Objects Of Desire: Art & Design

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. How often do we hear this, occasionally followed by an awkward chuckle, because it is the easy get-out-of-jail-free, indisputable response to someone’s appreciation of something that we find utterly unappealing, perhaps even offensively ugly? (That’s where the nervous chuckle usually comes in.)

- Stefanie Hauger

I had always struggled with this expression. I felt very awkward when I caught myself uttering it. It’s probably because deep down, I felt it was too simplistic for the complex moment of revelation and discovery that is actually occurring within a person when they find themselves in the presence of an object that they are overwhelmingly drawn to desire.

I prefer the notion that the viewer completes the narrative of an object.

We carry within us the missing pieces to finish the puzzle. One could liken this to subliminally filling in the negative spaces around the positive form or perhaps a kind of upgrading of this ‘thing’ from a mere suggestion to a full description in our hearts. The animate complete the inanimate, and vice versa. This goes far beyond merely the idea of beauty, which is a safe, somewhat dismissive blanket term for things that move us, and more into the realm of a spiritual epiphany.

Too far-fetched? Am I overthinking something that is actually really basic? Don’t we all just have different tastes, and that’s all there is to it? And are our choices much more random than that?