Beauty as a sensuous act of inclusion

The beauty of beauty is we can all sense when it’s there—and when it’s a no-show. That is not to say it’s simple, as you and I might both find something beautiful, but have divergent preferences and reasons for thinking so. Beauty is never absolute or definitive. The word stems from the Latin bellitatem, meaning “a state of being pleasing to the senses,” which begs the question in today’s oversaturated, Just Scream hotline world: what if we intensified sensuousness in how we went about our life and related to others?

In Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Perspective for Everyone, author Minna Salami cites the song “The Rose that Grew from Concrete” by rapper Tupac Shakur, in which he speaks about a flower defying nature by rising up from a pavement crack. “Beauty in an oppressive system proves the system wrong; it stands in stark contrast to the ugliness of the social order,” Salami writes. (In honor of 2pac, we’ll put this song on our list for Concrete Love, our festival this fall where Salami will be speaking, too.)

When social order is built on conformity and efficiency, beauty as an artform can transform a space swallowed by “same same.” The artist Corinne Loperfido dedicates her work to salvaging beauty from the otherwise wasted, discarded, even mundane, to compensate for the “spiritual void that comes with sameness.” With so-called “outsider art” she puts a dent in mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what not. The “Trash Temple” she created for a Meow Wolf exhibition, made of collected and donated items, is only one example of how reimagining what we already have (or had) deserves a second look.

Watch a short teaser of Corinne, whom we’ll also feature in this Sunday’s Living Room Session.

This sensuous act of including other realities comes to life when we “do beauty,” Salami writes, inspired by The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, calling us, you and me

“Do beauty, dear reader. Do beauty like your life depends on it, because in many ways it does. All our lives do. Beauty in action is art, and the more we strive to make of life an art, the more beautiful our world and we ourselves will become. I have never seen a person, no matter what age, look, ability, height, this or that, be passionate about life and not be beautiful.”

Beauty as a sign of well-being

For artist and philosopher Shakti Maira, beauty is about how things are. For him, our profound misunderstanding of beauty, coupled with a proliferation of ugliness, is at the root of many of today’s problems, resulting in what he calls “Beauty Deficit Disorder.”

It wasn’t always so. In Ancient Greece, India, and other civilizations, beauty represented the ideal expression and ultimate ambition for what humanity could be. It was a lodestar for organizing ideas, relationships, and systems to maximize wellbeing. A good life was a beautiful life. But over time, beauty was displaced by values that could be more easily quantified. Market values such as economy, efficiency, scale, and growth became paramount, and beauty was deemed non-essential, frivolous even. Stripped of its deeper ethical, emotional, and spiritual core, it became synonymous with surface appearance and luxury.

In his book The Promise of Beauty and Why It Matters, Maira proposes a “systems view” of beauty as the expression and experience of relational excellence. For him, beauty reflects the qualities of balance, harmony, rhythm, and proportion, and is always relational and dynamic—never static. It is not confined to well-made objects or pretty people but shows up in all areas of life.

“When an environment is healthy it tends to be beautiful,” Maira argues. “When a flower or animal is vital and well-formed, it is invariably beautiful. When people are mentally and emotionally in balance, harmony, and good rhythm, they feel beautiful within. Likewise, families with harmony, balance, and proportion are beautiful, and this can be extended to all systems. Beauty is a sign or signal of health and well-being in every system and network.”

What’s exciting about this line of thinking is the idea that beauty could be the “master key” for approaching a range of modern systemic problems. He further writes:

“There is a new holistic understanding forming… about living systems and our world: that it is completely interconnected and interrelated. In the new thinking about Nature, environment, technology, health, sciences ,and economics, we need a relational framework that emphasises balance, harmony, proportionality, rhythm, appropriateness, contextuality, and fairness, and that is what I believe ‘beauty’ offers us.”

This has implications as we consider how we might design systems that further human and planetary flourishing on a practical level. Maira calls for a shift in focus from growth and GDP to increasing GNH (Gross National Happiness) by maximizing GNB (Gross National Beauty).

“Where there is more beauty and less ugliness...it is likely to make for greater pleasure and wellbeing. To live in beauty might be a good working definition of a happy and healthy life at all levels of existence,” he asserts.

Maira’s argument is reminiscent of philosopher Elaine Scarry and her seminal 2021 book On Beauty and Being Just, a fervent defense of beauty (against accusations of privilege or masking more pressing socio-political issues). Her case for beauty as a powerful catalyst for our concern for social justice seems acutely relevant in a world of wokeness and cancel culture that in some more unfortunate instances has revived anti-beauty reflexes. With its direct appeal to the senses and its “surfeit of aliveness,” Scarry argues, beauty—as an experience of awe—helps us transcend self-preoccupation and thereby shift our attention outward toward others, resulting in a greater sense of ethical fairness.

Meet Shakti Maira tomorrow in our Living Room Session.

Beauty as having choices

The Guardian deputy fashion editor Priya Elan on his experiments with “male-specific” makeup:

“I consider myself in the mirror and it looks as if I’ve used a very flattering Instagram filter on my face. My wife looks disparagingly at me when I say this out loud. She disagrees: ‘That’s a nice sentence, but you look the same.’ And she’s right. In my neurotic panic at being found out for painting my face, I didn’t really factor in the possibility that absolutely no one would notice. Which shows how far men’s makeup has come.”

The men’s grooming and beauty products industry is booming worldwide. Statista projects that the global market will hit $70 billion+ by end of 2021, and surpass $80 billion by 2024. While even before lockdowns and mask-wearing obviated the need for much in the way of cosmetics, many women were celebrating feeling free not to apply make-up, to many “beauty-curious” young men the story is exactly the opposite. For the men embracing the glut of new skincare products, being able to dabble in foundation and eyeliner, or picking out a moisturizer, is actually liberating, confidence-boosting—a window to self-actualization plus a way to soften their appearance without fear of having their masculinity questioned. As Hasina Khatib reports in Vogue India, “the final frontier for the beauty industry would, then, be genderless makeup, fueled largely by generation Z’s rising disregard of gender binaries.”

The idea of genderless beauty dates back to iconic moments like Calvin Klein’s CK One, launched in 1994—“a fragrance for a man or a woman.” This sparked a first wave of conversations around gender-neutrality within the beauty industry that has intensified in the last few years, mainly thanks to social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. With a more confident, broader take on how to live and who to be, younger generations are shifting mindsets and cultures, and challenging the traditional identity markets.

Political beauty is the “look of the day” for Gen Z: from Matt Bernstein calling for climate change activism and voting through artistic makeup, TikTokers transforming themselves into their “Republicansona,” their conservative alter ego, or applying makeup while lip-synching to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to Ted Yoho on his sexist remarks, TikTok girls dancing to audio of toxic ex’s voicemails, and using beauty tutorials to raise awareness for BLM and EndSARs.

In social media, an interest in beauty came first, the decision to make it socially and politically relevant, second. In the High Tea newsletter, focused on understanding Gen Z and TikTok trends, the writer Alice Ophelia explains:

“They know that TikTok has a distribution model that allows for the message to be widely distributed and will have a higher engagement rate because of the surprising message within. It’s almost a secret coded message for the viewer and makes them feel they are in on the activism itself.”

Apropos TikTok: loveable and unloveable beauty

Beauty and love—the relationship between the two has been the cause of much passionate philosophical debate (and even war).

Urbanism professor Michael Benedikt created a 2 x 2 matrix illustrating the continuum from “lovable beauty” to “unlovable beauty,” and from “lovable ugliness” to “unlovable ugliness.”

He arrived there by intersecting the two main traditions shaping Western notions of beauty and love: beauty as the highest aspiration of the Greco-Roman tradition and love as that of the Hebraic-Christian. Both traditions, Benedikt argues, view “lovable beauty” as the highest state of the human experience and agree on “unlovable ugliness” as the lowest. He points out, “There is a tendency to think the job is done in each case: the Greco-Roman resting at beautiful (lovable or not), and the Hebraic-Christian resting at lovable (beautiful or not).”

But those two absolute viewpoints are less interesting to him than the shades of beauty between them, for example “lovable ugliness,” for which he cites the juvenile as the most prominent manifestation: “Consider the large, wide-set eyes and the charmingly uncoordinated antics of babies and puppies; consider the freshness and awkwardness, the innocence, the unwarranted confidence and nonjudgmental affection of the very young.”

He concludes: “What makes (some) ugly things lovable is the hope for transformation, or the knowledge that it is imminent. The duckling we know will become a swan is not really ugly.” In contrast, unlovably ugly objects, places, or people offer little such hope.

In business? Facebook is unlovably ugly. TikTok is lovably ugly.

And as for “unloved beauty”? “Here we enter the territory of much modern architecture,” Benedikt contends.

Unloved beauty is pure functionalism purposefully stripped of love. A fully automated AI-first organization run entirely by machines comes to mind. Loved beauty is...Rome.

Where does your brand fall?

Beauty beyond skin-deep: Aesop

Aesop is a lovable beauty, for sure. The Australian B-Corp has rarely put a foot wrong since it was founded by hairdresser Dennis Paphitis in 1987. Having earned a reputation as a beauty brand whose concept of beauty goes beyond skin-deep, it has managed a nearly impossible feat: to become a luxury brand that’s simultaneously an unpretentious, self-assured, no-cult cult.

There are numerous case studies on Aesop’s unique philosophy and approach. At the center of the company’s success are skin, hair, and body products that are carefully blended, cruelty-free, eco-friendly, and made with natural ingredients.

But equally important has been Aesop’s “unbranding” marketing, which centers on actively participating in the art and design community—partnering with numerous prestigious art and cultural institutions, including The Judd Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Modern—poetic writing, and “unselling”: the decision to let the Aesop products and their presentation in carefully designed store environments, highlighting elements of scent, touch, and local culture, speak for themselves.

“I like ideas and products that reveal themselves slowly—more whisper than scream, something that becomes part of our own personal universe,” Aesop founder Dennis Paphitis once said, and his predilection pinpoints the essence of the brand and serves as its guiding principle to date.

A non-beauty brand beauty brand with beauty as its transcendent purpose—that is on the one hand a safe bet, but on the other hand also an increasingly daring proposition in a cultural climate of acute social consciousness in which luxury brands are exposed to new scrutiny. Aesop’s fastidious earnestness and rigor can easily be mocked as a somewhat quaint persona—or it may be exactly the kind of consistency we need in these pandemic times.

Aesop’s former global creative director, Marsha Meredith, will be joining us in our Living Room tomorrow to share her inside perspective on Aesop and future vision for beauty brands.

Beauty as uniqueness in a digital world

The NFT craze has reached new heights, and clearly, a week in NFT-land is like a New York minute. Since we released our Beauty Shot issue last Sunday, there have been a flurry of new developments (in Brooklyn, a man sold a fart for $85) and the debate about NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens—has heated up: are they beautiful because they make no sense? Or are they ugly because they only make sense to a few tech elite folks? Do they democratize the playing-field for artists and creators, or are they worrisome precursors of the commodification of everything, including memories and moments—with the “human stock market” as the ultimate dystopian scenario?

On the one hand, arguably, NFTs extend the concept of concept art: if a banana on the wall of Art Miami is art, then the video of the “hungry performance artist” eating it is art, too. As New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel points out, while the eating artist was rewarded with attention that was perhaps monetizable, minting the original video as an NFT now allows him to point that attention to one single token of appreciation. In that sense, NFTs widen the playing field for creators and make more artifacts (and moments) collectible. More creativity, more art, more monetization options, more ways of making a living.

Garry Krugljakow, a “Forbes 30 under 30,” the founder and CEO of VIA Trade, and an expert and investor in crypto assets, told us in our Clubhouse room this week that NFTs may also take the experience economy by storm. Imagine going to a concert (when that’s possible again) and scanning a QR code at one particular moment that proves that you were there. It’s the digital equivalent of the concert ticket that you kept in your drawer as a token of an indelible memory. And now imagine applying that scenario to moments that are more intimate, either significant—your first kiss, graduation, the birth of your child—or more mundane, like a random conversation that you record.

Are NFTs inaugurating a world where absolutely anything can be packaged and sold? Warzel writes that a quote by social network NewNew’s founder and CEO, Courtne Smith, “gave him pause.” She said: “We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments.”

Will that make life more beautiful?

Beauty as scars

“What is beautiful is in league with what is true,” writes Elaine Scarry, whom we’ve already mentioned above. That sentiment is undoubtedly at the heart of projects that aim to broaden our collective understanding of what can be considered beautiful, and to situate the appreciation of beauty in an unflinching acceptance of what is, no joke, with zero delusions.

In SCARS, author, journalist, photographer, and filmmaker Laura Dodsworth invites five people—Pete, Christina, Helen, Simon, and Cordelia—who live with visible, physical scars to speak candidly about how their scars forever changed how they see the world, and how the world perceives them.

“The first time I saw my scar was actually when they took the dressing off and took the stitches out, and the first thought I had was, ‘Wow, that is amazing,’” smiles Cordelia, a woman who survived a brain tumor that her doctors told her was one of the largest they’d ever operated on. “It looked like I’d been in a battle, and I’d won.”

In his book Saving Beauty, the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han contends that injury and disaster are integral to true beauty:

“Negativity is the invigorating force of life. It also forms the essence of beauty. Inherent to beauty is a weakness, a fragility, and a brokenness,” he writes.

Indeed, business, for the most part—notably through the means of marketing and advertising—has stripped beauty of any negativity to make it consumable. To re-establish beauty we need to allow space for the ugly, the broken, the damaged, and fragile.

Beauty as library: the essential reads

Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The Book of Beautiful Business

Anjan Chatterjee, The Aesthetic Brain

Edgardo Cozarinsky, Borges in/and/on Film

Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

John Donohue, Divine Beauty

Umberto Eco, On Ugliness

Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible

Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty

Albert Hofstadter & Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger

Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Alexandra Kitty, The Art of Kintsugi: Learning the Japanese Craft of Beautiful Repair

Life is Beautiful (is not a book, but still)

Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

David McCandless, Knowledge Is Beautiful

Alan Moore, Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything

Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things

Beauty as parental duty

“I have always seen it as a kind of parental duty to show my own children beautiful stuff, and in doing so reveal to them an alternate world. By beautiful, I mean interesting, inspiring, ambiguous, challenging and sometimes dangerous things that exist within the world of art. I feel that the online world provides us ready access to a vast and ever-deepening barrage of bad shit, where the cruel reality of the world is well covered. This continual onslaught of negativity can erode our souls and the souls of our children. My job is to show my children that there is a whole universe that exists beyond the grim issues of the day. This is not to divert them from certain truths, but rather to remind them that the parallel world of art and the imagination can literally save their lives, as it certainly saved mine…. And as they respond to the world we have built for them, inventing new forms of madness beyond our comprehension (as we did with our own parents), it is comforting to feel they have some understanding of the aesthetic nature of the world and art’s ultimate capacity for salvation.”

—Nick Cave, from The Red Hand Files