The Ancien Greeks had penned their art within a rule they called "the canon of beauty". As a matter of fact, Beauty that was natural had it’s origin in the paradigms from the utmost-sky, according to Plato, that is to say the canons or modello most idealized. For a woman to be considered beautiful she had to be quite similar to the canon, in all respect. To the canon dictated by the corpus of the whole studies of perfect bodies, shaped by the mind or Judgement of Taste or aesthetic, and dictated by the masters in charge of the High Arts and often indirectly responsible of the mores of their time.
Nowadays, all the artistic practices or arts & crafts perpetuate this search for the ideal female. And the top model is clearly the creature who is at the forefront of this quest fairly tinged with eugenics, if one may say…For any search for bodily perfection necessarily induces a kind of specialization that would eliminate what is commonly regarded as ugly or not-beautiful by the masters of media and art and by the whole bunch of communication standards involved in our time.
More, the comparison between improbably top-slender-models with the pure-blood-Arabs horses would be quite akin with a eugenicist temptation that wants to improve the specie. Somehow, the supermodel looks like the archetype of the future Humanity elaborated in the indirect laboratory of Nature, say the world of Fashion, and sometimes in the mood of sybarite and bizarre.
In fact, when we reach the peak of the utmost classical beauty, that is to say, we cannot add nor subtract any element without ruining the perfect order, the least and remaining formula of invention is what Freud expressed as the « disturbing weird ». That is the new beauty never seen moreover never foreseen.
It should be noted that since the XIXth century and the start of the avant-gardes, art critics and artists have defined the «realism», traditionally opposed to the «ideal», by the term: « novelty ». For this reason, art jumped into the pleasuring spiral of hurried events and more scandals. One should be new at any price first weekly then from day to day.
Today, the canons of Beauty are created within the world of Fashion, and the strangeness or the novelty appears easily in the outskirts of Fashion. In some remote space where the masters of fashion would fail to impose their old canons, which obviously must evolve : to get brand new within our brand new century.
A new and contemporary practice of art and Judgement of Taste is exerted by a manner of scanning the profusion of images that internet, the new techno-scientific media and the street offer today. There, people, trained by ethnic cultures in some laboratories all over-stimulated by the dendritic or bushy Nature, meet artists who can scan-and-see or discern their new canons of Beauty, say the canons of tomorrow who are actually the very Beauties of today.
Finally, the role of the artist and art critic is to identify these canons, to theorize them by the means of their paintings and writings, and to impose them to the media in all possible forms of creation that means their very artistic legitimacy. This is what Baudelaire called : « The creative critic« . That is to say, not only creating works of art, but creating better models and canons of beauty, then paradigms of new events, within the abundance of artistic and natural diversity which lasts endless.
Demian West