More than skin deep, beauty enriches lives

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari

The conversation about Sydney's new Gehry building resurrects the beauty question. To most people it seems a small question, almost trivial, a foible. I beg to differ. In my opinion it's a question every bit as important as Medicare and motorways and massively more subversive, because it's about how we connect to the universe.

We moderns are shy of beauty. We don't know what it means, what it's for or what it's worth. Unable to weigh it or count it, we accept the boofheads' view that beauty is both superficial and almost embarrassingly personal. Beauty is something to lust after, compete for, even own but not something to talk about. The conversation starts and finishes with "I like it", as though that's all there is.

Our buildings look rubbish (compared with those designed by Vanbrugh or Palladio) and our music sounds crude (compared with that of Bach or Verdi)

How did we get it so wrong?

Beauty may be subjective, but this is precisely why it matters. Its subjectivity takes it from some optional externality for when you have time and money, like that retirement novel you'll never write, to being as daily a necessity as bread or water.

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Beauty is a need and a right. In all its forms personal, musical, visual, spatial, natural, moral and mathematical it is something we should debate and demand, something to march for in the streets.

Everything in our culture tells us to despise and devalue beauty. Our brash cowboy background makes beauty a luxury. Twentieth century scientism sidelined it into the squashy female bracket, to be closeted in the "home". The subsequent postmodern overlay reinforced this, making beauty so personal and contingent we barely have a common language, even, for the discussion. And the neoliberal greywash over the lot means that if it can't be dollar-costed, it has no meaning, value or a right toexist.

Yet our deepest experience gives lie to this, as does our entire species memory. Beauty used to be the focus of intense imaginative engagement, philosophical enquiry, education and public pursuit. Taken as one of the highest human values - up there with truth and love it was tested and scrutinised, pummelled and parsed, debated, refined and above all taught.

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More than skin deep, beauty enriches lives