Folly

In Anne Wysocki’s, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty” we delve into the ideas of “beauty”. Wysocki argues for a different understanding of beauty, aesthetic, and form that is rooted in the particular rather than universal generalities and tenets that visual designers use for composing images and texts, universal rules that were developed first through Kant’s philosophy.

One of Wysocki’s arguments is how distant we as readers feel to the woman in the text Wysocki analyzes. The distant emotion is due to the fact that the person is in fact not a person. We see her as an “object or abstract body” (Wysocki, 157). Wysocki later states, “When women and other Others are subjected to this aesthetic formalizing, they are made distant, objects to be observed, not people to be lived with” (Wysocki, 168). My idea is to argue that in the context of such advertisements, covers, or visual texts found in The New Yorker or Vogue or any “hip” and “modern” text that is not the goal. Readers are not trying to find a soul or “people to live with”, and that is why Wysocki’s argument is weak. She is taking the images out of context. The context of such texts is to stimulate a chic, high fashion, or highly sophisticated tone. A huge reason why this interests me is because I am an active reader of magazines and have never “felt” the anger described by Wysocki, because it would be foolish to expect that. It would be folly on my part to flip through visual texts today and expect to see an overweight woman in a bikini selling lotion, or for me to see an acne faced girl on the cover. I have never felt that because that is bringing emotion where it does not belong. You cannot expect to walk into Burger King and get organic fruits and vegetables; just as you cannot expect to open The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, or Vanity Fair to see in visual texts someone that is not distantly beautiful but looks just like your gap toothed sister.

Wysocki also argues that we do not focus enough on the “strangeness” in beauty. That we should look to make “objects unfamiliar” (Wysocki, 171). The problem with these statements is that some of the most strange and unfamiliar beauties are found in texts such as The New Yorker or Vogue. Tell me, is it more common and familiar to see an overweight, poorly dressed, bleach blond haired woman walking down the street next to you today, or a 6’1 green eyed, bone thin, wheat blond haired woman? The women portrayed in specifically Vogue for example completely dissipates Wysocki’s argument towards the particular. In such contexts as Vogue we are not supposed to focus on the soul of the woman. Who opens up a magazine and thinks, “Man, I hope I see someone who looks like my Mother in here so that I actually feel something towards the model instead of feeling distant from her.”? The main purpose of my argument will be that Wysocki and others who feel the same way cannot expect to buy organic food from Burger King nor can they expect to see women in magazines or visual texts as someone they know, but someone who truly is unfamiliar.