2004, "What's Hot: Beauty Beauty Beauty," EGS

I. What's Hot
Beauty is awe giving. It is a quality of a person, place, object, or fantasy that attracts and asks to be acknowledged. It can be a stable thing, accessible each time a something is approached. But more often than not, beauty is an event. It happens in an instant. But that happening is in endless production, forever re-appearing. This is a unique ability of beauty, to continually break through again and again and assert a timeless power.

Beauty' s ogoing re-appearance intensifies its contemporary attraction. Magazine culture thrives off beauty as the event upon which to report - what it looks like, how to get it, who already has it, and declaring "what's hot" before it's already gone. In the phenomenon of "what's hot," we witness momentous beauty. The terminology refers to the latest sacred, the most recently coveted beauty to possess. The hot is literally burning, it is a fiery encounter with the crux of beauty.This collision is the stunning effect of beauty, leaving viewers speechless, particularly when the encounter is accompanied by social myth or rumor of some thing's "hot" value. "What's hot" is the surprise collision with beauty and the recognition of its value. Having it signifies power or status.

Theodor Adorno wrote that when we return to works of art outside of their original moment we find that the thing disinterestedly contemplated pleases because it once precluded contemplation. Adorno explains this by describing how decades earlier, specific gemstones were once coveted for their supernatural powers. Their rumored significance made the stones hot, beautiful and also powerful. It is only in the aftermath, Adorno explains, when the social myth has passed, that the gems can be adored for their "absolute powerlessness of beauty, at once perfection and nothingness." Hot implies the thing will cool off, fade or disappear. By returning to an object, person or place its beauty, now out of fashion, is powerless and able to be contemplated.

Nostalgia and sentimentality are two methods of clinging to an original site of beauty. But now, in a culture with excessive enabling of sentimentality through media formats that constantly record and immortalize, the hot asserts itself as strong as ever as an already sentimentalized new. The hot claims its moment as a passing moment, a beauty you will later forget, therefore asserting a conviction to fetishize it, to catch the latest beauty in its event.

II. Beauty as Event
Like Adorno' s gemstones, Jennifer North is perfection and nothingness. She is a character from the 1967 superficial beauty film Valley of the Dolls. North was played by actress Sharon Tate, a beauty pageant girl originally from Texas who married film director Roman Polanski. Tate portrayed Jennifer North at the cusp of her career, at her hottest moment. But shortly after Valley of the Dolls was released, Tate, 26 and 8 months pregnant with Polanski's child, was murdered by the Manson Family who were searching for former resident of Tate's house, music producer Terry Melcher. "We seduce with our death," wrote Jean Baudrillard and the martyr like tragedy of Sharon Tate seduced millions. Tate's film role of Jennifer North became a site of social fascination, as a last trace of beauty.

Valley of the Dolls is a film about women pursuing stardom. One woman is an actress, another woman a singer but Jennifer North is just beautiful. Beauty is her talent, challenge and ultimately her end. She works as a model and loves barbiturates. Gorgeous and after fame and money the easy way, she gets her status by marrying a celebrity. She begins in an idyllic marriage which falls apart when she discovers her husband is dying. North is pregnant, gets an abortion and flees to Paris where she stars in a set of art films. The films are scandalous and she returns to America to face not only disgrace but a diagnosis of breast cancer. The day before her mastectomy, she cries, "now I will have to live without my body when that is all I have ever had." Unable to survive without good looks, she swallows a lethal dose of sleeping pills.

North' s story is an allegorical enactment of the condition of good looks but it also bears an important relationship to its historical moment. The character accompanies the decisions transforming woman at the moment - birth control, abortion, sexual freedom and an equal work place. North's body is the site of willful abortion and negative exposure making her a dark example of women's liberation. But beauty, both within this historical moment and of all time, makes no difference to problems, no changes to a mastectomy or to Tate's real world fate of murder. In Valley of the Dolls, beauty is revealed as something with the power to manifest itself but powerless in its ability to evade misfortune or sustain itself; it is beauty and its futility.

Valley of the Dolls gives a particularly pastel, one-dimensional take on beauty, focusing on its disadvantages and dead ends. The fictional character Jennifer North represents the conflict of good looks and its mixed social reception. North was a character who could not respond to her beauty, its social regard or its subsequent loss. The character' s mind and thinking abilities are virtually irrelevant. North is vacant, un-acted by Tate. And perhaps in making a film about beauty, without grandiose or quality acting, beauty acts, beauty itself is the film's event. North's beauty is her only purpose and strength and when it is gone she cannot go on and the film must end. North is beautiful and tragic as Sharon Tate is beautiful and tragic.

As viewers of Jennifer North we are voyeurs of beauty in its possibility, of the promise of genetic vitality, of the hope in youthful attractiveness, of the expectation for the career of Tate. North has become an index to Tate's beauty and her murder. The image of her thus contains the two antithetical components at work in beauty: its pure existence for itself beyond justifications, and simultaneously its impossibility of coming to being by itself without the expectation of its loss. When we witness Jennifer North we witness beauty we know only lasted a moment, we witness the same effect of what today is trying to be achieved with "what' s hot," an overdetermined view of beauty informed by its inevitable disappearance. Jennifer North is an enactment of beauty as vanishing, of beauty as forever hot.

Roland Barthes described the face of Audrey Hepburn as so full of characterization that its beauty was an event. But it is not only the event of beauty that is recorded on film but through film that we witness beauty in surplus of finitude, in its ability to out live the actor and viewer. Tate's husband, Roman Polanski survived her and continued to make films, many of which concerned leading women and their misfortune. "Love, explained Polanski carries in it the seed of tragedy." Perhaps so does beauty, in its burst upon the scene, in its event with limitation, in its passing. Beauty seduces us because of its inevitable death. Now beauty operates in a moment of cultural over production and offers a haunting and incessant re-appearance, even after death. Nothing is more the case than with a film star whose beauty on film outlives her.

Tate represented something hot in cinema in 1969. But more than her momentary significance, Tate was a platinum blond whose look represents a certain ideal of classic beauty shared by actresses like Bridget Bardot. When the camera falls on the beautiful, it records a trace of the timeless, it communicates properties outside of the moment and it is this aspect of beauty which is so disarming in film. It is in the trauma of the new, the event of the hot, that we are confronted with beauty as universal and reminded of its eternal recurrence. The classic beauty shocks us because we have seen it before. If beauty is in dialogue with the timeless, it is through the collision with the sublime, in the moment of the hot, that we are made aware of beauty's indifference to any circumstance including our own. Beauty outlives all of us.

Film is a simulation of reality, an artificial, constructed reality. In Valley of the Dolls the story of beauty is constructed. And while film can be a social event, can be hot at the time of its release, it is frozen time. Beauty wants to pass, to fade to escape but film freezes it. In many ways this does not provide an event of beauty as much as access to the trace of the original event. We can see the hot, contemplate it but are not really part of the hot event. In the work of Vanessa Beecroft, there is a creation of the event. Beecroft's work uses film and photography as documentation but the performance, her event, is her work.

Beecroft instructs the women in her work: "Don't act." The activity is nothing but standing and walking, the performance is beauty without justification. The work is a portrait of today, a painting for a culture of events. Beecroft's work is a still life of a restless life, of events without purpose other than the purpose of looking good, for a moment. The beautiful readymade is the female. Ritual, costume and stage set are performed in the name of beauty, without reason, without function. Here beauty is just like an awards show, the Olympics, a biennial or concert, all where the value of the event is in relationship to the value of its aesthetic presentation. What's hot is what looks good right now and that is all that Beecroft provides the fleeting.

The hot is the flash, the event, the passage of beauty. Beecroft's work addresses this temporality in way tougher than any other contemporary work. She exposes the temporality of contemporary art, itself also an event. And her simulation is a real event for the lived participants. Beecroft's performances are almost always incredibly beautiful and take days of labor for groups of people. But the event is prescribed, called into being. Like a séance, Beecroft culls beauty into the arena of art, she brings beauty into a site of congratulations for an encore.

Beecroft makes her events of beauty to a closed audience and documents them for the public to view after the event. Her work can be only seen in the photographs and videos but it cannot be accessed because it is already gone before you see it. It is already a myth in dialogue with the hot made to be so hot it is already over.

In art, the parallel reality with its own system of meaning, Beecroft's performances succeed. But in some ways, as a simulation, it misses the essential aspect of beauty, beauty as necessary for survival. Beauty is not only that which is objectified, it is also that which transcends language and difference. Beecroft's work is not necessarily a program for the new production of contemporary beauty. She is critiquing the event, the hot as a lack, as a void in which we find that beauty has already moved on to the next event. She hits the frailty of popular culture which seems to promise the impossible - definitive beauty while also being a bottomless source for the new. True "hotness" is something like an inversion of this, a paradoxical enactment of the disposableness of the timeless. Beecroft can't create the real thing, nor can culture. The event of beauty, of what's hot, has to be found, discovered as it presents itself.

What' s hot is the passing event of the timeless, both now and forever. We can revisit it nostalgically or re-create it synthetically but cannot appear to control its continual re-appearance on the scene. Because it appears and is found, it is the news; it is the crux of magazines. But the timelessness of beauty is always experienced against the background of its immanent decay. Even in stable forms, beauty is subject to its own limit.

After Tate's death, Polanski directed the film Tess, in honor of the last gift Tate gave him, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervillers. Tess is the story of a young peasant girl who pursues a job with an aristocratic family only to be raped and become pregnant. Her child dies and eventually another man falls in love with her. Tess later returns to her offender and murders him. The story of victimization, tragic loss, and revenge was no doubt a labor of love for Polanski. But the story of Tess is also simply the story of her beauty, seen through the eyes of the man who finally marries her. Angel, Tess' lover, sees her for the first time dancing in a field. When they meet much later, neither recall the first encounter. Tess believes that Angel likes her because she is new to him, because she is hot. Tess thought that "it was largely owing to her untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes." Angel however, is not attracted to her because she is new. While he does not recall seeing her in the field, "he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar, something which carried him back into a joyous and unforseeing past. He concluded that he had beheld her before; only where he could not tell." Angel's response to Tess, his strange familiar attraction to the new woman suddenly in front of him, describes the event of beauty. Beauty presents itself as new but we recognize it, not knowing exactly where we have seen it. It came before us and passes by us and beyond us but is accessible in what's hot right in front of us.