Beauty in the West has become increasingly fanatical over forced appearance via its orgy of realism and production. A pornographic Real works at all times. In consuming one can become fashionable, an indeterminate and immense process of cultural recycling takes place, whereby one’s knowledge of immediate culture (fashionable manifestation) stands in for actual content.
A madness obsession, a virtue of beauty essence appears in a gadget (truth) as an immanent unity of genuine essence and Notion. Thus, mass culture follows the same decoding and recoding logic of the hyper-real, where the authentic gives way to the simulation.
Under capitalist realism culture of the real was replaced with signs that are now even more dominating under the emerging pole of techno-feudalism. A technological monopoly cultivation of mass culture through “communication” processes that communicate nothing at all.
While Marxist orthodoxy argues the aesthetics of the beautiful as essentially "bourgeois", a cover for class advantageous distinctions and distractions. A form of gatekeeping used against the proletariat. They find it difficult to associate this Notion with revolutionary aesthetics (irresponsible, snobbish) but understand it only Real in the carnivalesque post-revolutionary fervour (a fantasy of the heavenly delights opened up after ending class struggle).
In beauty the subject is a finite world's cancellation, a reconciliation where the Infinite makes beauty as essence explicit to itself, its own harmonious, yet completely different relation than “classical beauty”. It displays the inner life of spirituality entirely embodied in its individual corporeal data form, as actions and events are outer appearance. A simple and immediacy of living blissfully on the surface.
In contrast, to “classical beauty” there is “romantic beauty”, a beautiful soul of one-sidedness of beauty, a fleeting external appearing simultaneously as essence, essence as living and congruent reality in-itself. For example, Gothic music shapes itself as a will for more self-barred will – a romantic pining for what it “knows” is lost.
Romantic beauty is masturbatory desire happy in submissive production. For this reason, beauty resides no longer in the objective “romantic” idealisation of shape, but in the split-subject in itself as shape. Beauty becomes a subjective depth of external shapes pierced by spirit preservation. Beauty is visible by being more visible than the visible – an exception that pops.