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26th September 2011
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#1 | ||
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Senior Member
Join Date: July 2005
Posts: 509
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Art as the Ideal Reality
As this site has pointed out consistently over the years, an awareness of the tradition of full-figured feminine beauty in Western art is absolutely crucial in dislodging people out of the state of ahistorical blindness in which they live, a condition in which they are duped into thinking that the modern starvation standard is the definition of beauty, when in fact it is an aberration and a sick inversion of the true beauty tradition.
I thought of this the other day when I encountered the following article. http://www.charlotteobserver.com/20...out-eating.html It describes the efforts of one woman, who lost her sister to an eating disorder, to raise awareness about the issue: Quote:
What makes the article significant, apart from its focus on the true health epidemic confronting society (i.e., women needlessly starving themselves), is what triggered the organizer's vision of a fundraiser in an art gallery: Quote:
I find it fascinating that she had such an experience. In entering the art gallery, she encountered what was almost a secret treasure-trove (secret not by design but by cultural ignorance): a repository of culture from healthier, more noble ages than our own -- eras that recognized true beauty and celebrated it, enabling women to live freely and comfortably without a second thought about body image, other than to admire their own curvaceous physiques. In essence, when Ms. Dreyer entered the gallery, she escaped into an alternative reality. Or to put it more precisely, she escaped into the true reality, the natural reality in which we all should be living -- and would be living, had the history of the 20th century turned out differently. The misbegotten, curve-o-phobic, media-controlled world outside the gallery, the world in which we are condemned to live today, is actually the sinister mirror universe, the evil twin, the distorted opposite of the healthier, nobler existence that the paintings depict. But at least that visual record of a more natural, beautiful world exists, preserved on canvas. Seeing that vision helped Ms. Dreyer rediscover the true form of beauty. If more people could be exposed to this superior reality, their viewpoints might be transformed as well. Perhaps if Ms. Dreyer's sister had had such an epiphany, she would still be alive today, rather than being another tragic victim of the modern Death Aesthetic. |
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29th December 2011
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#2 | |
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Administrator
Join Date: July 2005
Posts: 1,726
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Re: Art as the Ideal Reality
Quote:
In many ways, the world around us today seems to have been scripted as the basis for a dystopian novel or science-fiction movie: a world where true beauty (full-figured feminine beauty) is no longer recognized as such, but is suppressed, while ugliness (androgynous emaciation) is falsely presented as the standard of appearance; where traditional, healthy values are defamed, and modern, counter-intuitive, degenerate values are valorized; where the truer an observation is, the more it is libelled, while the more transparent are the lies, the more fiercely they are instituted as social dogma. Incomprehensibly, but universally, women struggle to lose the beauty they have, to shed any attractiveness they acquire, in favour of looking meagre and less attractive. They even suffer greatly in the process, for the body tells them that what they are doing to themselves is ruinous, but they fail to heed the intuitive wisdom of the flesh, and submit themselves to the degenerate standards of our time. We are witnessing the ascendancy of slave morality, the onset of a new, political religion of Cultural Marxism and "social justice" (which translates to institutionalized personal injustice). In culture of our time--both high and low, both elitist and popular--reality is rigorously inverted: what is noble is calumniated and what is base is extolled. Thus, to accomplish a "revaluation of values" in this day and age, as this site advocates, would not be a revolution but a restoration. It would be righting a ship that has capsized and is floating with its keel above the water and its sails in the ocean, a ship has been overturned for so long that none of the survivors clinging to its hull even know that it is not upright, and cannot imagine that the natural orientation of the ship is opposite to its current situation. These survivors fail to realize that if the ship were ever righted, it would sail smoothly through the water once more, as it did in the past, and as it was meant to do, rather than rotting, motionless, in the middle of the ocean, with no direction and no purpose. To recognize the insanity of this world, one needs to step outside it and view it from a distant perspective. But doing so is all but impossible, for most people, because (a) they live in this misbegotten reality 24/7, and cannot see outside the bubble in which they live, and (b) they have never encountered an alternative, so they cannot imagine that the world might ever have been otherwise; that, in fact, it once was very different, and was so for most of Western history. Different, and better. This is why we created our Pinacotheca (still a work in progres), an online art gallery at this site, collecting images depicting plus-size female beauty gathered together from throughout the history of Western art: to give the public the ability to enter a different reality, a world where true beauty is recognized and celebrated, and to lead them to understand that such a world of beauty, and pleasure, and nobility once existed, and can exist once again, if only the will existed to make this happen. Eduard Steinbruck, The Birth of Venus (1846), depicting the Goddess of Beauty with a round waist and a soft, fleshy, sensually untoned figure. True beauty.  |
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