The Question of Beauty in Current Discussions
There have been two very recent examples of the question of the importance of beauty being brought into the public sphere in the United Kingdom. The first is the current exhibition taking place, mentioned previously, at the British Museum entitled Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art. The description for a related event which I attended at the British Museum in May 2015, which was named On beauty, reads as follows:
"Greek ideas of beauty have profoundly influenced Western art and how we think about ourselves today. This panel discussion will consider Greek perceptions of beauty, and how ideas have changed, from Greek sculpture's impact on art in the 19th century to recent neurological insights into how the brain generates experiences of beauty."[27]
During the symposium On beauty, neurobiologist Semir Zeki demonstrated that the human brain’s response to beauty is indeed contrastable with its response to ugliness, and that studies on the human brain prove that the medio orbitofrontal cortex of people of all types (race, gender, age, etc.) universally recognizes beauty in specific facial proportions and also gains pleasure from viewing art works which are commonly considered beautiful; whereas a different, and more basal, protection-oriented part of the brain – the amygdala – is stimulated by images commonly considered ugly.
To quote Semir Zeki: "The Neurobiology of Beauty: What is beauty? And is there a single characteristic or a single set of characteristics that defines it? The answer is 'yes'. The question has been pondered and debated for centuries without adequate resolution. Art and beauty were brutally separated by Marcel Duchamp when he sent a urinal which he called euphemistically The Fountain to an art exhibit."[28]
Also taking place this summer of 2015 is a colloquium at the University of Oxford, Mansfield College, called Making Sense of Beauty: The Beauty Project. It is entertaining reading the description of this conference, as it seems to go out of its way to include ugliness and death as being part of beauty, but these glaring attempts at asserting relativist subjectivity only succeed at emphasizing the awkwardness of shoving the polar opposites of beauty and ugliness together into an uncomfortable, repulsive, falsely-fused dichotomy, which causes cognitive dissonance in any healthy mind. Witness the following:
We see beauty; we experience beauty; we think beautiful words, beautiful thoughts. It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills, takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely and unexpected places of death and destruction.
Some find no beauty in life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more.
It is many things to many people. But it is never neutral or detached and you cannot 'take it or leave it'; without fail, it elicits a response.
What is beauty? The flickering shafts of light playing through the leaves of a tree, the nuanced strokes of an artist's painting, nature's rich abundance of animals, the interplay of light and shadow on a human face, the angles and curves of a building, the structure of a snow flake or (diseased) molecular cell, the simplicity of a mathematical formula, the manner of a death: all have been labelled beautiful. What is it – if anything – they share in common that allows us to call them beautiful?
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