The Sticky Embrace of Beauty

I had a similar reaction to Wysocki's article as some of my classmates, being that it was a bit hard to follow. Something that I kept getting stuck on was the whole idea of beauty being a universal thing. I wanted to feel like what I think is beautiful is my own opinion that can be and is different from other people's opinions. And what some random person thinks is beautiful may be something I find disturbing, or even offensive. Why do we all have to think the same way? Don't we appreciate our differences? Don't we say it's good that everyone isn't the same? Our different looks, perspectives, opinions, thoughts, etc. are what make us so diverse, so I find it hard to believe that something like beauty can be applied universally.

This made me think of something that kept coming up in my comp theory class last semester. We discussed the idea of whether our writing is our own and the question of authorship. Some say that we don't own our ideas because what we write about has been written about before, and we get our ideas from the other things we've read and heard. But even though we know that, we still have a hard time accepting that our great story or interesting idea we came up with has already been done before. And just like how we want to believe our ideas and what we write belong to us, we want to believe what we see as beautiful is our own opinion, not what someone else decides for us. We like the idea of independence and freedom, or at least I do, which is why I think I didn't like being told that beauty is universal.

But on another note, there were some points that I found interesting in this article. The idea of visual hierarchy makes sense to me. Wysocki says, "visual arrangement makes easy one's access to what is most important in a layout, will sieve out what is unnecessary or not to the point, will streamline the direction and speed of one's sight to hone in on" (hopefully I quoted that right, but I took it from my notes and since I read the article in the library, my notes are all I have to go by). This made me think of William's discussions of business cards and how your eyes move around the information depending on the design of them (as in pg. 52 where your eyes wander off the card in the first example, and your eyes go back and forth between the bold type elements in the second example).

I also found Bang's principles interesting. Although I may not have thought about them specifically before, they make a lot of sense to me and offer a great perspective. They also make me wonder, though, if they are universal principles. What we (Americans) may think could be completely different in other cultures. Just like colors, words, phrases, gestures, etc. represent different things for us and for other cultures, these principles could be drastically different. We might see the upper half of a picture as a place of freedom and spirituality, but who's to say every other culture views it that way? Maybe pointed shapes are visually important in some other cultures because they stand for strength and battle, while rounded shapes are weak and troubling for them (compared to the fear we get from pointed shapes and the comfort and security we get from looking at rounded shapes)?

This might be a stretch, but the example I'm going to use is from Oprah. She had a show about beauty around the world, where women from different countries discussed what's considered beautiful in their countries. This reveals some major differences in beauty among cultures, which also denies the universal beauty idea.