Wilde On Beauty

”They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty”, wrote the author Oscar Wilde. People have wanted to surround themselves with beauty throughout history - it creates a multitude of positive emotions ranging from enchantement to being touched. Yet the definition of beauty has eluded many. The subjectivity of beauty, or if beauty is a personal opinion, has been a central issue in its definition. If beauty is subjective, it can be seen just as a psychological phenomenon.

Possibly what connects all the different opinions on beauty is a feeling of pleasure or appeal aquired by the senses, which is connected to the object considered beautiful. This ”pleasure” and what causes it are dependent on people's opinions, ideals of beauty and

Beauty cannot be a quality of the individual object of person, since it then would be equally beautiful to everyone, so it must be the quality of the person observing the beauty. This would suggest beauty to be a psychological reaction or state a person acquires when feeling pleasure. All pleasurable feelings people experience in different situations are in the end psychic moods similiar to all. This is why the experience of beauty is recognisable to us all, even if it would be caused by different observations of the world. Beauty can therefore on one hand exist everywhere in the world and be common to everyone, and on the other hand be everyone's personal, inner

These culturally dependent ideas of beauty have taken shape during a long period of time, and the psychological experiences of beauty of the people using power in different historical times have more or less defined the standards of beauty for entire societies. The ideal human of the Antique can be considered a founder of the Western standard of beauty, since the archetype of human beauty is still seen as an athletic person with a symmetric face. During the Reneissance the Antique human came back into fashion, and the place of that ideal in the core of the culture was sealed. Those who shaped beauty ideals both during the Reneissance and other historical times were often artists and their employers, the rich elite. Thus it can be said that the art wold and the people in leading positions on the society are the ones responsible for standards of beauty. They had enough resources to show their own view of the matter to the rest of the people, and enough social power to make others agree with them. Today the media and enterprises could be seen as using similiar power by attempting to appeal to our beauty ideals through for example advertising.

Beauty and its definition have therefore been controlled by indivduals of high status in the culture throughout history. However, beauty can still