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Final Essay
Beautiful or Ugly?
The word beautiful is defined in the dictionary as:
 1st meaning: having beauty, pleasing to the eye, ear, or mind (beautiful voice)
 2nd meaning: pleasant, enjoyable (had a beautiful time)
 3rd meaning: excellent (beautiful specimen)
The word ugly is defined in the dictionary as:
 1st meaning: unpleasant to the eye, or mind (ugly scar)
 2nd meaning: unpleasantly suggestive; discreditable (ugly rumours)
 3rd meaning: threatening, dangerous (an ugly look)
 4th meaning: morally repulsive (ugly vices)
Beautiful and ugly, right now after you’ve been reading the description from the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary you have drawn a conclusion to separate the two words of beautiful
and ugly simply by judging on that description. Your mind has visually drawn a line to categorise the two words into a good or bad, left or right situation. The description has separated the words of beautiful and ugly but at the same time there is a strong connection between them.
For instance something that is not appealing to the eyes is ugly and something that is appealing to the eyes is beautiful. But how do you separate an object and categorise that object into beautiful and ugly? Is it based on what you believe? How your eyes are interacting with the object? How your body is reacting after you’ve seen the object?
For example, you’re approaching a big, giant tree, something you don’t see in an ordinary park. A tree that inspires you to walk up to investigate its character and its towering size. If you break down the sequence of what our opinion of that tree first we see the tree and in a split second your eyes sends a signal to your brain to be categorised for you to make a judgement is the tree worthy of you approaching it. And by walking towards that tree you are drawn to its gigantic characteristics and the closer you approach you feel the movement of the tree, your other senses come into play like the closer you get to tree the quicker the reaction of the changing smell that your brain cannot grasp a time or period where the smell begins to change. And how your eyes are continuously scanning the tree from its trunk to its branch to its leaf to the movement of the leaves as if you can almost feel what the bark is going to feel like by analysing the surface. As you get closer you notice that what you thought you were going to experience could be a completely different thing then what you imagined it was going to be and your judgement of beauty and ugly at that moment has the answer or maybe it’s societies majority rather then your inherent senses and ideas winning over your thoughts. Can that be a guide line of your perception of beauty? What your parents have taught you, what to do, what not to do, what to touch, what not to touch, what to see what not to see and as you’re growing up watching how people act what do the majority of people agree on then you are left a choice to either conform to society or not to conform. Peer group pressure comes into play, the continuous advertisements that are pumped out on the television telling you what to look at, what to do, how to act, what to buy to look cool, what to drink to look slim, where is the best holiday locations and all of these things are driven by a money generated engine ever since the television was introduced into our society. So therefore you no longer have the choice of choosing, in fact the boundary of a choice has been so blurred sometimes you don’t even know if you are making a choice by your own will.
Do you, or what you’ve learnt, drive your thoughts from the day you learnt to pick up your first pen and draw something that your whole family praises you for? And then looking back in at it in ten years you laugh and pick out every single fault and ugliness that you can find, simply by judging on the ten years of knowledge and skills you have acquired for you to produce a much more superior drawing to the previous. And at that time your mind has categorised that drawing. And why do we do that? Is the drawing you did ten years really that ugly? Don’t you find that there is more pureness in that drawing then what you can draw today? Because it has minimal outside influence and at that time that drawing is the best you can do and in your eyes is beautiful. When you think about these two words again in a different point of view is there more to it then just a few descriptions of what it means? Or can you link it a little bit more with words like greed, evil, pain, giving, good, pleasure and now we have opened up a brand new view of the two words.
Take one of the most tragic moments of human history WWII. Driven by whom? A man named Adolf Hitler. What makes a man do such things? Obviously he was driven by greed, the greed of conquest, unification, power and dominion. These things link to ugliness because in order for Hitler to take, the whole world had to give. And at the same time it links directly to beauty, because it gives him the satisfaction of his desires and this to him is beautiful but to us it is ugly. This is because in our perception he is taking something good from us and because good things are usually beautiful then this is painful.
In the words of Bimba Beck, a survivor of WWII, ‘When Hitler entered Yugoslavia I remember standing in our yard when a German soldier, a young boy really, approached me and asked for a glass of milk. After we walked a few steps, I stopped and said, "You really shouldn't ask for milk from a Jewish girl's hand.'" The boy stopped and looked at me and said, "Oh, my goodness. You look just like everybody else."’ From this example you have a slight understanding of how Hitler manipulated the young soldier into believing that he was beautiful, and superior to all other races. But when it came down to it, on a human level his soldier didn’t even know the difference between him, a supposedly superior human and the Jewish girl who had given him milk, who was supposedly an inferior human. So the value of beauty can be manipulated by others if necessary.
For instance if a man has a pen made of silver, and his best friend sees the pen and he wants that pen because he, like most, are driven by greed. But at the same time he feels having that pen is not satisfying enough so he buys a gold pen. Then the man with the silver pen has been superseded so the he at that moment wants a gold pen, in fact he want’s a better pen and so the cycle of greed goes on in a paradoxical manner.
This is linked to a fight to have the supreme satisfaction of containing beauty for the individual in that moment. What I mean by individual perception of beauty in today’s contemporary society, is, for instance, general society would like to have a vehicle in the western world. And probably the best ideal of a sports car is a Ferrari simply because they go fast, they have esteem, years of reputation behind them, billions of dollars in development and advertising and are for the most part appealing to the western eye. Why is that? Why do people get such a rush when they see a Ferrari appear in front of their eyes and not a Volvo? And why do they try to catch the beauty of the Ferrari? Fair enough it’s a much more faster car than a Volvo but what is so beautiful about the Ferrari? Apart from the body shape and the speed it does the same thing as a Volvo transport you from one place to another. When we see a Ferrari and the majority say it’s so beautiful. Is it really because it’s beautiful or is it because what kind society level that car brings you to? By having that car people automatically think you’re rich. So really the majority of us believe a big part of beauty is material wealth. And beauty itself is like a big container and it pretty much has links to everything, and we’re trying the best we can to collect as much things as possible to fill up that container and to package ourselves. And the container is so big not only does it link to materiality it also links to self-image.
For instance one of the biggest popular artists of the late nighties is Britney Spears. She influenced a lot of girls around the world with her barbie doll looks, the stereotypical blonde hair, blue eyes and skinny body. People loved it and people bought it so that must be the majority’s perception of what a beautiful girl looks like, and what young girls want to look like when they are older.
So therefore Britney herself becomes a money-generated icon, simply by benefiting from the western perception of a perfect young woman. And it’s such a coincidence as soon as Britney rose you had numerous other girls with the same figure and same age trying to make it. A lot of which had little to no real talent. But why did they make it? Maybe because the perception of sex and youthfulness sells. Why do people want too look younger then they are, skinnier, sexier? One hundred years ago being voluptuous was beautiful. Do they find that beautiful? Or is it because people tell them it is beautiful and they think it must be?
That was the late 90s and very early 2000. In the matter of two years, Britney is no longer as popular as she was. What’s popular now, what the young general public want is RnB and Hip Hop. For instance newcomers to the rap scene like 50cent and Nelly have forced a perception of living life in the ghetto, having guns, going to nightclubs, having sex with numerous women is cool, and to them that is a beautiful life, living it up like a gangster. The video clips promote drinking, and all other kinds of debauchery is okay. It has put a scar in the youth of today. You might even say that the older generation would believe that there has been a reversal, ugliness becoming beauty in the eyes of youth. So therefore you can say that beauty lies in the individual but that it is heavily influenced by popular western culture to the extent where the lines between choice are blurred beyond comprehension.
For example, Massumi in his book ‘Parables of the Virtual’ in the chapter ‘The Bleed”, says, “In the family or at work, you perform your assigned social role. You interpret the script, you visualise or form a “mental picture” of what it means for you to be what you are, parent or child, mother or father, boss or employee, cop or criminal, and embody that visualisation for the benefit of others occupying the contrasting but contemporary character roles. For each role there is a privileged other in whose recognition of you, you recognise yourself. You mirror yourself in your supporting actor’s eyes and they in yours.’ What Massumi is saying here is that as members of society we perform everyday duties with a sort of script in our head, a script that has been formulated by society and our interoperation of society. This relates to beauty because obviously the script in our head is the best solution we can come up with that is considered normal and charming and beautiful. Maybe to not follow this script would appear to give the opposite reaction, ugly. Massumi talks about Reagan and his desire to first of all be an actor and become other people through his work, because this was beautiful to him, it was his desire for attention. But that wasn’t enough as with people it isn’t. He had to have more. So when acting no longer gave him complete satisfaction he moved into politics and eventually became the most powerful actor in the world, operating and acting on the world political stage, with real people as the president of the United States driven by greed.
I believe the only time when you truly discover the pureness of beauty is within nature, when there is no artificial effect to harm the image that is projected in front of your eyes. That’s why when we’re on a vacation we normally pick natural surroundings, because most of the time we live in an artificial world. When you’re surrounded by nature why do you feel like you are more open? Why do you feel more relaxed? Simply because when you capture that moment of beauty, when you are staring at an ocean on a cliff at sunset it is not something that you are being interfered by others, it’s just you and nature and the beauty lying in that is indescribable and intangible.
In relation to architecture I don’t think I’m in any position to judge any architects work based on my understanding of buildings but believe that every architect is searching for that one true beauty in their building. But architects design buildings for different purpose either for beauty, function, technological superiority, cost, etc. And all these architects must find the purpose of their building to be beautiful or they are not truly creating. In the world of beauty and ugliness we architects or architectural students are often prisoners of the two words. If we are an architect we design a building with our love and energy to the project, but often being criticised for our building just because everybody has different values of beauty. As an architectural student we are constantly trying to grasp what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly. But often we find ourselves being criticised at our final presentation by architects or lecturers that see a different view of our building. Are we supposed to agree with them because they have been in the field longer then us? Or are we supposed to stand strong and fight for our beliefs? So how can you design a building that has beauty, has function, has technology all wrapped up into one with out any flaws? Is it even possible? Sometimes you wonder is it the packaging of your presentation makes your building or the design of your building makes your building. So I believe as architects that the am to design a great building as believe we all do is almost impossible to achieve. But it lies in our head that if we think that is the best we can do and we achieved that that is the best we can achieve then I believe that that is beauty to us, not to everybody else but to us as individuals.
In conclusion to my essay, I believe that the subject of beautiful and ugly is to big and broad and 3000 words is no where near starting to cover the field. And everybody has their different opinions of beauty and ugliness and that’s how the world works. Humans are created to be different. So my essay is simply my own opinion of beauty and ugliness that I believe that beauty is connected to too much other fields. The word beauty is made up by other words, for instance, greed, pleasure, happiness. So what we see as beauty sometimes is not really what it is. It could be a false belief that has been created by the general public or the media. The same can also be said for the word ugly.
ShengMessages
coming soon
Daniel, 2003/04/29 01:59 EST (via web):</b><br>
Sheng,
some commments on the first draft:
- seperate what you want to say into paragraphs
- it reads like a diary entry, not an essay. First of all, because the thoughts aren't developed or challenging the reader to think, in it's current stage it is just a monologue on something that interests you, but gives no critical commentary or narrative that might develop the oppositional duality of ugly-beautiful into a thought through commentary or study of it.
- perhaps begin by setting up the duality of ugly-beauty and then enetering into a thinking about it through other texts, and take those texts somewhere in your own thinking. From what I could see, there are no references in the writing you offer, no arborescence into other people's thought on the subject through which you can develop your own thinking from...
- rewrite it from beginning taking these suggestions into consideration and perhaps you can develop something interesting on the topic that goes beyond a diary monologue. Remember, the genre of the submission is an essay, not monologue. - Daniel
IngerSays: Sheng these comments are valid. You need to take a critical position on the things you bring up - what do they mean? what are the implications for architecture, for life? How do we go about assessing "beauty" - when it is different for everyone? Does it have something to do with our own experience or are there "global factors" that reside in all bodies? The examples you have posed are not intrinsically bad, the problem is you are not expanding enough on the hypothesises you are making. For example, after the passage you wrote consider these questions:
"But how do you separate an object and categorise that object into beautiful and ugly? Is it based on what you believe? How your eyes are interacting with the object? How your body is reacting after you¡¦ve seen the object? Or maybe it’s societies majority winning over your thoughts? Do you, or what you’ve learnt, drive your thoughts from the day you learnt to pick up your first pen and draw something that your whole family praises you for?"
How does your body react, is it only your body reacting, which parts (the gut?)? Think of Massumis example with the monkey's brains firing in same patterns as the monkey that is performing.
You say: "Or maybe it’s societies majority winning over your thoughts?" I ask: Does culture totally construct our appreciation of beauty - it what ways might it be intrinsic - "a seeking for bodies in the forms we see? (human or otherwise)".
you say: "How your eyes are interacting with the object?" I ask: How does the human capacity for amodal perception (the ability to "know" what something feels like from how it looks)affect the things we look at - is there sense of "haptic touch" - what deleuze calls "smooth space" at work here?
you say:"Do you, or what you’ve learnt, drive your thoughts from the day you learnt to pick up your first pen and draw something that your whole family praises you for?" I ask: Learning is a vast field of research, much of what we learn is site in the body - proceedural knowlege is what psychologist talk about. How much of what goes on in the act of drawing, creating is in relation to the pen. Massumi talks about the force that exists between the tool and the wielder - the carpeter and the piece of wood. ("Users guide to capatalism and schizophrenia")
.
**Beautiful or Ugly?**
The word beautiful is defined in the dictionary as:
1st meaning: having beauty, pleasing to the eye, ear, or mind (beautiful voice)
2nd meaning: pleasant, enjoyable (had a beautiful time)
3rd meaning: excellent (beautiful specimen)
The word ugly is defined in the dictionary as:
1st meaning: unpleasant to the eye, or mind (ugly scar)
2nd meaning: unpleasantly suggestive; discreditable (ugly rumours)
3rd meaning: threatening, dangerous (an ugly look)
4th meaning: morally repulsive (ugly vices)
Beautiful and ugly, right now after you’ve been reading the description from the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary you have drawn a conclusion to separate the two words of beautiful and ugly simply by judging on that description. Your mind has visually drawn a line to categorise the two words into a good or bad, left or right situation. The description has separated the words of beautiful and ugly but at the same time there is a strong connection between them. For instance something that is not appealing to the eyes is ugly and something that is appealing to the eyes is beautiful. <br/>
But how do you separate an object and categorise that object into beautiful and ugly? Is it based on what you believe? How your eyes are interacting with the object? How your body is reacting after you¡¦ve seen the object? Or maybe it’s societies majority winning over your thoughts? Do you, or what you’ve learnt, drive your thoughts from the day you learnt to pick up your first pen and draw something that your whole family praises you for? <br/>
And then looking back in at it in ten years you laugh and pick out every single fault and ugliness that you can find, simply by judging on the ten years of knowledge and skills you have acquired for you to produce a much more superior drawing to the previous. And at that time your mind has categorised that drawing. And why do we do that? Is the drawing you did ten years really that ugly?
Don’t you find that there is more pureness in that drawing then what you can draw today? Because it has minimal outside influence and at that time that drawing is the best you can do and in your eyes is beautiful. When you think about these two words again in a different point of view is there more to it then just a few descriptions of what it means? Or can you link it a little bit more with words like greed, evil, pain, giving, good, pleasure and now we have opened up a brand new view of the two words.
Take one of the most tragic moments of human history WWII. Driven by whom? A man named Adolf Hitler. What makes a man do such things? Obviously he was driven by greed, the greed of conquest, unification, power and dominion. These things link to evil because in order for Hitler to take, the whole world had to give. And at the same time it links directly to beauty, because it gives him the satisfaction of his desires and this to him is beautiful but to us it is ugly. This is because in our perception he is taking something good from us and because good things are usually beautiful then this is painful.
And that fact works today. For instance if a man has a pen made of silver, and his best friend sees the pen and he wants that pen because he, like most, are driven by greed. But at the same time he feels having that pen is not satisfying enough so he buys a gold pen. Then the man with the silver pen has been superseded so the he at that moment wants a gold pen, in fact he want’s a better pen and so the cycle of greed goes on in a paradoxical manner. This is linked to a fight to have the supreme satisfaction of containing beauty for the individual in that moment.
What I mean by individual perception of beauty in today’s contemporary society, is, for instance, general society would like to have a vehicle in the western world. And probably the best ideal of a sports car is a Ferrari simply because they go fast, they have esteem, years of reputation behind them, billions of dollars in development and advertising and are for the most part appealing to the western eye. Why is that? Why do people get such a rush when they see a Ferrari appear in front of their eyes and not a Volvo? And why do they try to catch the beauty of the Ferrari? Fair enough it’s a much more faster car than a Volvo but what is so beautiful about the Ferrari? Apart from the body shape and the speed it does the same thing as a Volvo transport you from one place to another. When we see a Ferrari and the majority say it’s so beautiful. Is it really because it’s beautiful or is it because what kind society level that car brings you to? By having that car people automatically think you’re rich. So really the majority of us believe a big part of beauty is material wealth.
IngerSays: display, massumi "the bleed" - read stuff about social faces -are we all actors?
And beauty itself is like a big container and it pretty much has links to everything, and were trying the best we can to collect as much things as possible to fill up that container and to package ourselves. And the container is so big not only does it link to materiality it also links to self-image. For instance one of the biggest popular artists of the late nineties is Britney Spears. She influenced a lot of girls around the world with her barbie doll looks, the stereotypical blonde hair, blue eyes and skinny body. People loved it and people bought I so that must be the majority’s perception of what a beautiful girl looks like, and what young girls want to look like when they are older. So therefore Britney herself becomes a money-generated icon, simply by benefiting from the western perception of a perfect young woman. And it’s such a coincidence as soon as Britney rose you had numerous other girls with the same figure and same age trying to make it. A lot of which had little to no real talent. But why did they make it? Maybe because the perception of sex and youthfulness sells. Why do people want too look younger then they are, skinnier, sexier? Do they find that beautiful? Or is it because people tell them it is beautiful and they think it must be? That was the late 90s and very early 2000. In the matter of two years, Britney is no longer as popular as she was. What’s popular now, what the young general public want is RnB and Hip Hop. For instance newcomers to the rap scene like 50cent and Nelly have forced a perception of living life in the ghetto, having guns, going to nightclubs, having sex with numerous women is cool, and to them that is a beautiful life, living it up like a gangster. The video clips promote drinking, and all other kinds of debauchery is okay. It has put a scar in the youth of today. You might even say that the older generation over 25s would believe that there has been a reversal, ugliness becoming beauty in the eyes of youth. So therefore you can say that beauty lies in the individual but that it is heavily influenced by popular western culture to the extent where the lines between choice are blurred beyond comprehension. And I believe the only time when you truly discover the pureness of beauty is within nature, when there is no artificial effect to harm the image that is projected in front of your eyes. That’s why when were on a vacation we normally pick natural surroundings, because most of the time we live in an artificial world. When your surrounded by nature why do you feel like you are more open? Why do you feel more relaxed? Simply because when you capture that moment of beauty, when you are staring at an ocean on a cliff at sunset it is not something that you are being interfered by others, it’s just you and nature and the beauty lying in that is indescribable and intangible.
<b>Daniel, 2003/05/01 21:48 EST (via web):</b><br>
Sheng,
further comments for the essay:
The first thing I can suggest in attempting a second go at the essay topic, is ReadrEAdreaD. It is through reading the handout material and other reading referenced on the handout material (and any other material for that matter) that you can develop a beginning to what you want to say and an attempt at writing. When I say read, what I mean is think; read-think what other people have written and then think about that reading as you read and read as you think. It is only when thinking and reading come together and iterate between one another that a reading (thinking) on anything occurs. If this reading-thinking is productive, it will always trigger interests in you as to what may be worth thinking about or converesly give you an opening to think about what interests you and find other reading. As you think-read-think / read-think-read in this way, a writing develops out of it naturally; the writing is what constitutes the thinking about something. When you write in this way, the writing will naturally follow the structure of the essay genre, so if writing an essay poses a problem, then forget about 'having to write an essay and how do I go about it?', rather focus on writing down your thinking in relation to other thinking (reading) or other reading (in relation to thinking) and a wrting as such will by it's nature take pace within the genre of the essay.
If you are stuck as to what to write about, then my suggestion is you browse through some of the handouts and find something easy that grabs your interest and just read it; whilst reading it and thinking about it, take notes as to what thoughts and interests - QUESTIONS - that reading raises in you and then find something else (research) that either approaches the same topic from a different angle, or better still, is a different but somehow related topic to what you read from the first text. In this way, by layering your reading, you begin to connect a criticality or commentary (thinking) between the texts in question and a direction of thinking on something develops, something that is worth writing down. Then do further reading and repeat. What you will find at the end of the excercise is that you have multiple lines of departures from your initial interest (which could be aesthetics for that matter, if you want to stick with studying the beauty-uggly problematic of perception) that weave a narrative of ideas about a given topic. The aim is, to allow your thinking to be transported, to be disturbed, to have to think about something, it is in such a way that you begin to move through and across texts in weaving a writing-thinking about something. So, what you need to be is bold and just plunge into the middle of things - don't be concerned as to whether what you are thinking about is correct or not, it's just a matter of beginning the process of reading, thinking, research and writing - anything about anything (obviously something that interests you, because that will make the job easier). It is a bit of a job, because it requires efforta and an application on your part to pursue and research text and then in turn think about those texts in order to find your own voice. The reward though far supersedes the effort though as you beging to learn about something as you do it.
A good place to perhaps start your reading migh be Francisco Varela's 'The Emergent Self' and Daniel Stern's 'The Interpersonal World of the Infant' that both deal with psychological issues of infancy/early childhood. The other thing is not to be too rigid about what you want your essay to be. Allow yourself to be challenged and for new areas of interest to open up as a result of your reading and then be bold enough to completely change your chosen topic if need be and write about something else - the important thing is to follow your interests and read what you have a natural affinity toward, beacuse it is out of your interest that you will draw the stamina for research.
Hope this helps - good luck,
Daniel
RullaCommentsOnShengText
Answers to yur comments:
Beautiful and ugly, right now after you’ve been reading the description from the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary you have drawn a conclusion to separate the two words of beautiful
and ugly simply by judging on that description. Your mind has visually drawn a line to categorise the two words into a good or bad, left or right situation. The description has separated the words of beautiful and ugly but at the same time there is a strong connection between them. For instance something that is not appealing to the eyes is ugly and something that is appealing to the eyes is beautiful. But how do you separate an object and categorise that object into beautiful and ugly? Is it based on what you believe? How your eyes are interacting with the object? How your body is reacting after you’ve seen the object? For example, you’re approaching a big, giant tree, something you don’t see in an ordinary park. A tree that inspires you to walk up to investigate its character and its towering size. If you break down the sequence of what our opinion of that tree first we see the tree and in a split second your eyes sends a signal to your brain to be categorised for you to make a judgement is the tree worthy of you approaching it. And by walking towards that tree you are drawn to its gigantic characteristics and the closer you approach you feel the movement of the tree, your other senses come into play like the closer you get to tree the quicker the reaction of the changing smell that your brain cannot grasp a time or period where the smell begins to change. And how your eyes are continuously scanning the tree from its trunk to its branch to its leaf to the movement of the leaves as if you can almost feel what the bark is going to feel like by analysing the surface. As you get closer you notice that what you thought you were going to experience could be a completely different thing that what you imagined it was going to be and your judgement of beauty and ugly at that moment has the answer or maybe it’s societies majority rather then your inherent senses and ideas winning over your thoughts. Can that be a guide line of your perception of beauty? What your parents have taught you, what to do, what not to do, what to touch, what not to touch, what to see what not to see and as you’re growing up watching how people act what do the majority of people agree on then you are left a choice to either conform to society or not to conform. Peer group pressure comes into play, the continuous advertisements that are pumped out on the television telling you what to look at, what to do, how to act, what to buy to look cool, what to drink to look slim, where is the best holiday locations and all of these things are driven by a money generated engine ever since the television was introduced into our society. So therefore you no longer have the choice of choosing, in fact the boundary of a choice has been so blurred sometimes you don’t even know if you are making a choice by your own wil
<b>...</b> --2003/06/15 03:41 EST<br>
Final Essay
Beautiful or Ugly?
The word beautiful is defined in the dictionary as:
 1st meaning: having beauty, pleasing to the eye, ear, or mind (beautiful voice)
 2nd meaning: pleasant, enjoyable (had a beautiful time)
 3rd meaning: excellent (beautiful specimen)
The word ugly is defined in the dictionary as:
 1st meaning: unpleasant to the eye, or mind (ugly scar)
 2nd meaning: unpleasantly suggestive; discreditable (ugly rumours)
 3rd meaning: threatening, dangerous (an ugly look)
 4th meaning: morally repulsive (ugly vices)
Beautiful and ugly, right now after you’ve been reading the description from the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary you have drawn a conclusion to separate the two words of beautiful
and ugly simply by judging on that description. Your mind has visually drawn a line to categorise the two words into a good or bad, left or right situation. The description has separated the words of beautiful and ugly but at the same time there is a strong connection between them.
For instance something that is not appealing to the eyes is ugly and something that is appealing to the eyes is beautiful. But how do you separate an object and categorise that object into beautiful and ugly? Is it based on what you believe? How your eyes are interacting with the object? How your body is reacting after you’ve seen the object?
For example, you’re approaching a big, giant tree, something you don’t see in an ordinary park. A tree that inspires you to walk up to investigate its character and its towering size. If you break down the sequence of what our opinion of that tree first we see the tree and in a split second your eyes sends a signal to your brain to be categorised for you to make a judgement is the tree worthy of you approaching it. And by walking towards that tree you are drawn to its gigantic characteristics and the closer you approach you feel the movement of the tree, your other senses come into play like the closer you get to tree the quicker the reaction of the changing smell that your brain cannot grasp a time or period where the smell begins to change. And how your eyes are continuously scanning the tree from its trunk to its branch to its leaf to the movement of the leaves as if you can almost feel what the bark is going to feel like by analysing the surface. As you get closer you notice that what you thought you were going to experience could be a completely different thing then what you imagined it was going to be and your judgement of beauty and ugly at that moment has the answer or maybe it’s societies majority rather then your inherent senses and ideas winning over your thoughts. Can that be a guide line of your perception of beauty? What your parents have taught you, what to do, what not to do, what to touch, what not to touch, what to see what not to see and as you’re growing up watching how people act what do the majority of people agree on then you are left a choice to either conform to society or not to conform. Peer group pressure comes into play, the continuous advertisements that are pumped out on the television telling you what to look at, what to do, how to act, what to buy to look cool, what to drink to look slim, where is the best holiday locations and all of these things are driven by a money generated engine ever since the television was introduced into our society. So therefore you no longer have the choice of choosing, in fact the boundary of a choice has been so blurred sometimes you don’t even know if you are making a choice by your own will.
Do you, or what you’ve learnt, drive your thoughts from the day you learnt to pick up your first pen and draw something that your whole family praises you for? And then looking back in at it in ten years you laugh and pick out every single fault and ugliness that you can find, simply by judging on the ten years of knowledge and skills you have acquired for you to produce a much more superior drawing to the previous. And at that time your mind has categorised that drawing. And why do we do that? Is the drawing you did ten years really that ugly? Don’t you find that there is more pureness in that drawing then what you can draw today? Because it has minimal outside influence and at that time that drawing is the best you can do and in your eyes is beautiful. When you think about these two words again in a different point of view is there more to it then just a few descriptions of what it means? Or can you link it a little bit more with words like greed, evil, pain, giving, good, pleasure and now we have opened up a brand new view of the two words.
Take one of the most tragic moments of human history WWII. Driven by whom? A man named Adolf Hitler. What makes a man do such things? Obviously he was driven by greed, the greed of conquest, unification, power and dominion. These things link to ugliness because in order for Hitler to take, the whole world had to give. And at the same time it links directly to beauty, because it gives him the satisfaction of his desires and this to him is beautiful but to us it is ugly. This is because in our perception he is taking something good from us and because good things are usually beautiful then this is painful.
In the words of Bimba Beck, a survivor of WWII, ‘When Hitler entered Yugoslavia I remember standing in our yard when a German soldier, a young boy really, approached me and asked for a glass of milk. After we walked a few steps, I stopped and said, "You really shouldn't ask for milk from a Jewish girl's hand.'" The boy stopped and looked at me and said, "Oh, my goodness. You look just like everybody else."’ From this example you have a slight understanding of how Hitler manipulated the young soldier into believing that he was beautiful, and superior to all other races. But when it came down to it, on a human level his soldier didn’t even know the difference between him, a supposedly superior human and the Jewish girl who had given him milk, who was supposedly an inferior human. So the value of beauty can be manipulated by others if necessary.
For instance if a man has a pen made of silver, and his best friend sees the pen and he wants that pen because he, like most, are driven by greed. But at the same time he feels having that pen is not satisfying enough so he buys a gold pen. Then the man with the silver pen has been superseded so the he at that moment wants a gold pen, in fact he want’s a better pen and so the cycle of greed goes on in a paradoxical manner.
This is linked to a fight to have the supreme satisfaction of containing beauty for the individual in that moment. What I mean by individual perception of beauty in today’s contemporary society, is, for instance, general society would like to have a vehicle in the western world. And probably the best ideal of a sports car is a Ferrari simply because they go fast, they have esteem, years of reputation behind them, billions of dollars in development and advertising and are for the most part appealing to the western eye. Why is that? Why do people get such a rush when they see a Ferrari appear in front of their eyes and not a Volvo? And why do they try to catch the beauty of the Ferrari? Fair enough it’s a much more faster car than a Volvo but what is so beautiful about the Ferrari? Apart from the body shape and the speed it does the same thing as a Volvo transport you from one place to another. When we see a Ferrari and the majority say it’s so beautiful. Is it really because it’s beautiful or is it because what kind society level that car brings you to? By having that car people automatically think you’re rich. So really the majority of us believe a big part of beauty is material wealth. And beauty itself is like a big container and it pretty much has links to everything, and we’re trying the best we can to collect as much things as possible to fill up that container and to package ourselves. And the container is so big not only does it link to materiality it also links to self-image.
For instance one of the biggest popular artists of the late nighties is Britney Spears. She influenced a lot of girls around the world with her barbie doll looks, the stereotypical blonde hair, blue eyes and skinny body. People loved it and people bought it so that must be the majority’s perception of what a beautiful girl looks like, and what young girls want to look like when they are older.
So therefore Britney herself becomes a money-generated icon, simply by benefiting from the western perception of a perfect young woman. And it’s such a coincidence as soon as Britney rose you had numerous other girls with the same figure and same age trying to make it. A lot of which had little to no real talent. But why did they make it? Maybe because the perception of sex and youthfulness sells. Why do people want too look younger then they are, skinnier, sexier? One hundred years ago being voluptuous was beautiful. Do they find that beautiful? Or is it because people tell them it is beautiful and they think it must be?
That was the late 90s and very early 2000. In the matter of two years, Britney is no longer as popular as she was. What’s popular now, what the young general public want is RnB and Hip Hop. For instance newcomers to the rap scene like 50cent and Nelly have forced a perception of living life in the ghetto, having guns, going to nightclubs, having sex with numerous women is cool, and to them that is a beautiful life, living it up like a gangster. The video clips promote drinking, and all other kinds of debauchery is okay. It has put a scar in the youth of today. You might even say that the older generation would believe that there has been a reversal, ugliness becoming beauty in the eyes of youth. So therefore you can say that beauty lies in the individual but that it is heavily influenced by popular western culture to the extent where the lines between choice are blurred beyond comprehension.
For example, Massumi in his book ‘Parables of the Virtual’ in the chapter ‘The Bleed”, says, “In the family or at work, you perform your assigned social role. You interpret the script, you visualise or form a “mental picture” of what it means for you to be what you are, parent or child, mother or father, boss or employee, cop or criminal, and embody that visualisation for the benefit of others occupying the contrasting but contemporary character roles. For each role there is a privileged other in whose recognition of you, you recognise yourself. You mirror yourself in your supporting actor’s eyes and they in yours.’ What Massumi is saying here is that as members of society we perform everyday duties with a sort of script in our head, a script that has been formulated by society and our interoperation of society. This relates to beauty because obviously the script in our head is the best solution we can come up with that is considered normal and charming and beautiful. Maybe to not follow this script would appear to give the opposite reaction, ugly. Massumi talks about Reagan and his desire to first of all be an actor and become other people through his work, because this was beautiful to him, it was his desire for attention. But that wasn’t enough as with people it isn’t. He had to have more. So when acting no longer gave him complete satisfaction he moved into politics and eventually became the most powerful actor in the world, operating and acting on the world political stage, with real people as the president of the United States driven by greed.
I believe the only time when you truly discover the pureness of beauty is within nature, when there is no artificial effect to harm the image that is projected in front of your eyes. That’s why when we’re on a vacation we normally pick natural surroundings, because most of the time we live in an artificial world. When you’re surrounded by nature why do you feel like you are more open? Why do you feel more relaxed? Simply because when you capture that moment of beauty, when you are staring at an ocean on a cliff at sunset it is not something that you are being interfered by others, it’s just you and nature and the beauty lying in that is indescribable and intangible.
In relation to architecture I don’t think I’m in any position to judge any architects work based on my understanding of buildings but believe that every architect is searching for that one true beauty in their building. But architects design buildings for different purpose either for beauty, function, technological superiority, cost, etc. And all these architects must find the purpose of their building to be beautiful or they are not truly creating. In the world of beauty and ugliness we architects or architectural students are often prisoners of the two words. If we are an architect we design a building with our love and energy to the project, but often being criticised for our building just because everybody has different values of beauty. As an architectural student we are constantly trying to grasp what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly. But often we find ourselves being criticised at our final presentation by architects or lecturers that see a different view of our building. Are we supposed to agree with them because they have been in the field longer then us? Or are we supposed to stand strong and fight for our beliefs? So how can you design a building that has beauty, has function, has technology all wrapped up into one with out any flaws? Is it even possible? Sometimes you wonder is it the packaging of your presentation makes your building or the design of your building makes your building. So I believe as architects that the am to design a great building as believe we all do is almost impossible to achieve. But it lies in our head that if we think that is the best we can do and we achieved that that is the best we can achieve then I believe that that is beauty to us, not to everybody else but to us as individuals.
In conclusion to my essay, I believe that the subject of beautiful and ugly is to big and broad and 3000 words is no where near starting to cover the field. And everybody has their different opinions of beauty and ugliness and that’s how the world works. Humans are created to be different. So my essay is simply my own opinion of beauty and ugliness that I believe that beauty is connected to too much other fields. The word beauty is made up by other words, for instance, greed, pleasure, happiness. So what we see as beauty sometimes is not really what it is. It could be a false belief that has been created by the general public or the media. The same can also be said for the word ugly.