“The Human Face: Searching for Beauty.” A Response
This documentary is arranged and narrated in a very playful way, very casually offering proof that ideals of beauty are linked to biological imperatives that are wired into our brains. It is valuable in giving us some measurable standard of facial beauty but, for me, it raised more questions than it answered. Since we are dealing with the topic of aesthetics, we are forced to ask ourselves if this measurable standard of beauty within the number 1.618 is translatable into other areas of aesthetic quantification. Do we react to this standard because it’s the order that we ourselves are bound to and therefore seek it out in nature? Is anything deviating from this standard not beautiful? Is it the ultimate beauty or is it not exclusive of other beauties? How do we quantify the beauty we find in somebody’s personality or in a smell? Are we reacting to psychological and chemical relationships that follow this same number or is this just one aspect to which we have been able to ascribe a number and feel comfortable within the illusion that we “have an answer”?
The quantification of beauty makes me think of a parallel between phi (1.618) and linear perspective. Linear perspective was an “answer” given to artists in order to represent the real world, even though our eyes do not perceive the world in that way. We perceive in curvilinear perspective but this is more difficult to understand and represent so we are more comfortable with the easier answer that is linear perspective.
Are we not using phi as a superficial standard of beauty? This number opens up the world of fractals where an exponential and self-repeating progression offers us infinite repetition of a set of orders (which are beautiful). Is this not a step closer to true beauty? It describes the spiral structures that regulate everything from our DNA’s double helix, to the superclusters of galaxies and the spin around their respective black holes. I personally have seen artists claiming to seek beauty shy away from these ideas because they can be overwhelming and make us feel like we cannot even come close to what the meaning of true beauty is. The Greeks started the study of aesthetics through studying the cosmos and I believe that we should follow in their footsteps and ask questions which are difficult to answer if we hope to really make progress in the arts. We have so much more knowledge nowadays but specialization is killing the ability to learn other branches that are, in their own right, “Beautiful”. If we could learn from other branches of knowledge and use our artistic sensibilities to make associations between ideas that apparently have nothing in common, then we would be able to perceive a much broader spectrum within the issue of beauty.
This is why I say that the documentary raised more questions than it answered, I do not say this in a derogatory manner, I sincerely believe that asking the right questions is the way to progress! The answers almost become meaningless once we have gone through the intense process of deep questioning. I only hope that we can continue to march towards a deeper understanding of beauty as a species and that we don’t ever feel content with our achievements. Having said this, I really enjoyed the documentary and would recommend it to anybody interested in the matter of beauty and aesthetics as applied to humans.