THE UGLY HISTORY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Essays on Desire and Consumptionby Katy Kelleher
Activities that we often think of as quintessentially human often have nothing to do with immediate survival. We smear paint on canvases, we play tunes on instruments, we imagine a world that doesn’t exist and read about the fictional people who live there. But sometimes the human pursuit of joy and pleasure can bring about destruction. We struggle to adhere to the concept of enough. We recklessly and relentlessly chase things we want but don’t need.
In “The Ugly History of Beautiful Things,” Katy Kelleher writes about the extreme and sometimes horrendous efforts people have gone to to get their hands on coveted beauty objects: ruining their health, destroying the planet, inflicting suffering on others. As someone with a history of depression that was accompanied by self-harm and suicidal thoughts, she says beauty has given her the purpose to keep going: “The hope of beauty makes me leave my bed every morning instead of mouldering in the sheets until I get pressure sores.”
But the beauty she seeks is also tied to guilt. “I have never found an object untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time,” writes Kelleher. She buys trinkets and generates garbage. As a journalist who writes about home and design, she realizes that it has been her job to encourage others to do the same.
Fortunately, this book isn’t her penance – it’s more surprising and ambivalent than that, and there’s no scolding here, even though some of what she tells is disturbing and truly horrifying. Kelleher points out that an element of ugliness can be part of an object’s appeal, distinguishing between intriguingly beautiful and boringly beautiful. There is, of course, the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, which implies that imperfection can be a reminder of life’s transience and contingency; a rotting flower can convey another layer of experience that a fresh bloom will not bring. She doesn’t explicitly mention the Japanese aesthetic, but a chapter on the Nazi fetish for glossy white porcelain made me reread Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows,” in which he writes about the desire for a toilet made of black lacquered wood.
But an ugly history is different. Knowledge of it can detract from an object’s appeal, even if it indicates the desirability of the object – making it abundantly clear how rare something is, and thus how scarcity has contributed to determining its value. In the 19th century, an orchid hunter is said to have been eaten by a tiger or disappeared forever somewhere in the thicket of the jungle. During the Renaissance, Venetian glassblowers often worked with toxic materials such as lead and mercury; those who didn’t go crazy from the fumes or die from mysterious stomach ailments would still have to worry about being murdered by rivals in the glassworks or, if they tried to emigrate, by their autocratic rulers.
The mirrors these glassmakers painstakingly crafted have since achieved mass-produced commodity status, part of a system that has eliminated some hazards and generated others. Mirrors used to be rare and prized enough to be associated with scrying and magic; now, Kelleher laments, they are so common that they are taken for granted, or else derided as mere objects of vanity rather than beautiful constructs that enable the “sense of awe” that comes with seeing oneself.
Kelleher organizes her book by object, with chapters on gemstones (overshadowed by violence), makeup (overshadowed by toxicity), and perfume (overshadowed by animal excrement). She has a knack for deftly weaving her own memories and tastes together with the history of the objects themselves. She doesn’t want cruelty in her goods, so she fills vases with harvested greens and buys a second-hand silk dress. “I wanted to feel a fabric that glides across my skin like a breeze,” she explains. “Have you ever slipped a silk bathrobe around your body and felt it brush against your nipples?”
Most people in the world would no doubt answer no; silk is still a luxury good, even if it has been made more accessible by exploitative labor practices. Kelleher grapples with some of these tricky issues, though her enthusiasm is most palpable when she writes about the goods themselves. We desire beautiful things that give us sensual pleasure – that seems obvious enough. But a luxury good “was never meant to be available to everyone,” she writes — that also seems obvious. So what are the implications of this? Not everyone who wants to feel the caress of a silk robe can afford it, especially if it’s ethically made. Need to curb your desires? Or is that tantamount to releasing the elite: they do what they want, while the rest of us settle for what we can get?
It’s a lot of pressure to don a thin robe, but as Kelleher knows, you can’t write about this without at least gesturing to the bigger things: existence and mortality, capitalism and consumption. Towards the end of the book, she comes to relax with her own desire. She recognizes that she can appreciate beauty without owning it – she can take her daughter to the beach and make mandalas from shell fragments; she can go for a walk and spot a monarch butterfly in a field or a pink orchid in a swamp. But she admits she still longs for a fantasy house with marble countertops and slate tiles, even if her conscience and bank account make it impossible.
“Any beauty I find will fade, degrade, break, and tarnish,” writes Kelleher, “and there’s no point asking for what I can’t have.”
THE UGLY HISTORY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS: Essays on Desire and Consumption | By Katy Kelleher | 262 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $27.98
