BEAUTY AND INJUSTICE

On aesthetics, politics, and whether it is possible to make something gorgeous in good conscience

There is a school of thought that says beauty is suspect. That spending time and money and attention on how things look is, in a world with the problems this world has, a form of moral evasion. That fashion, in particular, is guilty of distracting us from what matters — from poverty, from climate breakdown, from the hundred urgent catastrophes that constitute the present with things that merely glitter. That the person who cares about the hem of their coat while the world is on fire is, at best, confused about priorities and, at worst, complicit in a system of distraction that serves power.

This argument has a long history. It appears in Plato, who thought artists were dangerous because they made copies of the world rather than engaging with its underlying reality. It appears in the Puritan tradition, which associated aesthetic pleasure with moral weakness. It appears in certain strands of feminist theory, which identified beauty culture as a mechanism of control a way of keeping women occupied with their own surfaces rather than with the world. And it appears, in more moderate form, in the ambient guilt that many people feel when they spend money on clothing or art or interior design while being aware of everything that money could, in principle, do instead.

Towering columns of neatly stacked multicolored clothes create a striking installation within a white-walled gallery space, blending art with everyday materials.

I think this argument is wrong, and I think the wrongness is worth unpacking carefully rather than dismissing.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger makes an argument about European oil painting that has never left me since I first read it. His claim is that the tradition of oil painting from the Dutch masters through the great portrait painters through the still-life tradition was, in substantial part, a technology for depicting things that could be owned. The specific property of oil paint, Berger argues, is its ability to render surface with extraordinary fidelity, to make the viewer feel that they could reach into the painting and touch the velvet, feel the weight of the gold chain, smell the fur. This was not incidental. It was the point. The paintings were documents of wealth, celebrations of ownership, ways of making property feel permanent and natural and aesthetically justified.

Beauty, in this reading, was never innocent. It was always in the service of something in this case, in the service of a class that wanted its possessions to feel like they were simply the way things should be. The aesthetic pleasure the paintings gave was real, but it was entangled with ideology, with the naturalization of inequality, with the suggestion that the people who owned these things deserved them in some deep, almost metaphysical sense.

This is a devastating argument, and Berger makes it with the precision of someone who loves paintings and is furious at what they have been made to do. But the conclusion he draws is not that beauty is suspect. It is that beauty is political always, inescapably, whether or not the maker or viewer acknowledges it. The question is not whether your aesthetic choices have political content. They do. The question is what politics they serve.

This reframe is, I want to argue, actually liberating. Because if beauty is always political, then making something beautiful is always a political act, and the question becomes which politics you are enacting. A garment made with attention to the person who will wear it, regardless of their size or gender. A garment produced by workers who are paid fairly and work in safe conditions. A garment made from materials that did not require the poisoning of a river to produce. This is not less beautiful for all of that. It may, in fact, be more beautiful not in spite of its ethics but because of them, because beauty that is built on concealed exploitation has a falseness to it that is visible, once you know to look.

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, writes that "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed." The camera does not merely record; it takes. It extracts an image from its context and places it in a new one, where it serves the photographer's purposes rather than its own. This is not an argument against photography. It is an argument for photographers to be honest about what they are doing — about the power they exercise and the responsibility that comes with it.

Making something beautiful is also a form of appropriation. The designer takes fiber, takes labor, takes land and water and energy, and transforms them into an object whose beauty is offered back to the world at a price. The ethical question running through all of this is what you are taking and what you are giving back whether the transaction is honest, whether the beauty on offer has been produced without concealed costs, whether the thing you are asking someone to buy has been made in a way that you would be comfortable making visible.

James Baldwin, writing about literature but saying something that extends far beyond it, argued that the artist's responsibility is to disturb the peace. Not to make people comfortable, not to confirm what they already believe, but to show them something true that they would prefer not to see. Beauty can do this. A garment that refuses to divide bodies into acceptable and unacceptable sizes is a disturbance. An aesthetic that treats sustainability not as a premium add-on but as a baseline condition is a disturbance. The beautiful thing that is also the honest thing is, in this sense, a more radical object than the beautiful thing that merely decorates the existing order.

The guilt about caring for beautiful things, in other words, is misplaced. Not because the world's problems are not urgent, but because the response to urgency is not to stop attending to beauty. It is to make beauty that is on the right side of things.