Background Noise: Skiksa Godess
Last Visited: How Art Made the World
Random Thought: Thank goodness for Go Fug Yourself: without them i wouldn't have known Aaron Spelling passed away. Well reported, ladies, and thanks for the tribute.
Mood: science awes
I was lucky enough to catch the first episode of PBS's new series How Art Made the World last night: More Human Than Human, an episode which dares to ask and answer the question:
Why is our world so dominated by images of the body that are unrealistic?
To call our obsession with body image popular would be like calling the Pacific a pond, the Grand Canyon a hole, Harry Potter a cult hit. This series takes an interesting route through the history of art, using science to get to the heart of the art of our ancestors. It's one hell of a ride.
From the The Venus of Willendorf's exaggerated beauty, to the Egyptian's Obsessive pursuit of Order and Persistance, to the Greek's search for realism then their equally obsessive quest for Naked Perfection (see: The Riace Bronzes), this episode meticulously tracks the course of our art, and what it says about human evolution.
The most interesting example, i found, was the Greeks and their lightning fast progression of the desires of their art. Always searching for the Gods among the men, initially they strove for exact replicas of the human form in their statuary. But once they had achieved that goal, they quickly found they didn't want their Gods to look like men. The Greeks dream for God-Like, physically unatainable, aestetic perfection in their statues was quite unlike their original goal of realistic human images; though the Greeks created the perfect human statue and didn't like it, didn't want it - they wanted better than human.
And like the Greeks, we to strive for a perfection that isn't attainable; our idea of beauty is an exaggerated dream where we emphasize different body parts based on the state of our culture. Be it breasts or lips or butt muscles or the torso, we are hard wired to want more than we have. So a woman's obsession with being thinner, prettier, with blonde hair and electric blue eyes, huge lips, huge breats, a golden tan and the newest latest clothes isn't trivial; it's an instinct as basic as breathing. But, does knowing that this behavior is instinctual help justify the lengths we go to to achieve this dream?
Interestingly enough, technology has gotten us to a point where we don't have to use our art to encapsulate our desires, we can perfect ourselves instead. For better or worse.
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