MUSA - Beauty Contest

Beauty and its construction and deconstruction in art can be seen in great diversity at the MUSA in Vienna until May 26th 2012.

World-famous actress and beauty icon Zsa Zsa Gabor stated years ago: „There are no ugly women, only lazy ones” – her phrase mirrors the state of affairs today: Cinema, television, magazines and advertising constitute the space in which endless advice on self-improvement and –perfection is given about style, beauty, hairstyle, fashion and the like. A space, where the illusion of unlimited beauty is transmitted, of a limitless access without restrictions, of a capacity to overcome all barriers and differences: it does not matter what you are, but what you can be.

The quest for beauty and the determining social categories are critically examined in the works of Austrian and international artists of various generations in the show Beauty Contest, curated by Berthold Ecker, Roland Fink, Claude Grunitzky and Andreas Stadler. The project of MUSA in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Ney York has been directed by Natascha Boojar (New York) and Roland Fink (Vienna). The exhibition lasts from 17 February until 26 Mai 2012. There is a guided tour in sign language on March 2nd, 5 p.m. Entry is free.

Is beauty a stable category, a universal notion or does it vary depending on the tendencies of the respective era? Common sense presumes an absolute notion of beauty, connected to proportion and harmony, coming from Greek civilisation where beauty was an attribute of Eros, God of love and desire. Freud would highlight the correlation between desire, beauty and death as attribute of the object of desire. The current notion of beauty has its roots in the still significant Kantian aesthetic theory: Beauty is a contextual category, deeply connected with the religious and moral attitude of the particular individual. As Birgit Jürgenssen shows in her ambivalent work of the same title: “Everyone has his own view”

Marcel Duchamp’s vanguard action of exhibiting a urinal as a work of art dealt a serious blow to the desire for beauty that was believed to be present in every work of art. Discredited and ridiculed as bourgeois ideal or as decadent, beauty took revenge by invading everything: fashion, advertising, design, every corner of daily life. Is it still possible to find criteria for beautiful and ugly in art?

The works of the artists in Beauty Contest deal, at times in a sarcastic or playful -in any case very personal- way with the topic beauty, the individual and social notion of beauty, the possibilities of subverting or redefining the dictate of beauty and the role of gender, age, power, status and race in its cultural construction.

As curator Berthold Ecker says. “Artists refuse to be told what to find beautiful, they break clear of stereotypes.”

In this context distortions and reinterpretations of beauty coincide with the crisis of contemporary culture, constituting one its most curious chapters. Art and design, fashion and various political and social movements have undermined universal authoritative categories of beauty. If the monopoly on interpretation is no more in one hand, the aesthetic canon and gender roles are in constant transformation, if beauty is exploited and redefined for design and commercial purposes, which relation does beauty still have to art?

That Beauty Contest shows various ways but does not take a binding decision can perhaps be attributed to the fact that there never seems to be enough beauty in this world. This is arguably the only thing that could be said about it without any doubt. (written by Cem Angeli)