On the trail of Beauty

In desolate Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, alongside ‘antique’ shops selling yellowed and scratched plastic buckets and broken digital clocks, there is a hairdresser with a fascia board that elegiacally proclaims ‘Beauty’. The world’s largest cosmetics business runs a global campaign with the strapline ‘Defining Beauty’ in pursuit of mascara and depilatory cream sales. Meanwhile, popular culture is deeply conflicted on the matter. Fitness cults and sun fetishes suggest near universal yearning for an idealised — and therefore unattainable — human form and brown coloration, but at the same time street culture, with its confrontational raggedness and disorder, its destructured style, its refusal of the smooth and unthreatening neatness that Edmund Burke claimed to be ‘beautiful’, is in flight from the polite.

It is even happening in industry, where the democratisation of beauty has been the chief sales tool for nearly a century. At Renault in Paris, the chef du design, Patrick Le Quément, has developed an aesthetic signature that he knows consumers find challenging. The ‘imposing’ Renault Vel Satis is one of the strangest-looking cars ever made. But Le Quément argues that ‘Beauty is not to be confused with elegance’. Something similar is happening with BMW, now producing cars that are visually fidgety and compositionally irrational. For the first time in history, major manufacturers are presenting the public with products designed to disturb before they delight.

Whether in people or things, Beauty is the most controversial subject of them all: in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations only ‘death’ has more entries in the index. But while Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘uncomfortable night of nothing’ is an unarguable certainty, there is always a good deal of disputing about aesthetics. The sculptor Auguste Rodin, in conversation in 1903, said, ‘There is no ugliness.’ He admitted that, as a young man, he would only sculpt women he found attractive, but a compensation of maturity, he said, was to realise that beauty was as much a matter of ‘character or passion’ as of physical charms or effects.