Saving Beauty

— Watch with headphones for the full intended experience. Beauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism — the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal(?) pleasures, instant gratification and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty. Here I trace a parallel to creation in the information age: we have imported to web3 dynamics the slavery of our own competition for attention in the World Wild Web. Artists creating to please. Impact over depth. Instinct over reflection. Wow over hmm. Sequential drops over paced, ...View all