In his book “Saving Beauty” Han calls attention to the unique aspects of contemporary art and traces the philosophical notions behind its popularity. The central theme in his book and his critique of our contemporary art and of our world is the loss of negativity in the sense of a loss of resistance, shock, injury, ugliness, disgust, or anything else considered other, different, or unknown. Negativity is a part of life and to hide or engineer it out is an impoverishing fantasy. Han begins by analyzing the aesthetics of the smooth: how it is that smoothness is so beautiful today. Later he will analyze four more aesthetics that are missing in modern appreciation of beauty.
The loss of negativity is best seen in the popularity of smoothness. “The smooth is the signature of the present time. It connects the sculptures of Jeff Koons, iPhones and Brazilian waxing. Why do we today find what is smooth beautiful? Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative. It embodies today’s society of positivity. What is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer any resistance. It is looking for a Like. The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.”
Beauty is not all smooth and positive there is negativity in it and in beautiful art one can often feel shock and resistance: “A push comes from the work of art.” But today art and the beautiful has become more like an anaesthetic drug designed to take away feelings judged as uncomfortable or bad. And so “Today, the experience of beauty is impossible.” Or in other words what we call beautiful today is only what we like. Beauty as a concept and as a feeling has been reduced to mere “like” as it has become commercialized and a commodity for consumption.
Even ugliness and disgust are becoming smoother. “Today, not only the beautiful but also the ugly becomes smooth. The ugly also loses the negativity of the diabolical, of the uncanny and terrifying, and is smoothened out, a formula for consumption and enjoyment. It lacks entirely the fear- and terror-inducing gaze of the Medusa which petrifies everything….The disgusting…lacks any negativity that might trigger an existential crisis. It is smoothened out into a form for consumption.” Today, we live in a world of compulsive hygiene and for most of us the closest we ever come to disgust is in a failure of “proper” hygiene.
The cinematic movie preference for facial close-ups “reflects a society which has become a close-up society itself.” The facial close-up has the effect of centering the action and eliminating or muting the body and background; a loss of the world. While it is true that the face may be the most expressive part of the body the loss of connection to the body and the world is pornographic. The face is on display in a false consumer intimacy. “The face appears caught up in itself and becomes self-referential. It is no longer world-containing, which means that it is no longer expressive.”
In our world where more and more things are becoming disposable there is less and less permanence. This makes for an increasingly insecure ego that finds it harder and harder to find a solid identity. “The addictive taking of selfies points towards the inner emptiness of the ego….Faced with its inner emptiness, the subject of the selfie tries in vain to produce itself….It is not a narcissistic self-love or vanity which generates the addictive taking of selfies, but an inner emptiness….we are dealing with a negative narcissism.”
One of the problems the modern world has caused for beauty is its separation from the sublime. Plato and the ancients never separated the two. For the ancients it was perfectly alright to speak of a terrible or painful beauty. Today, beauty is viewed as positive and pleasurable by any of the senses. For example a beautiful body is a smooth body and is both more pleasurable to look at and to touch. The sublime by contrast is viewed as “negative” in the sense of awesome or terrible. I put “negative” in quotes because these qualities are not always viewed as pleasurable right away. The corruption of the sublime comes from the quest to find the positive in it. There are two aspects to finding the positive. The first is subjecting the sublime to human reason and explanation – which tames it. And second, internalizing it which makes it internally derived, pleasurable, and personal. The sublime is precisely not personal or comprehensible; it is wholly other and external. Whatever meaning one may derive from the sublime that meaning is no longer the sublime. “We may recuperate another beauty, even a beauty of the other, only if we grant it a place beyond autoerotic subjectivity. Beauty and the sublime have the same origin. Instead of opposing the sublime to the beautiful, one should return to beauty a sublimity that cannot be subjected to inwardness, a de-subjectivizing sublimity, and thus undo the separation of beauty and the sublime.”
Today, in order to really experience beauty in its fullness we need a non-modern mind: “one that, when faced with the sublime in nature, becomes aware of what is wholly other about itself. The sublime tears the subject out of its captivity in itself….Natural beauty is opposed to digital beauty. In digital beauty the negativity of the other is entirely removed. It is therefore perfectly smooth. It is not meant to contain any tear. Its signature is pleasure without any negativity, namely the Like. Digital beauty forms a smooth space of the same, which does not permit anything alien, any alterity, to enter.” Digital beauty is “beautiful” because it can reflect our own egos back to us; it is safe, comforting, tame and therefore autoerotic.
Quoting Theodor Adorno, Han writes: “Natural beauty and artistic beauty are not opposed to each other. Rather, art imitates ‘natural beauty as such’ – ‘what is unutterable in the language of nature’. In doing so, it saves it. Artistic beauty is the ‘afterimage of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks’.”
Having written about what beauty as the smooth (and what it is missing in the modern world), Han make a slight shift and starts writing about the aesthetics of appreciation of beauty. The second of five principles of the appreciation of beauty (and the first that he believes is missing in the modern world) he labels as the aesthetics of veiling. “Concealment is essential to beauty. Transparency and beauty do not go together….Beauty is necessarily semblance. Opacity is inherent to it….Unveiling disenchants and destroys beauty. Thus, it lies in the nature of beauty that it cannot be unveiled…. Pornography – as nakedness without any drapes, without any secrets – is the opposite figure to beauty. Its ideal place is the shop window” A well-dressed person, in any society or time, has more beauty and is more beautiful than a similarly naked person – naked and nude are not the same: naked is missing something; nude is unadorned or natural.
“Beauty neither conveys itself to direct empathy nor to naïve contemplation. Both are approaches that try to lift the veil, or look through the veil. The only way to view beauty as a secret is through knowledge of the veil as such….The veil is more essential than the veiled object.” Veiling can eroticize text through the use of metaphor and figures of speech. “The technique of veiling turns hermeneutics into eroticism. It maximizes the pleasure of the text and turns reading into an act of love…. The erotic can do without truth. It is semblance, a phenomenon pertaining to the veil.”