I make a pointed effort to not watch the Grammys, the Oscars, or any other interminable, insufferable celebrity award feast. Once the markers of American cultural influence and ingenuity, these ceremonies lost their relevance decades ago and now serve as nothing more than fluff vehicles for an increasingly dwindling number of aging stars.
Alas, sometimes the algorithms get past the filters, as was the case after this Sunday's Grammys, when most of social media was geeking out over yet another round of meaningless awards. Case in point:
I am beyond caring about anything done by either Miley Cyrus or Beyonce. I do not care what awards they win or what albums they make or what Netflix shows they cameo in. But I must admit I was rather struck — floored, almost — by how they look. It cannot be just me that was stunned by their inexplicable transformations, is it?
Both of these women have been so consistently dominating pop celebrity headlines for so many years that it might be easy to forget what they've looked like at any one time. It is therefore instructive to compare their strange conversions in one fell swoop. Here, for instance, is Miley Cyrus 15 years ago and Miley Cyrus today:
I do not think I need to point out the obvious (and obviously self-imposed) declension here. Look at the shift from warm, living skin colors to pale, porcelain, lifeless corium; the natural curvature of her face has been poorly carved up by a cheap plastic surgeon; the healthy-looking, well-style hair has become a limp cataract that is cut at odd, blunt angles, like a football helmet from the 1930s. Even the pleasant country gal's tooth line, once so sweet and beguiling in an era of Hollywood superfluity, now resembles dentures, all perfect and capped and veneered.
Beyonce's transformation over the same timeline is, if possible, even more striking; on the left is how she looked most of the time circa 2010, on the right is how she appeared at the Grammys last week (and how she seems to increasingly appear in public):
There is, yet again, an odd sort of paling effect at work here. Beyonce's now-sallow complexion makes her look almost ill. Her beautiful cascade of hair has been transformed into a lifeless, unremarkable flop. She has been spared the worst effects of plastic surgery, mercifully, but she has still somehow transformed herself from an honestly, simply beautiful woman to a sort of strange parody of one.
These transformations — from beauty to crudity, from natural to abnormal, from honesty to untruth — are not accidents. So much of the cult of celebrity is based on this sort of worship of the synthetic: The relentless pursuit of de-aging, the nonstop divorces and chaotic family arrangements, the lives lived entirely through social media posts.
And it is not merely people who can exhibit this kind of abandonment of principled beauty. We can see it in the decline of architecture, for instance. Consider, for example, the elegant, understated structure of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library:
...or the similarly appointed George W. Bush library:
These are recognizably handsome buildings, with clean lines and appealing facades; they look like they were built with human beings in mind, as places for human beings to come and congregate and enjoy.
Now consider the Barack Obama Presidential Center, a billion-dollar boondoggle in Chicago that will take at least five years to complete and isn't even a library:
This is a hideous structure, ugly and unappealing, almost hostile in its elements. It is too large, its form is incomprehensible, it contains no symmetry to speak of and looks like nothing you've ever encountered in your life. It makes one feel vaguely queasy looking at it, like it's a structure you might see in a fever dream.
This is a dispiriting trend in buildings both private and public. Here, for example, is the Orrin G. Hatch United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City, opened in 2014:
It resembles less a courthouse, of course, and more a prison, all severe bars and grating lines. The strange, blockish chunks at the top make no aesthetic or functional sense. The square protrusion at the bottom resembles a skin tag. This is an ugly building, made all the uglier by its stupid modernist pretensions.
For a comparatively handsome recent building, consider the recently completed General Assembly Building in Richmond, Virginia:
This building may not ever win any awards. But it doesn't have to. Not every building has to be a stunner, but every building should be at least pleasant to look at. Here we have clean lines, orderly setbacks, windows that look like windows, an intelligible progression from street to roofline. This building looks like it was made with creative intent in mind; it looks like it was meant to reflect a principal of creation, an understanding that we are a creative species that should exercise that faculty with care and thoughtfulness, precisely as God intended us to do when he gave us these abilities.
The bottom line: Beauty flows from objective truth and the divine order of the Logos. When you rebel against that, you become a slave to evil.
It is an understatement, of course, to say that much of Hollywood has rebelled against the Logos. The consequences of that are not hard to see nor to understand.
Truth begets beauty. Reflecting on the work of artists, G.K. Chesterton noted that creators instinctively feel "there is something there, something behind the clouds, or within the trees," and that "the pursuit of beauty is how to find it."
Don't ignore truth. Don't stop pursuing beauty. The results of doing so are worse even than a bad look at the Grammys.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
