scars

i was up to eureka springs for the charlotte buchanan opening and film downtown in the parking lot and there was this tall blonde skimpily attired and twirling like a pole a beautiful richy looking boy
and every time my yearning gaze stole another sweet taste i found another scar
baby went thrrough a picture window or something
oh oh she was fine

in the usa they cut the rape opening last tango and i saw it in london and it was maybe my first strong sense of the alterred realities of scissors

i like scars better'n tattoos which is lucky or narcissistic or both

Men

So, what do your students think about men who want to change their wives bodies?

BTW, back to the topic of beauty: larger breasts are considered beautiful and scars - ugly. I have very small breasts and a relatively large scar on my stomach because of the removed appendicitis, but I never experience lack of (positive) male attention. So what is absolute beauty: large breasts and no scars or smal breasts and scars? Or both?

Sasja

Your concept of beauty is a bit narrow.

Arnon

Right. So, shall we call the men who want to change their wives bodies narrowminded? I would agree.

How do we call women who (want to) change their bodies when there is nothing wrong with them?

And then: how do you define a beautiful girl?

Sasja

Are you the one who decides when a body is perfect?

Arnon

I am the one who decides whether MY body is beautiful and/or needs adjustments.

Sasja

Your body is not the subject of the discussion.

Sasja

Actually you are the only one with the power to change your body, besides violent acts. But when I look at you it is me that decides if you are beautiful.

About universal beauty, I think it exists. But only because we are genetically programmed to desire objects, opportunities and situations that improve our chances of survival and procreation.

The nurture part in the appreciation of beauty is less universal. Famous is a story about a chinese that listened to an orchestra tuning. He applauded loudly when they stopped, saying it was the most beautiful music he ever heard.

Sander

What about art, then? Admiring a picture seldom helps you to survive or procreate (well except, of course, your reason to visit a museum is to chat up women).

I believe true beauty has a certain quality which makes it transcent time. I remember when I first heard Beethoven's Für Elise and started crying.

Body

@Arnon My body is a body, hence the subject of this discussion.

@Sander My body is a body, don't I decide whether it's beautiful or not when I look at it?

If universal beauty exists because we are programmed to desire 'things' that improve our chances of 'survival' what does it say about the beauty? The meaning of 'survival' has changed drastically over the centuries of our existance and if I follow your argument it more or less means universal beauty is defined by the society. And this might mean there are more 'versions' of universal beauty.

BTW, I think orchestra tunings are magnificent. :)

Juliane

In terms of Maslow's pyramid art is necessary to survive for some individuals in our society.

Juliane

Expression and interpretation are essential tools to train the mind. A better trained mind is more likely to survive.

Juliane

The thing we perceive as reality is nothing more than an interpretation of our limited mind. Games, stories, play and arts are very useful tools to expand our abilities to perceive and process stimuli.

As an illustration of our limitations, have a look at the excerpt of Brain Story, an excellent BBC documentary. It shows how people with minor brain damage lack some abilities while thinking they are perfectly normal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADchGO-0kGo&feature=video_response

Makes me wonder which parts of reality we are missing because we are lacking the senses or processing abilities.

Biology

I haven't thought about absolute beauty outside the minute or two it took to read this thread, but my initial hunch was similar to Sander's. If there is some more enduring form of beauty, it likely has biological origins. Anyone who ever watched small children grow up, can see how what they experience as beauty seems intimately tied to rewards in the brain, similar to solving a puzzle. After a recent trip to Athens, I brought back two Greek t-shirts for my oldest daughter (4 years). They were standard tourist fare. She was extatic about them nevertheless. After a while, I realized it was because of the Greek characters on them. In all other respects, the t-shirts were different. She was excited, I think, because she recognized the little squiggles as characters, but also noticed they were different from the ones we use, which she is very keen on recognizing and tying to peoples names.

Sasja

No we discussed beauty, not your body and the "positive attention" it might or might not get.

Michel/Sander

As was recently pointed out in a newspaper article darwinism fails to distinguish between art and kitsch. If you rely solely on biology while explaining and discussing beauty you will miss important parts of it I'm afraid.
This is not meant to say that we should discard the biological argument, I'm just pointing out that it cannot be the only explanation.
In the context of this discussion: according to Dawkins ideas might behave like genes.

Arnon

What newspaper article are you referring to? I googled a bit and found some reviews of books that explore the effect of Darwinism on art, but that is a different issue.

Sure, biology isn't the only explanation. You have to wonder, though, what then the carrier would be for this absolute beauty you suspect to exist. If it is culture, it seems a lot more difficult - though not impossible, perhaps - to argue there are any absolutes across time and geography.

Also, why would the biological explanation fail if it cannot distinguish art from kitsch? Is beauty incompatible with kitsch? I'm not advocating some postmodernist equivalence between art and kitsch. I have no opinion on that issue. All I know is that, personally, I have been moved by what I would call beauty in kitsch. Especially China has a lot of beauty in the guise of kitsch, at least according to Western standards. Not too mention the incident where I cried during a programme on Andre Rieu, something which has never happend to me during, say, visits to the opera. At this point I should perhaps disclose that I grew up playing the clarinet in a village orchestra. I think it had a profound effect on my aesthetic sensibilities.

“Beauty” can be reduced to a biological function (think bees attracted to certain flowers, the male attracted to a female form, the individual attracted to fertile spaces that offer possibilities for expansion), the art/kitsch evaluation could be reduced to a social distinctive one (the luxury that is authenticity versus mass product, sublime versus immediate, restraint versus indulgence, acquired ironic stance versus powerlessness…) . As I said before on this website, it seems the importance of beauty suffers from the dominance of rationality, which results in a concrete diminuation of "beautiful things" in the world.

Michel

An article by Arnold Heumakers in NRC Handelsblad. A review on a book by Dennis Dutton "The Art Instinct". It was published on the 18th I believe.
If there is a biological explanation for art there should be a biological explanantion for the difference between art and kitsch.
And should we take your tears as evidence?

Dries

Please explain "the dominance of rationality".

Arnon

I mean dominance of “the pursuit of quantifiable aims” , pushing aside the pursuit of aims which can’t (yet?) be expressed in terms of quantity, but are commonly associated with the sensible rather than the rational. Most will be familiar with the notion of an “instrumental reason” and its hegemonic tendency.
I admit it’s a bit negligent of me to use the word “rationality” when I perhaps mean a specific type of rationality.

By the way, much of your humour lies in giving those things which we do not deem quantifiable a semblance of quantifiability. That’s a seven vowel word, by the way.
I do believe that this is the case, that there is a fixation on the pursuit of quantifiable aims, and that this diminishes the role of those desires which can’t be dealt with as a pursuit of quantifiable aims. That there is a "dominance" of "reason"...

How does an economy deal with its excess wealth? It used to invest this in non-rational, wasteful luxury (Bataille’s “The Accursed Share”), think for example of a cathedral; but where there is only eye for the quantifiable aims, the excess wealth is invested only in what can be defined as rational aims…

Arnon

One of the problems I have with darwinists is that everything should be a -direct- result of evolutionary selection. While most features of human culture could easily be explained as mere side-effects.

For example and in this context: Curious, learning people have a higher chance of survival. So works like paintings or books that lead to new insights are higher valued by people than works that just confirm known emotions. Which is one of the definitions of the difference between art and kitsch.

Apply that mechanism to millions of years of nurture and a system of valuing artistic work arises.

It can be easily proven too. Show an isolated Amazonian tribe a picture of a crying gypsy boy and a picture of the Mona Lisa and ask them which one is more beautiful, more artistic. If everyone of them points at the work of Da Vinci, I would believe in an absolute, not culturally based, beauty.

syllable, not vowel, syllable . d'ohhh

Sander

Curious, learning people have a higher chance of survival? Up to a certain point, but maybe not absolutely. Maybe there is also some ideal level of intelligence (ideal for survival) at which it then stagnates…

Sander

I sympathize with the idea that there is something absolute in beauty.

Dries

What do we do with our excess wealth?

Arnon

I can't find Heumakers' article - the NRC website is wonderful, except for the search function of its archives. But I did read a review of Dutton's book in the Financial Times a few days ago.
http://www.davidbyrne.com/journal/misc/financialtimes_3_21_09_darwin.php

In any case, Dutton's argument seems amusingly misguided. So I'm certainly not advocating that position. But I don't see the relevance for the discussion here.

Here's the thing: You talked about "absolute beauty". What would carry this absolute, if not biology? Sander comes up with a nice explanation, even taking a shot at explaining the difference between art and kitsch.

I have never felt the need to think conceptually about art versus kitsch, but the word that comes to mind immediately is: interesting. The first is, the latter isn't. Even if it makes me cry. Which proves nothing, except that I don't think the difference has anything to do with emotions. I rarely cry and I'm afraid that it happened more often in response to kitsch than to art. In any case, I'm more with Sander, thinking along the lines of cognitive processes that our brain rewards.

Dries

Don't forget that a human not only has to survive and compete with the outside world. Even if one is perfectly capable of surviving in nature, you'd have to outsmart your semi-intelligent neighbours and sleep with their wifes to spread your genes while they raise your kids. Or fight a war with a neighbouring tribe and win.

Arnon

Please don't let my fanatic rationality ruin the pleasure and inspiration you find in beauty on an emotional level. Would you say that there is something divine in absolute beauty?

Arnon

accumulation of wealth, instead of irrational consumption, instead of waste. I recommend reading Batailles "The Accursed Share vol 1" the chapter "on the origin of capitalism" deals with what i m trying to say

Sander

I appreciate your "fanatic rationality".

Sander

Yes, but then we're dealing more with slyness, a particular form of intelligence.