over the economics of beauty.
That’s because aesthetics has been turned into a panoply of consumer products and services. The marketing campaigns for the beauty business make any culture critic’s views irrelevant. We’re a tiny needle in the haystack of filler syringes.
So I was delighted when one of our leading novelists, Sally Rooney, stood up for artistic (as opposed to dermatological) beauty.
She delivers this inspired takedown via one of her characters in the novel Beautiful World, Where Are You:
I still think of myself as someone who is interested in the experience of beauty, but I would never describe myself (except to you, in this email) as ‘interested in beauty’, because people would assume that I meant I was interested in cosmetics. This I guess is the dominant meaning of the word ‘beauty’ in our culture right now. And it seems telling that the meaning of the word ‘beauty’ signifies something so profoundly ugly….
I think the beauty industry is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism….To be open to aesthetic experience in a serious way probably requires as a first step the complete rejection of this ideal….
Of course I wish I were better-looking, and of course I enjoy the validation of feeling that I do look good, but to confuse these basically auto-erotic or status-driven impulses with real aesthetic experience seems to me an extremely serious mistake for anyone who cares about culture.
Rooney focuses on the consumerist angle here. Beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder—it arises instead from the wallet of the consumer.
But even worse, from my perspective, is the notion of beauty as something artificial, deceptive, manufactured.
This is the complete reversal of the Renaissance ideal for aesthetic beauty—which was described as holding a mirror up to nature. For Michelangelo and Leonardo, the natural world is the ultimate source of beauty—because it also is the source of truth and the pathway to transcendence.
When I was younger, I would have mocked anyone who believed Keats’s strident claim that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” It seems so outrageous and unfounded.
But I don’t feel that way anymore.
I now accept with total confidence that beauty and truth converge—almost as if their mutual attraction is woven into the building blocks of the universe. I would even add to Keats’s equation—insisting that Beauty = Truth = Good.
And if you doubt this, I will simply respond: It would be a strange universe if goodness and truth were not beautiful. I refuse to live in that sort of world. You shouldn’t either.
But in the beauty businesses of today, truth and nature are the enemy. You go to war against the natural—and your goal is the artificial.
That’s where the beauty marketeers betray those Renaissance ideals they pretend to serve. That’s why your stylist or skin doctor doesn’t deserve to put the name Leonardo on a business card.
So the threat to beauty today comes from multiple directions:
Beauty is now consumerist—viewed as something bought and sold, hence measured by profits.
Beauty is now downgraded—described as content, as if it’s generic and interchangeable.
Beauty is now artificial—viewed as the antithesis of the real, the natural, the authentic.
My stance is the opposite of each of these three statements.
There is one good side to this story, however.
The positive news is that people still believe in beauty—despite its disappearance from creative discourse. You might even say that they are obsessed by it.
The grand mystery is why this is obviously true in consumer culture, and totally ignored in artistic culture.
I’m a firm advocate of beauty in the arts. But I’m afraid that my view here is easy to misunderstand.
I’m not asking for prettier art (although I’m not opposed to it). I’m not asking for decorative art or sentimental art or populist art.
For me beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder—so I’m focused on that clear and direct connection between the creative work and the person encountering it.
I want this connection to be powerful. I want it to feel like falling in love at first sight.
I don’t want it loaded down with all the baggage provided by critics, marketeers, gatekeepers, and other intermediaries. We have too much of that—and beauty makes them all irrelevant.
Beauty of this sort can’t be controlled.
That’s why it’s so powerful, so personal, so disruptive. That’s why I’ve claimed that “beauty is the most dangerous thing in culture right now.”
This is perhaps made most clear when I describe what beauty is NOT:
It doesn’t require validation by an institution.
It can’t be manipulated by a corporation.
It doesn’t need or want theory or interpretation.
It’s not mediated through a critic.
So perhaps you can understand now why today’s medicalized consumerist beauty is so alarming to me.
No, I’m not trying to get rid of cosmetics or tummy tucks or any of that. But I want artists to recapture some of the fervor that goes into those things, and channel it into an honest and unfiltered relationship with their audience.
And we can even thank all those dermatologists with perfect skin for showing us how deeply people believe in the reality of beauty. We ought to learn from them.
We need to bring that intensity and desire into our own creative works, and our engagement with the artistry of others.
We have a beauty more real than theirs. And our beauty not only changes people’s faces, but their hearts and souls.
That’s gotta be worth something. Maybe even more than a syringe of skin filler.
I'm so glad you took on the concept of beauty, Ted. People do confuse it with physical prettiness, which doesn't do it justice. Beauty is a quality of wholeness or harmony that generates pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. The "beauty business" really IS skin deep. But that's not the kind of beauty that should matter to artists.
As a designer, I've thought about beauty a lot. Not only thought about it, but got my hands into the clay of it. Beauty can be rough, awkward, harsh, frightening, and even a little ugly, as long as it contains the elements of rightness, elegance, and surprise. Rightness includes qualities like integrity, honesty, and fitness for duty. Elegance is about simplicity, efficiency, and craftsmanship. Surprise is that tingle, or excitement, or emotional pop when you first encounter something special.
Using these as guidelines, a traffic jam fails the beauty test, and so does a landfill. A landfill doesn't communicate wholeness or harmony to many people. At the other end of the spectrum, the movie Casablanca does embody wholeness and harmony, giving pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction to a broad audience.
Any artist who isn't hot on the trail of beauty is rejecting the very thing that makes life worth living.
One can take a word and do whatever they please with it. I still love the word beauty and I use it a lot, as well the word truth. There is such a profound sense of unworthiness, and hatred toward the body, the feminine aspect in our culture, as well toward aging. I see the attachment to a youthful appearance as a form of morbidity, a crude relatoinship to death, unexplored, unspoken, a kind of dull materialism. When you can see beauty, and feel beautiful, you are free, and you will not be buying it from anyone.