The latest trends in art and fashion. How beauty changed and what the modern forms hide
The advent of new aesthetics, which is here to challenge classic beauty, is hard to ignore even if you don’t patronize modern art museums. Even social media portrays cosmetic surgery patients which surprises us with oddly transformed looks.
Remarkably, many of those are young, sometimes aged below thirty. Excessive lip enlargement and other kinds of art experiments with one’s face and other body parts, create some imagery that can by no means be called attractive or even sexually appealing.
Human appearance is not the only thing that is marred. The aesthetic canon of art is also changing. Instead of an art form, we have a big shapeless piece of clay, which your imagination can shape into anything, but rather, it forms something quite definite.
Conceptualist art, which has become one of the most prioritized trends today, states that form is of no importance. It is the author’s idea that matters. Rap manifests new aesthetics in music, with its lyrics containing a few words, typically unprintable. We see something that used to be “ugly” is now proclaimed “beautiful”.
The scale of changes is hard to overestimate as it is considered the emotional response to the “ugly” is connected with the gag reflex directly. Now, we are encouraged to admire it. What does this change mean? Do we see new aesthetics being born or a total collapse of our former concept of the beautiful?
The notion of beauty and aesthetic assessment are remarkably individual. Nevertheless, these individual judgments are within certain boundaries. Immanuel Kant differentiated between the pleasant, something individually likable, and the universally “beautiful”, which anyone should like as it is in line with common standards. Nobody has ever had an idea to portray Snow White or Cinderella as one-eyed, lame with a long, crooked nose. Despite fashion twists, changing epochs, and social systems, the beautiful has always been beautiful, and the ugly remained ugly.
The concept of beauty transformation in today’s world lacks large-scale social ideas and projects, including religion, society atomization, and general content. Today’s aesthetics reflects the laws of consumerism, where the chameleon law works: you should constantly adjust to the environment to consume more.
The notion of “beauty” is now similar to other advertised goods: if you could convince a consumer that you sell “beauty”, then you have the right to define the parameters.
Hence, we turn to the ideology of transhumanism, where any “improvement” of a human is justified if it gives some “evolutionary advantages”. All that will divert us from the traditional concept of beauty, mixing up the beautiful and the ugly and, as a result, the good and the evil.
