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Cyborgs, snapchat dysmorphia and AI-led surgery: has our digital age ruined beauty?
From photo-editing apps to ‘Instagram face’, technology has radically altered the way we see ourselves. Ahead of a new exhibition at Somerset House, our critic considers the meaning of art in a digital age
The cyborg may soon be a thing of the past, a vision of the future that is already getting old Kardashian’s 2015 book Selfish is a seminal moment in the rise of social media portraiture,not least for providing the template for “Instagram face”, the plumped up, feline aesthetic (the look was famously described as resembling a “ sexy baby tiger ”) that has come to dominate contemporary beauty standards. Even if you have never stood in front of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the way this nude goddess stands on a giant shell, legs curved yet with her upper body straight, one hand holding her long golden hair over her groin, another covering her right breast, will be familiar from its endless reproductions. In the fuselage of a crashed plane and long-abandoned offices beneath the sea, shimmering invertebrates swim, sprouting tentacles and tails, reproducing and mutating, becoming more fishlike, then reptilian, as millions of years of evolution are condensed by his algorithms into a hypnotic vision of DNA’s inexhaustible ability to create new forms of life.
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