Human Beauty. Human Ugliness. Human Beauty, again?

In this hideous and yet highbrow lecture, Umberto Eco walks us through a history of ugliness showing how the notion of “repulsion” has shifted from generation to generation.

But what struck me most is how artists have chosen to represent humanity over time.

In ancient Greece and the European Renaissance, the human form was beautiful - a thing deserving reverence and celebration. The Greeks so revered the form that even their God’s took its shape. Renaissance painters, likewise, moved away from holy subject matter towards more human ones.

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446

And it was this orientation that continued many centuries all the way up through the French academy and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the 1700’s. 

Jean Baptiste Chardin, Laundress, 1733

And on through art movements such as Art Neavou:

Alfonse Mucha, Dusk, 1899

And commercial art such as the poster art of the early 1900s:

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Calzaturificio di Varese poster, 1913.

But you might be surprised to know that fine artists didn’t just paint human beauty; they also painted human ugliness. However, that is not what I think is remarkable. Instead, it is the way the artists treated the ugliness. From what I can see, it was with surprising respect. Renaissance artists still saw their ghastly, even disfigured, subjects as people. People still capable of compassion, intelligence, strength and accomplishment. The following examples show how a few artists chose to show us the beautiful in the ugly: 

Quentin Matsys A Grotesque Old Woman (or the Ugly Duchess) ca. 1525

Rembrandt, Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, ca. 1665

Image pulled from Umberto Eco’s presentation (I couldn’t find name of painter of this)

But as I watched Eco’s presentation I felt the art community took a dramatically different stance, almost an oppositional stance, to their predecessors. From the Modernist movement forward, it feels like artists, more often than not, wanted to show the ugliness of humanity and the human form. The human being was not something to be revered but reviled. 

We see it in the cubist movement…

Picasso, Man with Guitar, 1911

…in the Futurist movement…

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

…in the Dadaist movement…

George Grosz, A Victim of Society, 1919

…and many other artists:

Hans Bellmer, ca. 1930

Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968            

Lucian Freud, in process of painting Naked Man, Back View, 1991.

What I find particularly interesting is that some modern artists are going back into old Renaissance works and deforming them. It gives me a weird feeling to look at this stuff. It’s as if someone, who by virtue of living at a later, more knowing age, went back and fixed the naivety of an ancient people. By altering the faces with horror film characters, the artists unmasked the true nature of subjects who once fooled us. It’s a statement that the grotesque is more human than the beautiful.

Aleesandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, 1480s

Uknown Artist

Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa

Unknown Artist

Unknown Artist (I couldn’t find the original)

Unknown Artist (I couldn’t find the original)

While I do think many things fueled this shift towards humanity’s ugliness, it is certainly no small point to note that the rise in “ugly” expressions coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology. Freudian psychology taught us that we are born bad – in the sense they we just want to do what feels good – and that our desires, if left uncontrolled, lead to personal ruin.

Artists saw this theme reinforced in the world around them. Greed, materialism and status fueled the erection of landscape-scarring factories that forced workers to endure horrendous working conditions and employed children to do dangerous, body-mangling tasks. Vengeance sparked trench warfare in WWI. Lust for strength lead to several notable WWII atrocities. It was a tough time to see the same beauty in humanity that Praxiteles or Botticelli did.

I bring all this up, I guess, because maybe we’re in a recursive phase circling our way back to our past. Maybe today we’re experiencing something akin to the Renaissance. After all, the Internet, like the printing press, has brought a rebirth in rampant learning - and I don’t necessarily mean education. Just as renascent Italians awoke to the humanities, we are reawakening to our relationship to the earth – a relationship at the core of many “ancient” and “primitive” civilizations. Networking technologies have opened up markets to smaller companies and individuals. They’ve even created new markets altogether (Second life, Ebay, MMORPG Gold, etc). That’s pretty big deal when you consider markets have been feudal territories ruled by corporate “kings”.

Swirled up in all these trends is the notion that maybe we’re starting, again, to see the beauty in humanity and an optimistic view on what we’re capable of. Maybe that’s why we elected a community organizer instead of a soldier. Maybe that’s why Pepsi, a brand that defines itself according to each generation, has developed Oneify and Hope campaigns and modeled its logo after a smile. Maybe that’s why WALL-E, while showing the grotesque side of humanity, also showed us our innate power to correct our errors and learn from them. (BTW, WALL-E received a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which almost never happens).  

I dunno. I have no specific point I want to make. I’m just thinking out loud here. Just trying to think about the context of what we do everyday so that maybe we can understand why we do it.  

Our Moral Roots

Purefold's Family Tree

In case you haven’t heard, Ag8 teamed of up with Ridley Scott to launch Purefold. As I describe it, Purefold is a platform for collecting crowdsourced stories that will be curated into a larger story by Hollywood directors and writers.

It’s a bold idea. So bold that much of the chatter revolves around the issue of “how.” How will they aggregate the stories? How will they manage the information and fan conversations? How will they manage the egos? How will…

But there’s another interesting question: “where.” Where does Purefold come from?

This is a question of lineage as every new idea builds on a past idea. And, as I see it, Purefold is the newborn child in a family tree dating back to the Bible.

The Bible, as far as I know, is the first crowdsourced story. Throughout early Christianity, no “Bible” existed. In its place, many individuals wrote and circulated their own stories of Jesus and other Christian characters – some tales becoming very popular. The Church, seeing disagreements among these works, decided to compile an official book recounting the story of Christianity. Rather than writing it themselves, they cherry picked from the pool of stories circulating in the public. The Bible, therefore, is one story, written by many authors, curated by the Church.

In the ancestry of Purefold is also the story of Santa Claus. St. Nicholas, a 4^th century bishop, kicks off this myth when he tosses a sack of gold through a window – by chance landing in a stocking by the fire – to help free a girl being sold into slavery. As this story spread, children would hang stockings in the hope of St. Nick’s continued generosity. The chimney enters the legend when tales emerge of St. Nick throwing gold down a chimney if windows were locked. Clement Moore’s “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” added the plump physique, bearded face, jolly attitude and eight-reindeered sleigh. George P. Webster’s "Santa Claus and His Works" gave Santa a North Pole home. Coca-Cola popularized Thomas Nast’s image of Santa Claus. But unlike the Bible, the story of Santa is a “free-range story” as creative minds continue extending the story: Elf, The Santa Clause, Robot Santa, Norad Santa Tracker and Santa Gets Canadian Citizenship.

More recent in Purefold’s lineage are Star Wars fan fiction and Star Trek fan fiction. Like the authors behind Christian and Clausian stories, fan fiction authors offer subplots and new elements to a preexisting storyline. But where they depart, I think, is that fan fiction fused crowdsourced storytelling with transmedia storytelling. Fans use text, film, novels, animation and machinima to tell their stories.

In 2006, a duo of Californians birthed what is arguably one of Purefold’s immediate family members: LonelyGirl15. This production departed from past crowdsourcing conventions in many ways. Most noticeably, it didn’t mythologize a real person or extend a preexisting story line. Its was original from the start. In a more subtle departure, LonelyGirl15 broke the third wall. Bree, the series protagonist, replied to people’s videos and comments while the series’ writers eavesdropped on online fan conversations and worked fan ideas into the storyline. As Wired notes, “When viewers suggested that he [Daniel] had a crush on Bree, they [the writers] changed the story line to include a romance.” Thus, by breaking the third wall, LonleyGirl15 achieved something fascinating: it became a living thing. Christopher Vogler, author of The Writers Journey, believes “that stories are somehow alive, conscious, and responsive to human emotions and wishes.” LonelyGirl15 confirms his belief. It was conscious. It was responsive. It was alive.

Last year, Penguin Publishing introduced another immediate family member. Penguin sought to answer the question, “Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?” The experiment, called A Million Penguins, invited anyone to come to a wiki and add to an “in-progress” novel. Around 1500 people contributed. Regardless if the end story was a success or not, it was an important step for crowdsourced storytelling: absence of the curator. All efforts before, even fan fiction, had had some level of a curator ensuring the quality of the completed “product”. A Million Penguins challenged this assumed need.

And since Purefold comes from this genealogy, we might say its shares genetic traits with its ancestors:

1. The Curator Gene
   The Church curated the story of Christianity. Free Scott will curate a large portion of Purefold.
2. The Free-Range Gene
    Santa Clause is a “free-range story” which has and will forever evolve. Purefold has no limits on where the story can go or become.
3. The Transmedia Gene
   Fan fiction authors used Transmedia techniques to help share their story. Purefold will make use of RSS feeds, film, Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, etc.
4. The Turing Gene
   Due to LonelyGirl15’s ability to be conscious of and respond to people’s comments and wishes, many thought this fictional character was real. While Purefold will take place two years in the future thus eliminating any question of its reality, it will still nonetheless be conscious of and respond to people’s emotions, wishes and conversations.

Purefold, for me at least, becomes most interesting when you think of it in its family context. In it, you begin to see that, at its heart, Purefold is an old idea. But, in its expression, it’s a new idea: one that incorporates the strengths of its ancestors and operates on a scale and at a speed that humbles all other attempts at crowdsourced storytelling.

Which is why the question of “how” is such a good one. ;)

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia - November 2009 from niko on Vimeo.

A New Metadata Video

Creativity = Better Democracy

"As people become creators, they become better critiquers, more self-reflective, more participatory."

Yochai Benkler

Heard at Open Video Conference

Reconstructing the Crime Scene

Via Ian

Logotherapy is our Generation's Psychoanalytics

If our modern-day concept of marketing were a stool, it would have three legs. The first leg would be the late 19^th century Symbolist movement, which invested all things with symbolic value to provide a temporary refuge from pain. The second would be Newtonian Physic’s mechanistic view of reality, which implies a rigorous determinism. The third, Freudian psychoanalytics, is the topic of this post.

Freud, broadly stated, based his model of psychology on the will to pleasure. It’s the idea that inside all our minds is an “I want” machine and that society, environment, family, or personal incapacity often prohibit satisfaction of our desires. Unable to sustain this tension of wanting without resolution, we push our desires down into our unconscious. Eventually, these repressed desires remerge as neurosis. That said, psychoanalysis concerns itself with undoing the consequences of repression to help “cleanse” individuals of neurosis, tension and pain.

Given that, one can see how this model has shaped our modern marketing ideology. Early 20^th century marketers were told that people are propelled to action by internal “I want” machines. So they labeled people “consumers” and treated them as such. Marketers were told people want emotional resolution. So they stopped speaking about product features and started speaking to subconscious desires. Marketers understood pleasure as a personally experienced sensation, not a communal one. So they marketed to the individual and individual interests. Marketers were told their products could resolve soon-to-be-repressed desires or even help unlock repressed desires. So marketers believed they we are uplifting society (see Edward Bernays).

And it worked. For a long time.

But I think the girth of our industry as well as chancing tech is exposing the cracks in what looked to be a sturdy stool leg. The Freudian model isn’t holding up like it used to. “Consumer” is a misnomer for today’s producing populace. Pleasure as a personal pursuit has left our society quantifiably unhappy. “Brand”, an arguably psychoanalytics inspired concept, is (slowly but surely) falling out of favor.

But what will fill its place?

I think the answer is Logotherapy. Begun mid 20^th century, Viktor Frankl’s discipline argues that our greatest motivation in life is not to gain pleasure or avoid pain but to find meaning in life. Logotherapy believes in the “self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that a human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself. Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibility – his purpose in a brief moment or in a long life.

Much can be said about logotherapy, but here is a short breakdown of the difference, as I understand it:

I can already see parts of this psychology popping up in our commercial world. Conscious consumption ties my purchasing activity to a larger purpose (Toms, Sun Chips). Companies engage me on a co-creative level acknowledging me as shapers and not a consumer (Starbucks, Purefold). Some help me be outwardly focused and connect with a larger community (NIN).

There is a WHOLE lot to say on the ideas of logotherapy, their value and their implications for marketers. But this thought by Viktor Frankle captures my sentiment best: 

"People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have means but no meaning."

Frankl believed that every generation has its own psychological discipline to help it deal with its situation. Psychoanalysis made sense for a world that viewed the machine as the greater uplifter and sought to understand why and how commercial progress had such a profound influence on individuals and society. But our world is fundamentally different now and I believe logotherapy is more aligned with it. Today, we seek to understand the why and how of people who are interconnected; who have unprecedented control over what they see, hear and do; who have storage units brimming with bought but unused products. To do that, we need to shed outdated frameworks and open ourselves to a new understanding of the world.

I encourage you to learn as much as you can about it, because the lens it provides for our work will present many new doors we never saw before. 

PureFold at bTween 09

Sorry it's cut off. If you want to watch the uncut-off version, visit this link.

Goethe Quotation

"If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming."

Goethe

In the Light

Eric Heller, in The Disinherited Mind, tells of the Munich clown whom he characterizes as "one of the greatest of the rare race of metaphysical clowns...." He recounts how he once enacted the following scene: the curtain goes up and reveals darkness; and in this darkness is a solitary circle of light thrown by a street-lamp. Vallentin, with his long-drawn and deeply worried face, walks round and round this circle of light, desperately looking for something. "What have you lost?" a policeman asks who has entered the scene. "The key to my house." Upon which the policeman joins him in his search; they find nothing; and after a while he inquires: "Are you sure you lost it here?" "No," says Vallentin, and pointing to a dark corner of the stage: "Over there." "Then why on earth are you looking for it here?" "There is no light over there," says Vallentin.