Decolonizing Art and Aesthetics

Society is a sucker for beauty. We like stalking pretty influencers. We marvel at the moon every night. We love watching handsome heroes save beautiful, distressed damsels. We climb mountain peaks to watch the sun rise and set. Perhaps humans are voyeurs. We gain innate pleasure from watching and observing. And this voyeuristic tendency has built a multi-million-dollar empire for good-looking people. From film stars to salespeople, beauty is a highly sought-after human resource. It is fair to say that we have drafted a flawed but somewhat objective measure of beauty for humans. However, much like art, we love claiming that beauty is subjective. The simplest interpretation of this is to say that beauty is a personal aesthetic experience that can change with the person’s opinion. But is there a point to this nuanced dissection of beauty? Well, contrary to everything mentioned above, beauty is not experienced subjectively. At least not always. A long time ago, the beautiful nation of India was visited by a few ambitious British merchants, which led to today, a country plagued with a colonial hangover and colourism. The story of human politics and its impact on art, beauty, and nature is as fascinating as it is disturbing. 

"A Young Lady's Toilet", A painting commissioned by the East India Company, depicting the social dynamics between the colonised and the coloniser.

Power and money have played an influential role in how we collectively consider something beautiful. For researchers in neuroaesthetics, “good art” and “beauty” are more than variables. Research tends to delve into generalizable phenomena, but to claim something universally beautiful can be problematic. In the realm of neuroaesthetics, beauty is not merely a matter of taste or opinion. It is a deeply embodied experience, entangled in the intricate workings of the brain’s reward circuitry. Studies have shown that the experience of beauty, whether derived from a painting or a face, consistently activates regions like the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), which is associated with reward and affective valuation (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011). This neural patterning suggests that beauty is not just incidental but perhaps neurologically meaningful as well. However, the prevailing notion that beauty is universal or static conceals its rich complexity, an amalgam of biological, social, historical, and cultural threads. Similarly, Vessel et al. (2012) found that the default-mode network (DMN), typically associated with introspection and self-referential thought, becomes engaged when individuals view artworks that they find beautiful. These neural activations suggest that beauty is more than an external stimulus. It is an emotionally resonant, internally processed experience. Yet, the interpretation of such findings often fails to interrogate whose beauty is being measured. The majority of neuroaesthetic research continues to rely on Western artistic canon and homogenous participant samples, producing a narrow understanding of what is neurologically “rewarding.”  

Suppose beauty is subjective; one is more likely to support and invest in art that most closely meets their standards of beauty. In an ideal world, where oligarchs do not hoard wealth, this system would theoretically work. However, when wealth is concentrated in a niche group of the population, it is their aesthetic preference that gets the spotlight. During the colonial era, the wealth happened to be with the white European colonizers, who consequently decided what the colonies would perceive and appreciate as beauty. While indigenous art and people were treated as inferior and uncultured, the colonizer became the standard for beauty and the decider of “good art”. Although we have come far as an independent nation, the standards set by the colonizer still measure what we consume as “good art” today. 

There Comes Papa by Raja Ravi Verma

As Leder and Nadal (2014) discuss, aesthetic judgment is embedded in broader systems of bias that privilege certain forms of beauty over others, often aligning with Eurocentric ideals. Aesthetic biases can reinforce systemic inequities, particularly in institutions like museums and media, where decisions about value and taste are deeply entangled with race, class, and cultural hegemony. Chronicled art history and academic curricula have aided in upholding these colonial standards through the erasure of indigenous art history. Consequently, this has led to the loss of a large chunk of indigenous art history and any subsequent knowledge it could produce.  

If beauty is truly subjective (as it should be), it is unfair for indigenous people to be forced into liking and appreciating art that does not conform to their aesthetic values. Worse, indigenous people are conditioned to dislike themselves and their art for not aligning with an imposed standard of beauty. fMRI studies in neuroaesthetics provide evidence of an intracultural aesthetic preference (Yang et al., 2019). Yet, we prefer watching Katrina Kaif as the lead actress over a brown-skinned Indian, while Hollywood exoticises our dark complexion. Cosmetic brands have earned a fortune selling Eurocentric beauty standards to former colonies. Colonialism has left us feeling ugly for looking like Indians while devaluing indigenous art for not looking Western. Viewing non-Western art or people as exotic, less refined, or simply ‘different’ has led to a bias in the treatment of the artists and artworks. 

Refrences

Chatterjee, A., & Vartanian, O. (2014). Neuroaesthetics. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(7), 370-375. 

Ishizu, T., & Zeki, S. (2011). Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PloS one, 6(7), e21852. 

Leder, H., & Nadal, M. (2014). Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments: The aesthetic episode–Developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics. British journal of psychology, 105(4), 443-464. 

Sartwell, Crispin. “Beauty.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 22, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/. 

Yang, T., Silveira, S., Formuli, A., Paolini, M., Pöppel, E., Sander, T., & Bao, Y. (2019). Aesthetic experiences across cultures: Neural correlates when viewing traditional Eastern or Western landscape paintings. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 798.  

Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, 66.