Beauty

Often people would’ve heard fellow people talking fervently, both in groups as well as in person, attempting to express beauty through sentences decorated with as many adjectives as possible. But, if one is to ask the same group in return to elaborate the reason why they had called that thing beautiful and under what criteria could they be able to explain such beauty, their replies would be just weird face expressions at the person who questioned. They cannot answer why they’d done so and that even wouldn’t stop them from celebrating beauty and its branches-cute, sweet, lovely, bubbly and all such (beauty had captivated them that they don’t wish to use a same word for expressing their most recent surprise which they might’ve used it for another situation or occasion: a marked sense of exaggeration).

All kinds of beauty have with it a tinge of surprise. A surprise that one wouldn’t have seen it either for a long time or had never seen before at all! This makes the comprehension of beauty at first sight, or of captivating beauty, purely relative. For a man who hadn’t seen any woman for a long time, the first sight of any woman seems to him to be the most beautiful. For he to shift his interest towards another woman requires him to confront many other women, that after his comparison of the woman whom he had known and the women who he confronts anew, his gradation of beauty would typically differ. On both occasions he had been right to his self.

This not only applies for women but also for each and every profession including art-forms. The first and foremost writer or a sculptor is celebrated without any comparison for he had created something new amongst the lives of the people living around. If at all there needs to be a beauty in the work of a sculptor there sure must be a comparison with another sculptor.

There are two typical questions in this that needs observation. Assume that civilization had grown considerably and specific art-forms had developed in proportion. Now, whose gradation of beauty i.e., whose opinion regarding the grace and beauty of anything would be profound and valuable? Whether that of the general people (audience)? Or, that of the people who carry out the same thing as their profession, whose opinions are that of his fellow professionals? Though, needless to say, each and every specific profession or an art-form is carried out only for the sake of the people in general-the audience. The latter said could be understood in more than one perspective, thereby we leave this here to avoid too much confusion.

Let us take a specific profession and what the people, its professionals, call as beauty in that specific profession (we take it for granted that beauty applies not only vis-a-vis women, but also for each and every object that human eyes rest upon; and also this is just a logical interpretation of beauty and not its origin).

Every man is capable of an opinion. The outcomes of the same profession, the workers (contributors or laborers) of which would proclaim it to be an epoch of beauty, could probably not end in the same reception among the general population, perhaps even by the contributors of another profession. What might be the reason for this contradiction in the perceptions of the same thing?

The audience is the group of people whose sphere of influence upon things other than their profession remains the least. Their lack of diversity in actions makes them immune to new creations, not as serious as their profession, unless those new creations might influence their personal sphere. Owing to the lack of predictability in this attitude and also being a passive approach for people, as they wait to be influenced by those things, their opinions of it must hence be the most farthest from being able to influence that profession. The audience, then, being unable to make a clear and effective exposition of beauty in that profession, henceforth makes professionals contributing for the sake of the audience, in terms of beauty, indirectly being useless; an end in nothing.

But, the opinion of the people who’d spent quite a considerable time in that same profession, would have a strong base and an exalted stability in their proclamation of ‘beauty’ either of their own thing or that of another man of the same profession. As people spend considerable time in doing a specific job, the average skill of the worker has a higher probability to grow to a certain extent, for they later inevitably belittle and depreciate things of trivial quality springing from their own profession: objects created by minimal skill. These same people laud the object of their field when it encloses more skill than the average worker usually objectifies. They are surprised because the skill objectified in that thing is more than their estimated comprehension of the usual thing. People celebrate this surprise and call it ‘beauty’.

This suits to each and every thing irrespective of any specific field. The Freudian interpretation of beauty as a libidinal implication on a thing that favors specific people is just the opinion of a normal man upon all the things that are outside his sphere of profession. But, already having cited the stability factor of beauty, this normal man’s opinions vanish at the brink of a critical argument.

Let’s take a profession where ‘beauty’ (beauty as such) could play a greater role, for the sake of its easy comprehension. The fashion industry of today has grown to great bounds. Very numerous designs and styles are produced every day throughout the world. If a girl is graded beautiful among her family members with specific conventional make-up techniques, she need not obtain the same opinion from a professional make-up artist; in so far as the girl’s family circle is devoid of any make-up technicians.

Actress’ Radha’s (a very famous South-Indian Actress) elder girl as well as Actor Arjun’s (Action-king of Tamil Cinema) girl, both have a set of very thick eyebrows, thicker than the usual, that the audience, the normal people, had felt quite uncomfortable while looking at their performances; but, at the same time, fashion critics and make-up professionals had lauded them for their eyebrows owing to its rareness-the difficulty in its frequency. Hence the contradiction!

The same applies when it comes to the interpretation of an ordinary low-earning man towards the fashion work of a celebrated fashion designer, that the immediate opinion of the former would be that the fashionable thing isn’t ‘beautiful’. Only the professional could see the intricacies and skill with which the thing is made. To expect the same from an ordinary man who does another profession is quite out of the question, for he prefers to not walk in the path the confusion of beauty and comprehensibility might take him.

The only way, then, to explain the beauty of the thing, would hence mean, in the abstract, to see the skill enclosed in the process of creation of that thing; in simple words the most beautiful things are all the most difficultly produced things; the amount of difficulty the thing has in itself. Whatever forms it might take! If a man is able to see the amount of difficulty the object encloses within itself then he proclaims the object as beautiful, for the proclamation becomes very stable as he’s able to see a level deeper, at the same time he could be able to give a broader explanation why he calls that thing ‘beautiful’. All the incomprehensibility of beauty vanishes!

Hence, only after we know a specific amount of information about a specific field could we be able to give a clear and broad opinion of it, if at all we opine lest we attempt to give a positive contribution. Opinions with no insightful rigor are nothing but useless. If money is objectified labor time, beauty is objectified labor; in simpler terms ‘beauty’ is just skill and difficulty. Usual definitions which clearly indicate its indefinable quality would mean to talk in circles.