Beauty and the Beast, Self Improvement, Picasso

Welsh Peasant Girl with Child 

Paul Falconer Poole (1807 - 1879)

Photo Credit: Bury Art Museum  [CC BY-NC-ND]

... in  an inquiry into body image, the Health and Social Care Commons Select Committee was boggling at the power of  social media. Eighty per cent of their poll of  social media users had told them the way they look was damaging their mental health, and 71% said their body image had led to them enjoying life less. Giving evidence to the committee, their "lived experience witness" Kim Booker, a woman who lives with body dysmorphic disorder, said she used to take magazines to hairdressers, showing them the style she wanted. "Now, you go through Instagram and you take that picture in to [aestheticians] and say, 'I want my face to look like this.'" So familiar had she become with her Instagram face, "When the video flipped off to my natural face, I got a bit of a shock. I hated what I saw, because you get used to the filtered version of yourself."

(Eva Wiseman, The Observer, 2022)

Reinforces the need for children to become critically aware of the media in all its forms and that should include conversations about unrealistic ideas of beauty.

Modern Thinking

Phaeton, 

William Hilton (1786-1839)

Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA]

Svend Brinkmann, professor of psychology and qualitative methods at Aalborg University, Denmark, suggests, in his book Stand Firm, you throw away the self-improvement books, embrace negativity and doubt and stand firm against the tyranny of positivity. The obsession with introspection and self-analysis risks stress, depression and, at worst, turns us into mini psychopaths.
                                                  
                                                          (The Times, 2019)

   Hurrah! Common sense rules in one small part of the world

                                                
Art
   
A 16-year-old commented on the behaviour of the crowd milling around a painting of Picasso at the New York Museum of Modern Art. “Why take photos of the painting rather than look at the painting itself?”
As her father noted, "Capturing the experience has become more important than the experience itself."

(The Observer, 2019)

Perhaps that is why there is now a Museum of Selfies. Where? On Hollywood Boulevard, of course.