Authentic Beauty		Authentic Beauty
Driving through a decaying neighborhood on the edge of city, I caught a most remarkable sight. On the front of a brown shingle house a façade had been added, probably some time in the 60's. We all see buildings and objects as tasteless and unintelligent many times every day, but this one excelled. The sign "AUTHENTIC BEAUTY" made its point with its direct diction and stark letter forms. Around it the architect (or whoever performed the architect’s functions) had concocted a transcendentally banal stew of skewed planes of glass, conical brass lights, aluminum, sickly pink terrazzo, and a built-in planter. I parked and walked up to the building, admiring its details. I thought I could discern the ghost of a fish tank through the lace curtain and a flash of a slowly moving yellow and orange fin. Have you noticed how, when you stand before any structure that catches your attention, whether it's St. Paul's or a gas station, your torso adopts a certain posture and your legs a certain stance? Here I felt myself flexing my knees and crouching over a little. My experience demanded a response, and I wanted a memory of it to keep. I had a field camera in the trunk, but, my attack had left me too weak to manage it. Fortunately I had a smaller device with me. I took it in my hands, found a vantage point, and craned around, trying to get the perspective straight.	Authentic Beauty, Albany, New York, 1991	Herbert Read in "A Civilization from Under" lamented the decline of "good design" and proposed educational solutions. He began his essay with a quotation from William Morris’ "The Beauty of Life": "...hope must ever be with us, and sometimes perhaps it will so quicken our vision that it will outrun the slow lapse of time and show us the victorious days when millions of those who now sit in darkness will be enlightened by an Art made by the people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user." AUTHENTIC BEAUTY was (and may still be, for all I know) a beauty salon, where women go to have the mark of craft set upon them. One of the things, I thought, Sir Herbert had failed to consider is that the practice he specified in terms of pottery or textiles is also exercised on living human tissue and hair, a theme already ancient at the time of Christ, when Ovid composed his elegiacs on the subject. "Morris perhaps had a more practical grasp of this than Read," I thought, staring through the dirty window into the bulbous eyes of an exotic fish. from "Authentic Beauty," an essay by Michael Miller