Week 2: Beauty

 

                                          Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978

https://montecristomagazine.com/magazine/volume-12/cindy-sherman

    To me beauty is subjective, which I think a lot of people would agree with. Beauty when it comes to artwork, for me, it's not so much about the looks of the art. I can find a liking in art piece I see, it's more the story that makes art beautiful for me. This self portrait is by Cindy Sherman. She was going to art school for painting in in Buffalo, New York. At the time Cindy kind of lost passion for painting and stopped. She started going to parties and events dressed up as different people and characters. Someone told her that should be her new medium, taking self portraits of her in her outfits. At the time portraits on camera were not common let a lone self portraits. Of course she's a woman in this time in New York in a male dominated field, so people, specifically men felt she was just playing "dress up" and taking her silly little pictures. To me it is a lot deeper than that, and that is why this is subjectively beautiful to me. To me she risked her whole career by just quitting painting, she started doing something extremely uncommon, she got a bunch of negative criticism for it from her male peers, but she succeeded. 

    I think this self portrait can directly relate to Amelia Jones essay because of the fact that Cindy Sherman is a woman, on top of that she is a woman artist in a field of mostly white men. Most of her portraits after her first one above do not follow the male gaze, yet they are beautiful self portraits nonetheless. Yes Cindy Sherman is a white woman, but even in her first self portraits, she is not exuding anything towards the male gaze. She is not smiling, she is not showing skin, and her hair is covered, yet, its beauty still.