Salvation of Beauty

Jeff Koons, the iPhone, Brazilian waxing: why are we so obsessed with smoothness?

Beauty today is caught in a paradox: on the one hand, it is expanding exponentially – the cult of beauty is everywhere. On the other hand, it is losing all transcendence and exposing itself to the immanence of consumerism – it is the aesthetic side of capital. Our experience of the negative in the face of beauty – as overcome, stunned, shaken – has been replaced with a tepid culinary preference, a Like; so that in the end we have turned the beautiful pornographic. This essay summons up those forms of the beautiful that manifest as truth, as disaster, as seduction. Han also examines those dimensions of beauty on which an ethics or politics of beauty might be founded.