Design Research: Personal Statement (in progress)

Beauty:  

• What is it?  
• How do you describe it?  
• What does it do?  
• Does it work for us? 
• Against us?  
• Does it matter?

I believe it does matter.  In one form or another I have been studying it throughout my life.  I've gone so far with it as to have trained academically in drawing and painting.  I've searched it out abroad and today it informs most of what I do.  I still spend countless hours each year pursuing it in museums, galleries, books, web and time based media.  

I believe it can heal communities and provide a foundation for future health and prosperity.  It might seem odd to give credit to beauty in this way.  In future posts I will attempt to take you to the reasons I've come to that conclusion.  For now, let me describe beauty in some extremes.  

The thing about beauty is that it smacks you around.  Perhaps this is why America is so resistant to it (our mythic individualist never one to be told).  It does things to us.  It seizes our attention.  It moves us to action.  It sings in our chest whether we want it to or not.  Maybe we just want to be home already from a long day of work.  Maybe we just want to plunk down in front of the internet.  If Beauty crosses our path, our plans tend to change, even if just in momentary turn of the head.  

Beauty is copilot to our economy.  It sells.  

It demands hundreds of millions of dollars from those poor souls who can afford a Klimt or Picasso.  It tells us, “here, have a drink of me...I insist”.  It shows us how we are not it.  This can be so painful it compels some of us to cut our faces in a foolhardy attempt to share in its power.  

When we have beauty, we tend to coddle it and protect it.  If it begins to slip from us, we are hard pressed to resist the urge to cling.  Beauty is power.  It grabs you by the throat, (though you think it’s your heart) and demands...”look, hear, taste, smell, feel...think me”

When it leaves the room...we revisit the moment in our mind, like some pathetic infatuate, trying to retrace the experience.  When we meet others, we think we should tell them about the experience, as if it were possible to pump blood through word.

It is woven into the very fabric of physics.  It exists from the atom, through the molecule and up to uncountable permutations of chemical form.  Yet, it can appeal to us in something as simple as the center point of line or a circle.

Beauty is sublime.  As much as we like to be independent, and apart from it.  As much as we would like to objectify it, to truly experience it, surrender is prerequisite. 

Is it any wonder we hate it?

Beauty is a bully...