"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the age of "alternative facts"
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness
-- John Keats, "Endymion"
From 2017 on, I've been intrigued by the White House's aesthetics. I'm not talking clothing here; Robin Givhan owns that beat and I'd be a fool to try. I'm just really into trying to figure out what makes the annual White House holiday decorations so compelling or why I can't stop looking away from the East Rose Garden redesign.
With the holiday decorations, I initially thought the problem was that the team which was responsible for them was probably more used to the scale and branding required by hotel lobbies. The first year I saw the Christmas decorations in the White House, I thought they made perfect sense if one remembered that the White House was now occupied by a hotelier and the wife who advances his visual branding.
Review the last three years of holiday decorations and a very consistent theme emerges: "traditional" patriotism overlaid in gilt. A tree might have a golden eagle atop it rather than the usual angel or star topper. Zhushing up a tree with a topper that reflects one's quirks is basically de rigeur for Americans. Why would we expect different from the White House? Perhaps because the "people's house" is currently occupied by someone who weaponizes patriotism against the people he dislikes and the eagle is an uncomfortable reminder of patriotism as a cudgel?
Aesthetics always tip the hand as to what a society's values are, hence my fascination. Any larger conversation on aesthetics is a conversation about the way our perceptions of something are reflective of our beliefs and values.
There was a Twitter kerfluffle around the rose garden redo -- the mature, pollinating cherry trees initially planted by Jackie Kennedy are gone, the intricately laid out beds that rewarded review by pedestrians replaced by massed beds of white flowers that will look very nice when viewed from a plane flying overhead, the philosophical history of the space as a balance between grandeur and democracy plowed under.
For some Americans, the garden represents a disregard for ecological considerations, a disdain for a pedestrian-centric lifestyle and the privileging of a "classical Western civilization" over all else -- symbolic of an administration that has eased environmental protections and ordered state-sponsored attacks against its own citizens.
In a previous administration, there were witterings over President Obama's use of dijon mustard on a burger (he eschewed the "American" condiment of ketchup) and his tan suit (it broke the norms of the D.C. dress code, suggested some). His food and clothing aesthetics became a proxy battle over cultural and class anxieties.
Some people didn't see what the big deal was. People love all sorts of stuff on burgers -- blue cheese or teriyaki sauce or kimchi. Right? America's a glorious multicultural mosaic and why shouldn't we branch out beyond ketchup?
For others, the mutterings about Obama's deviation from the "American" norm were really reflective of discomfort with a president who came to embody what one writer called an era of "woke cosmopolitanism," i.e. a mindset that did not place a white America at the center of global power but rather posited a diverse country as a leader within a global community. For a lot of Americans, "woke cosmopolitanism" translated into losing their jobs in a global workplace -- making fun of someone's suit and condiment choices was a proxy protest against the values, habits and privileges that woke cosmopolitanism embodied.
Aesthetics are the starting point for debates on what comprises our shared national values. When we examine racism in food media, we're having a discussion about who gets to define contemporary, mainstream cuisine. When we look at the ugly imperialist messaging inherent in a gauzy white "nap dress," we're talking about whether or not we're really aware of the massive inequalities that have become evident during a pandemic, and if our acceptance or participation in those inequalities reflect what we think our values are.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- "Ode on a Grecian Urn," John Keats
The hypallage that finishes the poem, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," is one of those lines that launches a thousand dissertations. And like the truth, beauty is always up for debate.
Christian theologians like Augustine used to argue that anything with a sense of order and unity reflected the nature of the divine and therefore was beautiful; beauty was connected to reason and the mind. Thomas Aquinas riffed slightly on this -- he argued that beauty makes one feel a sense of harmony with God's universe thanks to our cognitive ability to perceive beauty. Again -- beauty is defined by what we know, i.e. how we are indoctrinated in our learning. This is why some folks have a real stake in imposing standards of "classical" beauty and advocating for "classical" education as a way to understand beauty and therefore truth.
Is the new rose garden beautiful? It honestly depends on how we're defining beauty here. The garden's clear nod to Versailles can be considered violently unsettling when you consider the implications of "L'état, c'est moi" and the fact that America was meant as a democracy, not a monarchy. But someone else will look at the garden's formal geometry and go all in on the Augustinian definition of order as a quality of beauty. It all depends on the values -- those, like beauty and truth, are all in the eye of the beholder.
*
FURTHER READING
"Trump’s Beautiful Proposal for Federal Architecture(The Atlantic, February 20, 2020) -- "The way to get people to stop constructing ugly public buildings with government money is to insist that they use government money to design handsome buildings instead."
"The New Rose Garden Is Fit for an Unchecked Presidency" (Slate, August 24, 2020) -- "The old Rose Garden was a masterful balance between the assertion of power, proper in the house of the chief executive, and its limitations, essential in a democracy. But all that is now gone."
"The Aesthetics of the Alt-Right" (Post Office Arts Journal, February 11, 2017) -- This is one of those reads where you really have to heed the trigger warnings at the top, but it goes a long, long way in explaining exactly what the alt-right "looks like" through their memes and media.
"Welcome to AirSpace" (The Verge, August 3, 2016) -- "As an affluent, self-selecting group of people move through spaces linked by technology, particular sensibilities spread, and these small pockets of geography grow to resemble one another."
"Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?" (The Cut, March 3, 2020) -- "In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same."
*