beauty is disgusting

This is not a manifesto-type declaration. This is a description of a state of fact. Or rather a way of looking at things that transforms them.

Capitalism is the aestheticization of evil, that is why what we call ugly is beautiful and what we consider beautiful is ugly.

Beauty as imagined by the patriarchal-colonial regime is disgusting.
Beauty is the continuation of war by other means.
Beauty is the aestheticization of domination: a form of the political closure of our perceptive and cognitive system.

The beauty of the so-called complementarity of the sexes is disgusting.
The beaury offragile girl, their legs crossed, mouth closed, and tongue still, is disgusting.
The beauty of national identity and wedding dresses is disgusting.
The beauty of masculinity as power over one's own body and over the body of others is disgusting.
The beauty of brands is disgusting.
The beauty of Snapchat filters is disgusting.

The beauty of white skin, white walls, and orderly symmetrical streets is disgusting.

What we have considered until present as disgusting is what is just, and what we call just (respect for the father's desire, his gaze, his pleasure) is what is really disgusting.

Beauty is always a still life.

Only the confrontation with our true organic and therefore mortal nature, always imperfect, vulnerable, and progressively damaged, can paradoxically save us from the aesthetic of global capitalism.

After beauty
by Paul B. Preciado (fragment)
for Anne Imhof’s Natures Mortes
Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2021

collection of 9 portraits

Published at ‘Barcelona Metròpolis’ magazine by Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2022.