Nowadays, our pursuit of muscular lines, body proportions, fair skin colour, youthful faces, and more relatively perfect faces leads us to unconsciously believe that what the public perceives as beautiful is beautiful. But behind the scenes there is a hidden chain of huge benefits, with various industries such as medical, cosmetic and fashion accelerating the spread of mainstream aesthetics, which in turn translates into new causes of anxiety and lack of confidence. However, what exactly drives people to pursue beauty? What shapes today’s popular aesthetics? And what does the concept of beauty represent?
The Cult of Beauty explores the pursuit of beauty in every era and field through mainstream magazines, body painting methods, medical beauty, and race, gender, and status, and then sets up different standards to quantify beauty, establish standards of beauty, and form the mainstream beauty in each era, even privilege beauty.
The exhibition is divided into three parts. The first section, The Ideals of Beauty, focuses on various cultural definitions of idealised beauty from ancient times to the present day, and invites the viewer to use the objects in the exhibition to judge whether our current definition of beauty is more inclusive.
The second section is called The Industry of Beauty, which showcases the various tools and methods people use to become beautiful, from cosmetics to plastic surgery. One of the highlights is Beauty Sensorium, 2023, Renaissance Goo x Baum Leachy, inspired by Renaissance Jewish women’s cosmetic recipes, this installation stimulates viewers visually and olfactorily with jars of distilled rose water, thus emphasises the historically overlooked role of women as pioneering chemists and botanists.
The final section presents three new objects from the Museum’s collection that discuss and express identity through the understanding and pursuit of beauty.
As Naomi Wolf reveals in The Beauty Myth, “ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist”. For many of us, our inner relationship with beauty is an intrinsic part of life and directly related to our health and well-being. By depicting different pursuits of beauty, the exhibition encourages us to take ownership of who we are and define beauty according to our own values.
The Cult of Beauty is at the Wellcome Collection, London, until 28 April 2024.