“Everyone”, said Ars?ne Wenger in response to an Alex Ferguson jibe “thinks they have the most beautiful wife at home”. And therein lies the problem. What on earth is beauty? Obviously, as Wenger suggests, it’s relative. Your idea of beauty might well be different from mine. But if beauty is relative what exactly is it relative to?
Well, I’d argue first that beauty is not relative to something natural, deep and authentic. None of that mystic-individualism for me. No, there’s reasons why we find things beautiful – or ugly. Or for that matter beautiful-ugly. And that reason is culture. Both our individual cultural psychology forged through our own experience and the culture of the epoch we belong to. Beauty, if it’s anything, is a psycho-cultural phenomenon. After all, its an idea (or a sensation) that is not inherent to a thing but a qualitative value thrust upon the object of our gaze.
From Rubenesque figures of the 17th century to size zero of the 21st century the things (and people) we decide are beautiful change according to our circumstance. Beauty – if it really exists – isn’t static. It took hard graft at the cultural coal face to force us too see the beauty in, say, the Lake District (thanks to Wordsworth). Or in a three chord raucous cacophony (thanks to Punk – or Stockhausen depending on your take). The same goes for many of the other things we assume to be ‘beautiful’. All these ‘beautiful’ things were once ‘ugly’.
The history of the Modern is – often – a history of the desire to smash through the prevailing idea of beauty. At the beginning of the 20th century we see the aesthetic niceties of the 19th century shattered by new kinds of aesthetic drawn from sources such as the primitive (African masks), the industrial (grain silos) and the everyday (urinals). This process of continual aesthetic revolution hasn’t stopped since. The beauty carousel revolves like this: First shock, then acceptance, then mainstream before it becomes the thing to rebel against.
Beauty is, I’m arguing, an acceptable way of talking about something unacceptable in polite conversation: Taste. We don’t like to talk too much about taste because its a word replete with political issues. It drips with associations of value, class, and money. Using the word ‘beauty’ allows us to frame the very same subject in a way that avoids these uncomfortable issues. It suggests higher, more authentic, objective, and timeless qualities to the worldly concerns of ‘taste’. Which is, quite frankly, both disingenuous and a dereliction of duty for any creative practitioner.
When people use the word beauty in design they are seeking refuge from all of the difficulties of modern life – all of its doubts, fears and challenges. They are attempting to place themselves outside of the machinations of taste and beyond the vagaries of fashion (which is also a no-go word, especially in architectural circles). But avoidance only serves to construct a refuge of arch-conservatism, aligning oneself with the status quo. Far better, I’d argue, to engage with ugly and awkward issues. Far better to recognise architecture and design as a aesthetico-cultural battleground of political issues. After all, its the struggle with the offensive, the ugly, the un-seen and unappreciated that has given us much of what we find beautiful today.
Its an irony is that its the things which embody this tradition rather than the things that have pursued an accepted idea of beauty that, in the end, stand the test of time. Think of Brutalist architecture which is currently enjoying a revival after years of vilification, the aggressively industrial and non-decorative Modern that forms the cornerstone of contemporary architectural canon or the grotesque Victoriana that was the target of 1960’s wrecking balls. Driven by a desire to challenge myths of accepted beauty, have become in time, beautiful. In other words its the ‘monstrous carbuncles’ not society beauties that will inherit the earth.
First published in RA Magazine