My good communist buddy out west often laments the lack of beauty in modern architecture and construction. From those cookie cutter 3 story apartment blocks with the faux brick accent walls, to the barren warehouse minimalism of Box Stores, to the generally bland and boring and brutalist local government service buildings. “It’s the sheer lack of anything beautiful to be surrounded by” is his specific complaint, and it does resonate. He’s not wrong, and he’s on to something deep, whether he knows it or not.
The original Detroit pump house (pictured above) looks like it could be some kind of an Arabian palace. But it’s just a pump house. In your city, it is probably a concrete cube somewhere in town that, at some point in time, replaced a much cooler red brick structure in a slightly older part of town. Back in the day, even basic things with basic functions were crafted into works of art.
Why was that the case then, and why is it no longer the case now?
My buddy blames capitalism, corporatism specifically, for the great shittification of everything. Efficiency (profit) above all else, over unnecessary aesthetic frills. Serving a purpose while being beautiful became less coveted than serving a purpose while being as efficient (cheap) with resources as possible.
My mother, who is much the opposite of my buddy- a Christian theocrat as opposed to an Atheist commie- oddly shares his views on beauty almost exactly. According to her, Beauty is synonymous with Truth, which is synonymous with God. She credits the impulse to create art and beauty as fundamentally religious, as man’s great effort at touching or pleasing The Divine with the very best he is capable. She cites the fact that historically speaking most of the great works of art and architecture were in direct service to some god or another, even with the Romans and the Ancient Egyptians (and, before that, the Cult of Cthulhu).
She goes to church all the time, and will drive well out of her way to avoid a modern one to instead sit in the beauty of an older gothic one. She blames corporatism the same way my buddy does but of course splits hairs on which half of the equation controls the other (gvt v corp).
The principal of preserving and yearning for beauty remains between both. Perhaps for universal reasons?
Is beauty somewhat objective? If you ask 100 people whether the Cologne Cathedral or the Liberty Baptist Church on Buckeye Road is the more beautiful, I feel like 100 out of 100 would have the same opinion. Maybe not. Maybe 95 out of 100. Either way, there IS something- if not objective, then at the very least standardized, about what is or isn’t beautiful.
And I’ll challenge subjective beauty a step further- say there is something you find unusually beautiful. Do you not think that if you could explain your perspective on why you see it that way, and if someone could understand exactly where you were coming from, what it was like in your shoes exactly, that they also wouldn’t find it beautiful in equal regard? Is it just ignorance and gaps in information that keeps beauty exclusively in the eye of the beholder?
I have a theory as to why women carry the standard for the more beautiful sex.
It’s the roundness. The asexual human body has a lot of round features. Even features that are our sharpest and most angular are still round. Our elbows. Our fingertips. Our knees, Our toes. Our heads. Our butt cheeks. Our heels. Our chins. Our eyes. Our navels. Our shoulders.
It seems the most defining trait of the human shape, absent gender, is roundness. And women, with their two additional round items (tiddies) and extra roundiness in general, are therefore the more “human” humans. The more natural and aesthetically consistent sex, between the two.
Men can be beautiful too. For me a young James Spader or a young Ryan Phillippe or any age Sam Rockwell I would describe as such. The extra angles and slightly sharper trim package of men cuts against the natural roundiness of humans overall, but contrast is a different kind of beautiful- and I fear overall Men, aside from a few rare exceptions, do not measure up to their female counterparts of similar health and aesthetic output.
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