HSG

Many thanks to Blackcap for posting this compelling video lecture. It deftly encapsulates how Beauty has been banished from the modern art world--a theme that perfectly dovetails with the topic of this Web site. Everything that Mr. Burdick, the artist-lecturer, says about the suppression of beauty in visual art applies equally to the suppression of timeless beauty in female aesthetics.

A complete text of this splendid lecture is available here. It allows us to single out certain passages that are especially trenchant.

Burdick's vignette describing how a group of teenagers were awestruck by a 19th-century painting vividly expresses the power that Beauty possesses:


This is precisely the effect that images of today's most gorgeous plus-size models achieve, because they too incarnate Beauty--the timeless, feminine expression of it. Beauty is the greatest gift that humanity has been given, and to create Beauty is the noblest of human talents. How anyone could oppose Beauty is scarcely comprehensible, unless they were truly sick, truly warped in some fashion. And perhaps they are, for the works of ugliness that the modernists trumpet in lieu of beauty are often so repellent that they could only have come from a diseased mind.

In similar fashion, plus-size models clearly exhibit a look of health and vitality, while minus-size models so obviously malnourished, so emblematic of illness, that a preference for such an appearance can only signal something degenerate on the part of the pro-anorexia pushers.

The public, of course, would never accept ugliness in place of beauty, were it not indoctrinated to do so by the media and modern culture. As Burdick recounts:


This is indeed a perfect example of modernist brainwashing. Anyone looking at a painting by Picasso realizes that the man was a colossal fraud, but the diatribe that this viewer heard during his "audio tour" duped him into ignoring the evidence of his own eyes and accepting the propaganda, whereas his initial reaction had been the correct assessment. Likewise, anyone looking at a cadaverous straight-size model knows that she looks (a) ill and (b) ugly. But the fashion industry, through sheer repetition and hegemony, brainwashes society into accepting this ugliness as "ideal."

Another fine passage in the lecture reminds one of the arrogant statement by Alastair Macaulay (the New York Times ballet critic who recently dubbed a painfully thin ballerina overweight) that full-figured goddesses "are no longer part of any fashionable idea of beauty." It is argument by exclusion. Just as the fashion world enforces emaciation as the only permissible standard of appearance by banishing plus-size beauty, so the modern art world only sanctions ugliness and rejects any artworks that are aesthetically pleasing:


Burdick quotes the lunatic catchphrase of the contemporary New York art scene: "If it's beautiful, it isn't art." This is Orwellian doublethink. The modernists have fabricated the ultimate falsehood, the supreme lie, and passed it off as a truth. Rather, the exact opposite is the case: "If it isn't beautiful, it isn't art," because Beauty and Art are synonymous. Even the aesthetic of the Sublime is not the opposite of Beauty, but its complement, whereas works of ugliness are simply Degenerate Art--or more precisely, Non-Art.

Burdick refers to this mindset as the "cult of ugliness," and a better descriptor of the aesthetic of the modern fashion world, with its androgynous, corpse-like models, could hardly be found.

As Burdick notes, the film Exit Through the Gift Shop exposes the fundamental emptiness of today's art establishment:


We see this same scenario enacted in the fashion world, where ugly models with harsh facial features can make careers for themselves merely by stirring up "controversy" and attracting the attention of the press and the blogosphere, despite the fact that they are nowhere near as beautiful or talented as other, fuller-figured models. P.R. over substance--that too is the lesson of modern art and modern fashion.

One of Burdick's theories as to why Beauty is suppressed by the contemporary art establishment is just as persuasively applied to the fashion world:


Likewise, if the public ever were to see magazines filled with images of gorgeous plus-size models, it would prefer them over the pro-anorexia pubilcations like Vogue and Elle. The fashion establishment realizes this--hence it bans plus-size beauty from the pages of its glossies.

As Burdick goes on to say:


Again, the situation is entirely analogous to the predicament of plus-size beauty vis-à-vis the fashion world. Because the thin supremacists control the design houses, the magazines, and the media, they set the agenda. They create the works, then critique their own productions, while suppressing and ignoring that which could subvert their hegemony--timeless feminine beauty--so the public never experiences it.

Even in plus-size modelling the same situation applies, from agents who only sign faux-plus models to clients who only book models who are on the thinnest side of plus. The public regularly complains about the lack of genuinely full-figured girls, but they never get to see them. If the clients were to feature true plus-size goddesses, their customers would universally favour the bigger, more beautiful girls, and would demand their use from then on.

* * *

In another time, the aristocracy was the mediating force between art and the public. We witnessed a rare, latter-day example of the beneficial influence of the nobility earlier this year, when Prince Charles halted the creation of a modernist monstrosity in London and promoted a more architecturally beautiful project in its place. But such instances are rare in today's world, with the aristocracy having been stripped of its culturally vital influence and power. In a nobler age than our own, the gentry shared the beauty-loving tastes of the general public and shaped the cultural landscape according to those tastes. In the absence of an aristocracy, the worst kind of artists run rampant and create whatever ugliness reflects their own resentment-driven, degenerate tastes, while the rest of society is subjected to those works, powerless to influence the cultural environment around them.

In one passage, Burdick offers a particularly eloquent comment on the significance of Beauty:

Little wonder, then, than the erasure of beauty--including timeless feminine beauty--from the cultural landscape has left our world in such a spiritually impoverished state. Let us hope that the efforts of Mr. Burdick and other contemporary artists who are attempting to renew the beauty tradition in art heralds an aesthetic restoration that will revive our civilization, like water flowing over a desert.

Likewise, let us hope that the Classical ideal, in the form of today's most gorgeous and authentically curvy plus-size models, flourishes in the coming decade, restoring to Western culture the feminine principle that was its motivation to greatness throughout history.

Kelsey Olson, who, with her fair complexion, golden tresses, round facial features, and soft physique, is the living embodiment of the timeless ideal, the eternal muse who has inspired heroism, love, art, and culture throughout the ages.

- The Art Renewal Centre's "Living Masters" Gallery