Silvers, Anita. From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made
2000, in: Brand, Peg Zeglin (ed.), Beauty Matters, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 197-221.
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Added by: Hans MaesSummary: Starting from our appreciation of cubist portraits, asks why it to commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones. Argues that the aesthetic process that permits our attraction to portrayed human anomalies can be expanded so as to offset the devalued social positioning of real people whose physiognomic features are anomalous. Presenting an anomaly as originality rather than deviance is crucial.
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Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, beauty, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics.
Artworks to use with this text:
Pablo Picasso, Maya with a Doll (1938)
Cubist portrait of a child. Silvers interestingly compares this to a photo of a child with osteogenesis imperfecta.