When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.
(Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars. Is Clarke saying that beauty is a kind of positional good?)
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.
(William Gibson: Neuromancer)
What's more, beauty is now a mass phenomenon, almost as ubiquitous as electricity or water. Hard to remember, but high-speed, high-quality color printing is only about 50 years old (the same is true for color television). Our world, in which ordinary people view hundreds of lifelike, full-color, drop-dead gorgeous images daily, is entirely the product of that brief period. For most of history, ordinary people saw few, if any, deliberately beautiful images in their entire lives. Paintings and sculptures were for palaces and cathedrals; most human beings until recently lived on farms or in isolated villages. If they visited town and saw a beautiful statue in the square, the sheer rarity of that experience would heighten the sense that this beauty was in no way related to their common lives.
(David Von Drehle: Looking good. The Washington Post)
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