To be beautiful, according to popular belief, it to be extremely aesthetically pleasing. This beauty is what sticks out to the untrained eye when it comes to art. We look for beauty; we cherish it. What, then, is the status of a work of art displaying only perpetual beauty? As Martin Heidegger would put it, is it concealed or is it unconcealed? The question falls in line with the idea of truth. Heidegger says, “Until now art presumably has to do with the beautiful and beauty, and not with truth”(347). This statement suggests that beauty and truth fail to exist in the same realm when it comes to observing art. It must be one or the other, but never both. As truth is a byproduct of being unconcealed, are we then to assume that beauty is correlated with the concealed?
What would happen if Heidegger’s ideas on truth and beauty were translated to the modern-day, social world? The idea that beauty occurs in concealed art has extreme implications on the manner in which society operates. For people, particularly women, beauty is often associated with certain socially constructed obligations such as makeup, suggestive clothing, and extensive hair routines. These practices, done in the quest for beauty, act as a sort of mask in which women can settle behind and be called beautiful. In this sense, modern women are thrust into their own concealed state of being in their desire to attain the unattainable: true beauty.
We can then infer that, like a work of art, truth can only come from moving into the unconcealed; a woman can only find truth when she puts away the mask and moves out into the open. Only then will she be able to find real beauty in the truth and candidness of her existence and state of being.
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