LATERAL VIEWS
The issue of authenticity: beauty, friction,
and the spaces in between.
At LDF, we often find ourselves returning to the same question: what does it mean, today, to create something that feels real? Not just polished, relevant, coherent but alive. Something that doesn’t simply reflect the world, but moves it. Or at least disturbs its surface.
Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist, writes in The Saving Beauty that we live in an age dominated by smoothness, an era of frictionless surfaces, where nothing resists, nothing interrupts. “Smoothness,” he writes, “is the signature of our time. It connects Jeff Koons’ sculptures, the iPhone, and the Brazilian wax. Today, we find beautiful what is smooth because, beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative: the positivity of contemporary culture. Smoothness doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t resist. It only wants to be liked.”
What was once a site of tension, the object, the image, the self, becomes optimized for approval. Anything potentially unsettling is softened. The result is a kind of visual anesthesia: everything “looks good,” but nothing leaves a mark.
Even what appears raw is often aestheticized. Ambiguity is ironed out, contradiction made palatable. We’re left with images that impress, but do not disturb. Surfaces that sparkle, but do not speak. And yet, in the spaces we inhabit, fashion, photography, design, there are still gestures that resist this logic.
Jeff Koons's: New Paintings and Sculpture
Few arenas expose, and complicate, the myth of authenticity as clearly as visual culture. From photography to fashion, from contemporary art to branding, the idea of a “true self” has long been stylized, choreographed, and performed. Presence becomes a matter of composition. Identity, a matter of design.
Yet within this system, certain practices operate with another logic. Not by rejecting construction, but by holding it in tension. They show the seams. They allow room for contradiction.
Who, today, still introduces disorder, opacity, or discomfort without sliding into cynicism, irony, or spectacle?
Richard Avedon is an unlikely but precise starting point. His portraits, especially those from In the American West, are clinically frontal, immaculately lit, obsessively composed. At first glance, they appear to offer a direct line to truth: stripped backgrounds, no distractions, subject and viewer face to face. And yet, that “truth” never arrives. What Avedon captures is not the essence of the subject, but a charged stillness, a moment where the subject performs being seen. His images don’t confess; they implicate. They remind us that even the most austere transparency is a kind of theater, and that the act of looking is never neutral.
Richard Avedon: In the American West, 1985
Martin Parr flips the frame entirely. His world is populated not by icons, but by banality, fluorescent lighting, melting desserts, sunburned skin, souvenir shops. Where Avedon suspends, Parr saturates. His images refuse aspiration: they confront us with what we overlook, what we discard, what we mock. But this is not kitsch. Parr isn’t laughing at his subjects; he’s forcing us to look at what we participate in. The discomfort lies in the proximity, in the fact that what’s “ugly,” awkward or vulgar in his work isn’t outside the system, it is the system. His camera doesn’t romanticize reality, but lets its contradictions accumulate until they can’t be ignored.
In contemporary art, few practices challenge the aesthetics of smoothness more consistently than that of Marina Abramović. From Rhythm 0 (1974), where she offered her passive body to the public, exposing the latent violence of spectatorship, to Rhythm 5 and Rhythm 2, where she tested the limits of consciousness and risk, her work turns the body into a site of tension, ritual, and rupture.
In The House with the Ocean View (2002), she lived in silence for twelve days on three platforms, refusing speech, food, or interaction. Nothing dramatic occurred. And yet, the slowness was radical. Every gesture became unbearable in its visibility. Her presence emptied performance of theatrics replacing it with exposure, duration, and control.
Rather than reveal the “authentic” self, Abramović stages the conditions for truth to surface. Not through confession, but through structure. Not through aesthetics, but through unyielding presence.
Left: Rest Energy, Marina Abramovic & Ulay, 1980
Right: Martin Parr, Olny Human
In fashion, Maison Margiela dismantled the system from within. No logos, no designer persona, garments left raw, tagged only with four stitches. But more than that: Margiela displaced fashion’s stage. One of the house’s most iconic shows unfolded not in a Parisian palace but in a working-class suburb, with children interrupting the runway and neighbors leaning out of balconies. The gesture was not spectacle, it was dislocation. A refusal of fashion’s polish in favor of something more porous, more unstable. Clothes that bore the marks of time, use, repair. What was shown wasn’t beauty, but trace. And in that trace, something honest (and rare) appeared: a body not performing fashion, but carrying it.
These gestures are not about being “authentic” in any naive or essentialist sense. They are about resisting the demand for clarity. They allow contradiction to remain visible. They challenge the idea that everything must be polished, presentable, communicative. They don’t simplify the world, they hold the world open.
