Talk pretty to me
The World Cup may be over, but my feed is still full of photos of a topless—and jacked—Ferran Torres. And I’m not complaining. Male pulchritude, as we know, was much celebrated in ancient civilizations; the sculptures unearthed from classical antiquity reveal a preference for the male form in all its muscled glory.
And now, of course, we have Clavicular and his looksmaxxing nonsense, which directs the focus to male beauty in the age of social media.
The paradox of beauty
The cult aspect of beauty—from its hierarchies to its uniformities, from its excesses to its peculiarities, from its associations to its manipulations—is the subject of an ambitious, sometimes disturbing, and thought-provoking exhibition I caught recently at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB).
While “The Cult of Beauty” begins with a necessarily chronological approach, examining the earliest examples of the idea of beauty through—predictably—ancient sculpture, what it really does is trace the evolution of our obsession with beauty itself: how we define it, how we preserve it, how we engineer it, how we amplify it, and even how we live without it.
A contemporary series of ’70s-tinged photographs by Juno Calypso casts a wry eye upon some of the extremes women go to in pursuit of beauty. In one, a woman in a long gown stands in her living room with a red light mask over her downcast face.
Calypso titled it “12 Reasons You’re Tired All the Time,” and one does feel both the fatigue and the grim resignation of a woman weighed down by society’s beauty standards. Another photo, “A Girl’s Guide to Egg Freezing – Step 3 The Harvest,” with a woman lying down on a hospital bed, legs in the air, links the idea of fertility to beauty.
And therein is the paradox of beauty. So much effort, in effect, is expended to make beauty seem effortless.
Beauty can be achieved but must be maintained
A massive installation features an artist’s idea of what a medieval-meets-futuristic lab might look like, all tubes and funnels and vials and pipes—an alchemist’s paradise in which beauty potions were made.
On the walls, a video played a present-day scientist mixing formulations using centuries-old recipes and methods, such as actually crushing herbs with a mortar and pestle, straining the unguents through a cloth sieve, then bottling them in mason jars.
Time and technology have evidently modernized the manufacturing process, but the fact remains: beauty can be achieved, and once achieved, must be maintained.
Whether you’re male or female, cisgender or trans, one particularly disturbing—at least to me—exhibit was that of glass jars with something suspended in formaldehyde. From afar they looked like loofahs floating in water.
But when I looked closer, I realized they were breast tissue from someone who had undergone top surgery.
On the nose
Speaking of surgical procedures, Iran, it turns out, has one of the highest rates of rhinoplasty in the world.
In “The Disobedient Nose,” Iranian artist Shirin Fathi imagines herself in a series of photographs with “a nose that doesn’t want to be tamed,” with a prosthetic here, a skin graft there, as well as a sculpture of a giant disembodied nose perched on the floor and strewn with rope.
This brought to mind William Kentridge’s set design and series of illustrations for Shostakovich’s opera, “The Nose,” based on a short story by Gogol about a man who wakes up one morning without a nose.
What terrified me the most is what’s happening today: How beauty and the persistent pursuit of it can be a form of fascism. What has emerged is relentless repetition—so that instead of beauty becoming singular, it is simultaneously comical and tragic that it has become uniform, even pedestrian.
A look, say that of the Kardashians, is pushed mainly through social media as a new standard of beauty, and therefore an ideal to aspire to. So everyone alters their features, whether through makeup or surgery, to reflect this new ideal in order to be considered beautiful according to the acceptable and newly imposed standards of the day. Yes, same nose, same hair, same eyebrows, same cheekbones.
An installation by Makeupbrutalism, aka Eszter Magyar, makes this trenchant point in the mirror that is its central feature. Scrawled on the mirror like lipstick are the words “I’ve mistaken social pressure with self-expression.”
And the title of this particular montage? “It makes no sense being beautiful if no one is ugly.”
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