“Cas he said Leopards, there beauty is cruel: there are those who have it and those who do not“. But what does it mean to have it? A luminary answered for us, Stefano Zecchiformer professor ordinary of aesthetics at the University of Milan, guest at the Milan Beauty Week together with the beauty director of iO Donna, Cristina Milanesi.
One of the most anticipated talks in the schedule of first Milanese beauty week organized by Cosmetica Italia to celebrate the social, economic, psychological value of a sector, but also an Italian concept.
Milan Beauty Week: Prof Stefano Zecchi and the beauty director of iO Donna Cristina Milanesi
Milan Beauty Week: the philosopher Stefano Zecchi on the sense of beauty
“We could trivialize everything and tell ourselves the usual:”What is beautiful is not beautiful, what is pleasing is beautiful“. Answer comfortable. And partly true: in fact today like big junk!The professor begins, ironic. Which transforms the best systems into a careful analysis of concepts, and starts a talk that brings the guests of the Milan Beauty Week back to University benches.
“It is not beautiful on the outside, but it is beautiful on the inside. Yes, but in the meantime it’s ugly outside! And on the contrary, how many beautiful women are so ugly inside that they frustrate that superficial beauty? Talk about feminine beauty it is a discourse that disturbs much more than the aesthetic category. Beauty is culture, understood as capacity is to possess it, is to distinguish it“.
Isn’t it beautiful what is beautiful?
“Is beauty absolute?” asks the beauty director Cristina Milanesi.
“THEThe beautiful, the good and the true are the three concepts that organize human life, our way of knowing and having experience. If, after all, we have fairly objective notions of perception on the issues of truth and good, the same cannot be said of beauty: anyone can surround themselves with horrible things thinking they are beautiful, and live well like this. In this sense, then, beauty is subjective»Says prof Zecchi.
The leap is logical: «The beauty therefore is culture because it must be known how to distinguish… from the ugly! If mathematics is valid it is valid, it is measurable. Beauty is not. It can be said that a Picasso is it good or bad? Or that stream writing is Joyce? Before answering, other categories, formal, content, must be analyzed. Good and bad are not an immediate answer nor univocal “.
Beauty is only in a “polite” eye
That is why, nowadays there is an urgency for another concept. Aesthetic education. “If we can’t define it as objective, this beauty must be recognized, studied, understood. It represents one of the foundations of the history of man and of all cultures. What would we be us without beauty? Nothing, the desert“.
Professor Stefano Zecchi continues: «Aesthetic education is education for differenceexactly al contrary to the banal, to the superficial gaze, of the homologation of thought, judgment. We should start from the great company references: school and family. To teach young people to question themselves, their thoughts. When there is education in beauty there is also everything else: sense, culture, respect for the other“.
Can beauty live on social media?
“Let’s clarify an assumption: beauty is not communicated, but what is presumed to be beautiful. So in any form of communication, be it a newspaper, a sitea social media: they are all forms of language that allow one to reach the other with a sense to communicate, which is never aseptic“.
And this is where the problem lies: “if we have no aesthetic education, or sense of discernment, it is very difficult to distinguish the differences between horrible and wonderful things. Images, concepts, models, but also aesthetic canons“.
The beauty will save the world?
Where are we going to end up? you ask Cristina Milanesi. “It should overturn the famous phrase of Dostoevsky, “beauty will save the world”: it’s the beauty it should be saved from the worldin a present that shows infinite ugliness without adequate reflections »replies Zecchi.
“You need it more than ever because it’s a engine of our history: man has always sought meaning in beauty. It has always implied construction, project, utopia, upward trend. It is not never negative, dissolutive“.
Here is the importance of an event like Milan Beauty Week: economic, aggregative, but also an important one space for reflection. Mission accomplished.
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