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Between looking at something and deciding what we see, there are contributions from culture and experience which feed our decision about our perception. Both of these contributions develop stereotypes in our minds, which aid us in dealing with an idea. As the perception enters our brain through our senses, it is not entering without the influence of the brains history of perceptions and its consequential development.
Plato’s theory of the forms outlines that we have a set of ideals in our heads which contribute to our decision about what an object is. The forms for abstract concepts such as beauty and goodness also exist. Plato distrusted the arts as distracting and weak attempts at imitating these ideal forms. Modern art on the other hand has moved away from representing beauty to attempting to alter the audience’s perceptions or experiences of issues other than goodness and beauty.
Throughout history the ‘idea’ image of a woman has changed and has been reflected in the body form complemented and accentuated in clothing fashion. This poses the question: how can something be a true example of beauty if it changes? There seems to be an underlying persistence that beauty never changes.
The quote ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is perhaps more isolating than there being one universal ideal. Is there an element of safety in something being universally, unequivocally true? Consequentially removing doubt and uncertainty. Contemporary art, in its essence falls outside definitions. It attempts to challenge set out ideas and subvert the norm or at least explain it.
Similar to the idea of mass hysteria, a group of people can react in the same way to something, because the focus of the attention is something which provokes a strong feeling but is false. It is based on either rumors or fear, both of which run on their own course of reality. Perhaps ideas of beauty belong to the group ‘rumors’, and ugliness belongs to ‘fear.’
Experimenting with our capacity to interpret also gives us the capacity to share the interpretations we reach and we can call this art or philosophy or even just the personality we exhibit to the world. We may experience a life event of which we hold already established ideas in our heads. Stereotypes relating to interpretations of the outside world have a strong effect due to life events adding to who we are in ways which are unexpected, therefore adding to how we see ourselves.
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