Having just arrived back from a delightful evening with my childhood best friends I am left pondering the nature of beauty. Partly because these two men are beautiful Adonis-like creatures and partly because that’s one of the many things we talked about.
Beauty is always experienced in the particular, we concluded. Never can the generality elicit the distinctive response of beauty.
So the question I wondered on the walk home was can a mass produced item be beautiful?
Your Correspondent, A Greek in the age of Rome
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i often feel “life is beautiful” (not the movie) as i reflect on it, i know i reflect on lots of particular experiences so am I cheating in generalizing it with such a statement as “life is beautiful”
or put another way:
can i reflect on beauty generally and experience it particularly?
to try and answer your question – movies are mass-produced and surely they’re beautiful (depending on the movie of course)
I don’t think movies are mass-produced. There’s no assembly line equivalent. Some children’s TV, on the other hand …
I think there are beautiful mass-produced objects (I’m thinking of some Ikea stuff) but you could argue that the beauty is in the design (which is unique), rather than the object.
Mags
yes – surely beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the eye of the beholder is ‘a particular?
My eyes are different to your eyes and their different to Nelly and Mags eyes.
I think mass produced wind turbines are beautiful for instance, but plenty of people think they are eyesores.
I can’t spell proper either
I think the beautiful thing can be produced in any way but the experience of beauty demands that it is a single instance of the mass produced thing. So, I love my (slightly) mass produced office desk but because of the connections I have built up with it….
I probably hate no cliche more than “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” 🙂
“I think there are beautiful mass-produced objects (I’m thinking of some Ikea stuff) but you could argue that the beauty is in the design (which is unique), rather than the object.”
This is a truly brilliant point. You are a smart one, Mags.
it’s hard to beat a good cliche…:)
It’s like saying can you ever have a beautiful digital picture on your blog?
Or is a digital picture of a Van Gogh painting beautiful?
http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/moma/the-starry-night