ART and ORGANISM

Gorgeous Trumps Everything

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BEAUTY: A competition between reason and intuition?  To that extent and like all tensions we experience, it is easily exploited.  We are vulnerable, depending in part on how safe we feel.   The intuition that gorgeous confers adaptive advantage to all who participate in it, no less procreate … led to The Jaguar Motor Car “gorgeous campaign” of 2005  ( http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2006/jaguar-gorgeous/)

 Jaguar ads in 2005  …  “gorgeous trumps everything” … Script:

Gorgeous deserves your immediate attention.
Gorgeous makes effort look effortless.
Gorgeous stays up late, and still looks gorgeous
Gorgeous has no love for logic.
Gorgeous loves fast.
Everyone cares what gorgeous says.
Gorgeous gets in everywhere.
Gorgeous can’t be ordinary even if it tries.
Gorgeous pays for itself in the first five seconds.
Gorgeous doesn’t care at all what others are doing.
Gorgeous was born that way.
Gorgeous trumps everything.
Gorgeous is worth it.

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Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power traces the path of this remarkable early feminist and visionary art patron. In Rubinstein’s world, art and commerce blended seamlessly. She ornamented her salons and homes with splendid artworks—Surrealist murals, modernist portraits, Art Deco furniture, Venetian mirrors, and one of the era’s great collections of African and Oceanic art. Her understanding of beauty was similarly expansive and democratic: she saw the face as the site for self-expression and the exploration of identity. The Rubinstein beauty program thus included not only makeup and hairdressing, but also lessons in health, deportment, and culture. Such features, innovative at the time and wildly popular, today provide a fascinating glimpse into popular culture as it affected women in the 20th century.”   link

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BEAUTY IS POWER?  I was taught SCIENCE is POWER  But it seems to be both.. as in evolutionary theory, does that hint at a deeper common cause?

The cultural traditions of beauty and reason:

• There are two modes of knowing, through argument and experience.  “Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience. (Roger Bacon in Opus Majus (1268)
• There is a familiar aphorism: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. (The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” (Blaise Pascal, in Pensées (1670).
• Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (David Hume, A Treatise upon Human Nature (1739) bk. 2, pt. 3)

BUT one’s aesthetic choices are not the only thing that can overrule facts: there are other reasons (more to do with how “truth” is established) that are important. READ:

• Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.) in  Elizabeth Kolbert’s  essay review in The New Yorker Books  February 27, 2017 Issue  pp 66-71   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds[ii] THEN take a look at
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• Why I Know But Don’t Believe, Carter T. Butts Article In  Science  21 Oct 2016:Vol. 354, Issue 6310, Pp. 286-287.  Doi: 10.1126/Science.Aaj1817 Article  Figures & Data  Info & Metrics  eLetters   PDF
• Look in on A&O WEB NOTES on TRUTH including Lerner et al. (2015): Although a negative view of emotion’s role in reason has dominated much of Western thought (for discussion, see Keltner & Lerner 2010), a few philosophers pioneered the idea that integral emotion could be a beneficial guide. David Hume (1978 [1738], p. 415), for example, argued that the dominant predisposition toward viewing emotion as secondary to reason is entirely backward: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”  (cited in  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043 )

The Affective Fallacy “(also The Romantic Fallacy; Emotion over Reflection; “Follow Your Heart”): An extremely common modern fallacy of Pathos, that one’s emotions, urges or “feelings” are innate and in every case self-validating, autonomous, and above any human intent or act of will (one’s own or others’), and are thus immune to challenge or criticism. (In fact, researchers now [2017] have robust scientific evidence that emotions are actually cognitive and not innate.) In this fallacy one argues, “I feel it, so it must be true. My feelings are valid, so you have no right to criticize what I say or do, or how I say or do it.” This latter is also a fallacy of stasis, confusing a respectful and reasoned response or refutation with personal invalidation, disrespect, prejudice, bigotry, sexism, homophobia or hostility.”  (https://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm )

So, if GORGEOUS reflects a bias, we should examine the origins of this: look in on Alison George’s reporting in New Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833122-000-why-were-in-tune-with-our-emotions-but-suck-at-judging-our-smarts/