“Beauty, when it is not a promise of happiness, must be destroyed.” - The Lettrist International
Everything can only become beautiful once the meaning behind beauty is expunged in the name of infinite objectification. What the career artists, sycophant art tourists, and galleries don’t understand is that their participation - and dare I say it, their very existence - makes it impossible for them to ever find beauty, much less bring it to life.
Everything is in the service of something. Not because of some intrinsic, “objective” brain-fart-of-an-outlook. But because the processes of objectification that reify our social relations necessitate it. Objects are turned into subjects; subjects turned into objects. Beauty then becomes a tool of further dehumanization, control, and homogenization.
For starters, the beauty industry advertises products, habits, and lifestyles designed to regiment feminie expression into easily digestible - and therefore controllable - avenues that reinforce heteropatriarchal systems. Even when “diversity” is thrown into the beauty industry it’s only goal is to further intrap feminine expressions. This diversity is not only intrinsically the same as before the diversification happened, but makes it harder to escape. Everyone is beautiful, which means we must always be beautiful.
Beauty has become novelized too. Life is beautiful. Our pain can, must, be beautiful. Loss is beautiful. We must find beauty in everything that happens to us, along with everything we put on and acquire around us.
Beauty becomes one of many ways to objectify the non-physical in our lives. It narrows our perceptions of reality, thereby limiting how we progress through life and what lessons we gleam from our experiences.
To reference the beginning quote, one example of beauty that I personally connected with was Ursula le Guin’s “The Dispossessed.” It humanizes a post-capitalist society (what both radicals and the pessimistic sad-fucks call, “utopia”) in some of the most realistic images I’ve come across. It’s beautiful because it serves a purpose that isn’t in the service of homogenizing control, but of liberation. It widens my perception of what’s possible, and of how the possible can look.
This is one aspect of what beauty is - or, could be. A liberating effect that widens our understanding of reality. Reality is infinite, in the sense that it’s not physical, but mental. The “reality” of consumerized beauty regiments, and other mass-culture conceptions of beauty are nothing but banal frameworks to distract us from that. For example, I’d say the beauty of queer spaces is vastly different from the beauty of heteropatriarchal feminine spaces, thanks to the general radical socialness of existing as a queer person in a society built on homogenized gender and sex roles. For many people existing outside the confines of social norms, beauty and feeling beautiful becomes conduits for true empowerment. Whereas, for more heteropatriarchal femine spaces (and this is just a general statement, not an all encompassing accusation) beauty is a normalizing requirement for being accepted within homogenous (and I’d argue, toxic) spaces. How we’re raised to see beauty, for others and ourselves, and subsequently taught to execute it in our lives determines a lot of this.
People wanna discuss obtuse terms like “beauty,” “truth,” “love” and so on without so much as trying to avoid regurgitating the same banal conceptions. This leads them to violently withdraw from the conversation when new blood is injected in. I’ve never met a happy person who adhered to the beauty regiments dictated by the heteropatriarchal social system. They are usually ruled by its assumptions, subconscious proddings, and self-deprecative commands. And the people who adhere to mass culture concepts of beauty gate-keep, dismiss, and shit on anything that wasn’t “produced” within their hierarchical sad-sack system. Essentially capitalists of the art industry, they can take their high brow nothingness, turn it into a currency, and then shove it up their asses.
Beauty today only points toward itself. It reproduces itself. Representing nothing but its own endless assimilation of life for its capitalist masters. Life isn’t beautiful just because it’s the word we associate with existence. Beauty is created, it defies, and it should push us forward. A beauty that pushes us toward a rat race of beautification is poisonous concoction, only worthy for a raging dumpster fire.
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