Wednesday 12 October 2011

Beauty. And advertising.

OK, what can I talk about today to delay the eventual necessity of actually getting onto the subject? How about this? As you almost certainly don't know, the Cheerobics® DVD just got released, you should totally go and check it out – and not just because I know one of the people involved in making it. You can buy it here. And don’t just take my word for it. Read the review on the Amazon page I just linked which was published significantly before the actual DVD. That’s sure to be reliable*.

Right then. Now that I’ve done the obligatory ‘completely off topic’ bit out of the way, let’s move on to the bit that you actually came here for. Just think of the above as Acanthus’ equivalent of advertising (one advert every four and a half months isn’t really that bad). Actually, it’s not all that irrelevant. I’ve decided to do a bit more on being ace. Not entirely because some people think I mention it too much (although given my rather bloody-minded nature, that’s not entirely absent from by thoughts)**. Mostly it’s because there isn’t much else I can say which is really unique. Anything else I come up with, on democracy or liberalism, someone else could come up with just as well. If you want to know what feminism is, there are rather a lot of ways to find out. That’s not to say that I think they’re valueless (well.... no more than I think that everything I write is pretty valueless), or that I’ll stop writing them. It’s not as though I’ve let it being utterly pointless ever stop me doing anything before, so why start now?

So, you remember how I said that what I wrote at the beginning was irrelevant? That was what is technically known as ‘a complete lie’. Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn’t entirely true, either. So, four hundred or so words in, let me explain what I’m going to be talking about. Beauty. What is it? Keates would tell me that it’s truth, but I don’t like Keates very much.

So what does beauty have to do with being ace? More than you might think. You see, the big question here is whether ‘beauty’ is really a single thing. So answer this: Is Cheryl Cole, (or Brad Pitt), more beautiful than the sunset. Or is there some qualitative difference between seeing a ‘beautiful’ person and seeing a ‘beautiful’ sunset? To me? No, not really***. But from talking to people, and from the rather different reactions people tend to have to the two, I have a suspicion that most people might disagree with me on this one. So there are at least two different kinds of beauty, which I’ll call aesthetic and sexual. Actually, there’s no real reason why a human couldn’t be aesthetically beautiful – after all, several of their statues are.

Now let me deconstruct it a bit further. Which is more beautiful – Beethoven or Paradise Lost? There’s less of a qualitative difference here – you could probably tell me an answer if you had long enough to think about it. But it’s still rather difficult to compare the two****. I think we can agree that there is a difference here. So we can probably divide up aesthetic beauty by sense – they’re not necessarily entirely separate, something could cross over, but it avoids the problem of trying to compare a Cheerobics® routine to the music it’s being done to.

Now let’s look at something completely different. What makes things beautiful? If I grind the Mona Lisa down to a fine paste, in what part is the beauty? What if I remove a single flake of paint at a time? When does it stop being beautiful? What about an acanthus flower? Is the shape of the petals more or less beautiful than their colour? To put it shortly, where, exactly, is beauty?

Obviously it’s a property of the object as a whole, rather than of any individual part – a ‘ghost in the machine’, if you will, like Oxford University. To try and define and quantify beauty, even with the divisions I’ve set up here, is a fool’s errand. You can do it, but your answer is only really true for you, and tells you nothing you didn’t know already. That doesn’t mean I think my divisions are useless – there’s a difference between an unanswerable question, and a merely meaningless one – just that I’m not going to try and define ‘this is what beauty is’, and I’m certainly not going to quantify it. A dancer might be beautiful, but I’m not going to say whether ballet is inherently better than hip hop. To me, a butterfly dying, having got its wings trapped on a thorn, is tragically beautiful. To a lot of people, it’s a dead insect. To take Hume’s approach, and say that some people’s taste is inherently better than others, and that the people who find the ‘wrong’ thing beautiful are actually mistaken would be, in my opinion, the height of arrogance. And when the guy who says that democracy is bad because people are so ignorant says that you're being arrogant, you might want to examine your position.

Final thing. For those who are still wondering what this has to do with being ace: It’s effectively the postmodern theory, that people outside a particular majority social group think more about the inside of that social group, since they have to understand that part of society as well as their own. ‘The outsider sees most of the game’, if you will. Beauty is so inherently tied up with sexuality that it’s something that’s probably more closely examined by aces than by most sexuals, or, at least, in a different way.


*Wow. I can’t even plug something without being cynical. To explain, Jess Rossi has been doing Cheerobics® for some time now (as have others), so it’s perfectly possible to have a review of Cheerobics® from before the DVD was actually released. It’s also possible that the reviewer was using that magical thing known as a preview copy.
**To those people: I’ll stop mentioning it when it stops being brought up, and when I stop having to examine everything I say, lest it be seized upon as evidence of my ‘real’ sexuality.
***Except that humans tend to be uglier. I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who was more beautiful than her jewellery. Boys are even worse – they don’t wear jewellery.
****This is, by the way, the exact problem of utilitarianism, except I’m talking about beauty rather than pleasure.
And because looking at people who are different from you, with apparently nonsensical rituals, is interesting. And amusing. That’s why anthropology was invented.

For the interested, Cheerobics® belongs to Jess Rossi, and to Cheerobics® Ltd. If either they or she mind the free advertising (and I would totally understand not wanting to be associated with me), I'll cut out the bits of this referencing them.