Beautiful Transparency

After reading Anne Wysocki’s article, The Sticky Embrace of Beauty, and at first being thoroughly confused at what seemed to be her shifting stance on the topic of beauty, I believe I can now safely say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” To summarize twenty-seven pages of Wysocki’s discourse about what makes an image or design beautiful, I would readily point to the afore-mentioned cliché. Or, I could sum up the main idea in Wysocki’s own words: “If we see beauty as a quality we build, rather than one we expect to discover, then we can potentially see beauty—and other aesthetic qualities like coherence or unity or balance—as shared values we can both celebrate and question” (169). In other words, beauty is subjective and not an inherent property of an object.

As part of her attempt to define beauty, Wysocki sought to understand why the Peek ad should elicit feelings of “pleasure and anger” in her.  She therefore drew upon and analyzed the theories of Robin Williams, Rudolf Arnheim, Molly Bang, and Joel Kant (to name a few) to formulate her own thesis about the association between beauty and pleasure. I don’t want to re-write the entire article; I only mention this because it would be interesting to apply some of these theories to the topic of “pleasing, effeminate discourse” described in Kathleen Jamieson’s paper, Eloquence in an Electronic Age. Jamieson stated, “Where manly discourse persuades, effeminate discourse pleases” (803). She commented on several of the perceived differences between the written and spoken discourse of men and women, and one of those perceived differences is the “ornamental” or “flowery” style common to women. Well, I think even those adjectives of “ornamental” and “flowery” insinuate something of beauty. So, what makes a woman’s speech or prose beautiful? Could we apply the same principles of imagery proposed by Wysocki to this specific area as well?

On a new tangent, Jamieson expressed her idea that the “self-disclosive, narrative, personal, ‘womanly’ style” is to the benefit of modern-day politicians (811). This very idea is also espoused (although not in terms of feminism) by Clive Thomson, who wrote a blog post titled The See-Through CEO about the importance of companies building up their reputation and boosting their revenue by being completely transparent on blogs and other online sites. He predicted, “One can imagine how the twin engines of reputation and transparency will warp every corner of life in years to come, for good and ill.”

Speaking of transparency, I usually take forever writing up a blog post for this class. However, because of the mothering instincts of my roommate, I’ve made a pinky-promise to write this in an hour, so I can dedicate the rest of my night and early morning to writing an essay due in another class. Therefore, I realize my writing is a little disjointed this time around, but feel free to start a conversation about any of the ideas I briefly mentioned! (If I had more time, it would’ve been fun to pursue some of them more in depth). Or wait…maybe that’s a sigh of relief I hear coming from you: “Yes! Not another freakishly-long post!” Haha; well, the timer just went off. Until next time.