Besides « The Ugly Truth About Beauty » there is also « The Beautiful Truth About Beauty », but the thesis is impossible to solve since beauty is subjective.
When I was a child, beauty was attached to pleasure, to pretty things. I still remember this beautyful only two-tone car in turquoise and white I could admired in my village once in a while… Turquoise and rose fuchsia were my favorite colors; what they colored was automatically beautiful to me. With time, color became a tool to make the object more representative; it now has the function to describe the reality of things and life. Today, when all the elements fits at the right place to express, to describe something, when they can have an impact, they become good tools to communicate, and how gratifying !
But the authenticity of what one has to say is another step. We are in a period of crisis, everything has to be solved immediately, we don’t take time to consider who we are, « our own mission » sounds archaic, time is lacking to search the false note. Maybe this has a link with the « Ugly Truth about Beauty ».
The artist as anybody else, needs to be attentive to the truth he perceives and to choose his own way to interpret his vision. « Everybody is beautiful in its own way » may be true, nevertheless, everybody may not like the other’s way of being and doing. Nowadays, the notion one has of beauty may be different, and everybody has to live with it.
To me, beauty corresponds to authenticity. Beauty is true when all the elements « fits in the puzzle », in order to reach something of the essential. Coincidentally, two different friends of mine recently quoted to me the following assertion by Proust: « La vraie beauté est si particulière, si nouvelle, qu’on ne la reconnaît pas pour la beauté ». One of them told me that to her, this can be applied to spiritual life as much as to beauty. Beauty and authenticity are twin sisters and they are both undoubtedly related to the spiritual world.
Marie Hélène Allain
à la demande du journal/ requested by
The Telegraph Journal