Wysocki IWA

"The Sticky Embrace of Beauty"

Because I was in the group that made this apparatus, I've already helped construct this summary and beginning thoughts:

Anne Frances Wysocki’s “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty” is an article written to question how we assess beauty and what is and is not beautiful, according to socially enacted forms. According to Wysocki, there is a great danger in consistently linking the social and strange in our individual perceptions of the world. Specifically, in our notions of form we have begun to accept that “to be human is to be tied to place and time and messiness and complexity, then, by so abstracting us, this desire [for abstract formality] dehumanizes us and our work and how we see each other” (94). As a result, we objectify all images and see beauty as only what we can view as spectators. This distancing between the image and the viewer can be dangerous. Wysocki suggests we reexamine particularities and strangeness as positives ideas all their own, without looking to social norms to pre-enable them. By acknowledging the forms we are taught, we can then begin to show how they constrain our perception of beauty and uniqueness in visual imagery and how we must depart from them at one point. This departure allows us to reconnect as humans and prevent objectification from being pervasive. Once this is done, we will view images of each other and recognize that we are all “built out of numberless and necessary particularities” (96). Most importantly, we as viewers of numerous kinds of media can understand how objectification spreads not just to images of people, but to all visual components within texts. Thus, we must use forms to teach us, but eventually part from them in order to invent our own unique forms that break norms and question artistic values. We must fight against principles essentially. It is these principles of form that prevent the student from understanding that when they create text in new media formats, the texts have real effects and consequences. Their work has influence on an audience. What they create contributes influence between audience and composer, very much like sponsor and sponsorship in the Brandt reading. When anyone creates text, including photoshopped imagery and similar projects, they are participating in reciprocal communications with an audience that influences larger audiences. 

Synthesis: 

This text reminded me a lot of previous thoughts by Scott McCloud and the mask that is presented in text to separate self from art and created works. It also reminds me of Berger and the situation in which women become objects in art with a dual sense of existence in art and life. Wysocki describes the constructed idea of beauty as the reason for both the mask and the dual existence.

QDJ:

3.     Does the Peek ad work for you as a consumer? Does it interest you and make you want to either purchase the book or at least learn more about it? Explain your answer.

     It works for me, in the sense that I want to know if it's only women used in pictures like this, or men as well. I researched the Kinsey Institute as my Before You Read exercise, so I know that it isn't just women. However, It's still objectification and the fact that it's a female picture to introduce it and gain interest is telling to us. I've never thought about the way in which alignment and text guide the reader's eyes to what advertisers want us to be attracted to. It doesn't work for me, in another way, though. Because I know that the woman in the picture is not completely real, that the picture is adjusted beyond reality. So in essence, it's like a book of drawings to me. Not a real reflection of humanity, or beauty for that matter.

AEI:

2.      Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Do you agree with Kant that “the beautiful is that which pleases universally,” that some things are inherently beautiful? Or do you agree with Wysocki that “beauty is something we construct together” and subjected to social forces?

      I think beauty is both, in the eye of the beholder but also universally constructed.  I think that we are genetically programmed to be pleased with certain physical attributes on bodies, and combinations of several things that our bodies respond to on one specific person is going to warrant many people to find beauty in them. However, I also think that we can learn to appreciate physicalities of people that we didn't originally find attractive, so beauty is also a learned idea. However, socially constructed beauty is where it gets tricky, because I think in this case people learn to discount things they do find attractive and endearing because it's not socially acceptable to. That's why we fight so hard to change ideas of social acceptance, so people can react honestly and be themselves.

MM:

Wysocki states, "There is no question that there is a certain necessity to effective visual composition because a design must fit a viewer's expectation if it is to make sense… but if design is to have any sense of possibility—of freedom—to it, then it must also push against the conventions, the horizon, of those expectations" (97). How does this statement apply to Wysocki's article? Does it apply to any other visual art? If so, how?  

     

      I think it does apply to Wysocki's article because she consistently redirects our attention in the text to bold and highlighted sentences, punctuation breaks, paragraph structure, and basically just pushing limits of what articles like this usually present. I think Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are perfect examples of pushing limits of art. They produce art that many consider unoriginal, yet, it can not be duplicated completely.