This week marks five years for the reason that launch of Dazed Beauty! Over the subsequent five days we will likely be celebrating this anniversary by bringing you big celebrity interviews, cultural deep dives into the bizarre trends of today, and going back through the archives to resurface a few of our favourite pieces.

To cite our co-founder Bunny Kinney in his original editor’s letter, Dazed Beauty is: “an area for us to document, deconstruct and experiment with beauty in all its forms, in every dimension, and tell the stories of the lived experience each one among us has in our own individual bodies as we navigate the world, each online and off.” We hope we’ve remained true to our promise and can proceed to be difficult, anti-establishment, diverse and exciting. Thanks for being a part of our journey.

“I like Los Angeles. I like Hollywood. They’re so beautiful. The whole lot’s plastic, but I like plastic,” Andy Warhol once said. “I need to be plastic.”

As a kingmaker for “superstar” celebrities and socialites, Warhol understood the ability of physical transformation. As an artist, he believed in taking something pre-existing and banal – Campbell’s Soup, a Brillo Box, a lady with money but not much talent – and transmogrifying it right into a murals. Little wonder, then, that cosmetic surgery in all its forms proved fascinating to him, given its ability to make even the plainest people fit for his beloved magazine advertisements.

At twenty-nine, Warhol got a nose job; he had frequent collagen injections, and when he began to lose his hair after a nervous episode, he compensated with a library of white wigs. Born “Warhola,” he also snipped off the “a” in an effort to seem less just like the son of Slovakian immigrants, and more like a true-blue American. This shouldn’t be technically a surgical treatment, but it surely does have the identical energy: the sense of something real and biological being abruptly, strategically cut from his identity. Together with his output canonised, and along with his personal appearance now as much an element of his persona as his movies or his screen-prints, Wharhol’s self-editing looks as very similar to artwork because it does the results of insecure vanity. This Warhol, just as plastic as he dreamed of being, is the one Warhol that we ever picture. Andrew Warhola stays a mystery, as empty as a Warhol-issue Brillo Box.

As a circa-2019 feminist, I find it borderline-impossible to come to a decision how exactly I’m meant to feel about elective cosmetic surgery, leaving me without anything particularly strident to contribute to the discourse: I feel that giving a nineteen-year-old girl a complete recent face is, frankly, not exactly ethical, but I also imagine in few things with more certainty than a nineteen-year-old girl’s right to bodily autonomy. There isn’t a easy option to reconcile the 2 ideas, making it lucky that I also imagine feminists can contradict themselves.

“What does interest me about cosmetic surgery is its proximity to other transformations, more readily accepted as fantastic art reasonably than vanity.”

What does interest me about cosmetic surgery is its proximity to other transformations, more readily accepted as fantastic art reasonably than vanity — it’s performative and public, and whether or not it means to, it reflects something essential about what we imagine to be beautiful, or feminine, or worthy of our gaze. After we do gaze, it gazes back, making it not dissimilar to work by certain iconic, iconoclastic practitioners of gallery-sanctioned body art.

Where, then, is the dividing line?

That altering the body could be art shouldn’t be an idea without precedent, nor without its supporters within the art world. Modifications of the body have played an intrinsic role within the work of performance artists since performance art began. The Aktionismus group, in Vienna throughout the sixties and the seventies, sliced up their genitals, had public sex and painted with their blood, all in accordance with a manifesto by the artist Otto Muhl which championed work where “material motion is [a form of] painting that has spread beyond the image surface, [so that] the human body…becomes the image surface.”

In 1974, Marina Abramović, an icon of self-flagellating female body art, allowed an audience access to scissors and a loaded gun in Rhythm Zero, ending up stripped bare and bleeding in a homage to Yoko Ono, whose own Cut Piece (1965) only stopped in need of becoming surgical because no audience member proved sadistic enough to chop Yoko reasonably than her clothes. In 1975, Abramović carved a pentagram into her naked stomach for a bit called Thomas Lips.

Chris Burden, in 1971 and 1974 respectively, first had himself shot within the arm for Shoot, then had himself nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle for Trans-Fixed. VALIE EXPORT peeled her fingertips and dipped them into milk for Distant…Distant… (1973). By the point Ron Athey was prickling himself with hypodermic needles like a porcupine in 1994, and Pyotr Pavlensky was photographed nailing his own scrotum to the road near Lenin’s tomb in 2013, self-harm and conceptual mutilation felt establishment, slightly like old hat; as legitimate and familiar as an art form as a watercolour, a well-sculpted bronze.

If the modifications made by Aktionismus or Abramović were scarifying reasonably than seductive, in addition they kicked off a movement towards art using the body like a canvas in the identical way that a plastic surgeon might use an adventurous, attention-seeking client: to attract stares and to redraw the lines of possibility for human flesh. Erwin Wurm, the Austrian artist known partially for his One Minute Sculptures, which use viewers’ bodies to provide intending to inert and random-seeming objects, and partially for his supersized “fat” cars and “fat” houses, has been involved in the opportunity of human transformation as an art form throughout his profession, believing beautification to be as conceptually meaningful as pain.

“Arnold Schwartznegger [is] from my hometown,” he told AnOther magazine in 2012, “and he’d make a fantastic piece of art. He’s a fantastic sculpture! What he did along with his body is incredible.” Wurm remarked to an interviewer at BlouinArtInfo in the identical yr: “When you’re making a sculpture in clay, you add volume or you are taking volume away. You do the identical thing whenever you gain weight or whenever you reduce weight. That puts different levels together: the social level, the private level, the sickness of our time where everybody needs to be slim.”

That social and private level, and a special but adjoining “sickness”, were explored by Amalia Ulman in her Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections, for which she pretended to have had a full surgical nose-job, a breast augmentation, and a druggy mental health breakdown. “People denounce my performance and say it’s like, you’re laughing at basic bitches,” she told ArtNews. “But, you recognize, I’m also slightly little bit of a basic bitch – I’m laughing at myself.”

“Surgery could be a logical tweak to a really Warholian, very online “personal brand.”

The concept that “basic bitches” – who are actually in a position to achieve a really Warholian style fifteen-minutes of fame via Instagram – are most definitely to get nose-jobs and breast-jobs is a contemporary one. Where surgery was once regarded as the preserve of models, actresses and millionaires, it’s now as accepted within the mainstream, as say, getting one or more finger tattoos, and can be far more common (if still, in some cases, controversial). It can be a logical tweak to a very Warholian, very online “personal brand”.

Either for pleasure or for the performance, Ulman actually spent $2,000 on a non-surgical nose-job and fillers, and was invited to the Swiss Institute in New York to meet the ‘Baron of Botox’, Dr Fredric Brandt, according to one article, “a recent art collector and celebrity physician who resembles nothing a lot as an immortal, disarmingly un-creased blond vampire,” an outline made haunting looking back by Brandt’s suicide one yr later, in 2015.  

Brandt would have recognised art when he saw it on two counts: the primary because he was one among the titans of his field, considered an artist in his own right, and the second because by the point he died, he had amassed an art collection that zig-zagged from Christopher Wool to John Baldessari, from Cy Twombly to Damien Hirst, the one force uniting each work being that Brandt found them to be beautiful, or interesting, or witty.

“A person of real vision in the sector of cosmetic dermatology, his masterful work was beyond compare,” a breathless write-up for the posthumous sale of his pieces on the Phillips auction site exclaims. “His canvas, the face. His paintbrush and paintbox, the tools of his trade. His inspiration, the gathering of up to date art he amassed over the past 30 years.”

Art, despite sometimes feeling as if it would spring from nature, shouldn’t be natural. It’s as constructed as a recent nose or a recent ass. What’s most outré in surgery might also be most like art, less about function than about beauty, extremity, or transformation. The sometimes problematic artist Orlan, who had quite a few surgeries throughout the early Nineties “not to seem younger or higher in response to the designated pattern, [but] to disrupt the standards of beauty,” could have had horns fitted in her brow a la Devil, however the metamorphosis of Kylie Jenner into a completely different woman isn’t any less surprising or extreme. No less problematic, either — Jenner’s recent aesthetic, heavily inspired by the bodies and the form of certain desirable black women, has been criticised in much the identical way as Orlan’s adoption of what she refers to as “non-Western referents.” Like art, it has invited criticism, and like works by Dana Schutz or Jeff Koons, it has provoked to the purpose of causing offence.

And yet: we don’t consider Kylie Jenner as a “problematic artist” a la Orlan, only as tres problematique. Jenner’s mouth could also be a famous logo, it might be price a fortune, but it surely doesn’t hold the identical cultural value as a piece by Marina Abramović, and although certain men online have disagreed with me about Abramović’s work, the one piece I’ve ever written that provoked a person to barrage me with messages suggesting that I kill myself was Jenner-and-Kardashian-adjacent.

Chris Burden, despite being consensually shot and crucified, is usually not judged as harshly as a Kardashian sister paying for her recent waist to be carved, her sharper jaw cut into shape. One difference is intent: that a Kardashian probably doesn’t imagine herself as an artist, and doubtless doesn’t have any message in mind apart from to telegraph her hotness. Yet one more may be gender, with art still being seen as a primarily male-coded discipline, and cosmetic surgery and reality television coded as feminine and subsequently, in some people’s minds, as dumb. More crucial still is audience — the proven fact that teenage girls, even in the event that they are arty, morbid teenage girls, are unlikely to wish to imitate Chris Burden, but are prone to be tempted by the concept of being a perfect-looking, California-dwelling billionaire with the minute ski-jump nose of a cartoon Disney princess. Such desires are comprehensible but unimaginative, making the road between self-editing for art’s sake and self-editing for vanity’s sake more distinct.

In direct contrast to most moldable surgery, fantastic art has an expansive and elastic view of what is gorgeous or worthwhile, in order that while Kylie Jenner’s features are believed to suit a tiresome beauty standard only once they appear on a wealthy Caucasian girl, art could be angular or difficult or sick, could be made by or can depict an individual of any race, gender, age or sexual orientation, and still be seen nearly as good art.

“Anybody who performs surgeries, or injections, needs to be a student of beauty” – Dr Raj Kanodia

Dr Raj Kanodia, who’s less the Warhol of the cosmetic surgery world than its Rodin, has created several famous faces so exquisite and so realistic — “realistic” being, as in art and in AI, among the best compliments that one may give a face that’s surgically-enhanced — that to discover their owners could be borderline-litigious. Like Dr Brandt, he sees a robust affinity between art and surgery. He identifies, not necessarily incorrectly, as an artist. “Art,” he tells me over email, “is an important component [of plastic surgery]. A surgeon needs to be obsessive about art and sweetness.”

“Beauty can provoke emotions like happiness and euphoria because its optics are so nice,” Kanodia suggests. “It’s perceived each by the human eye and by the lens of the camera. For that reason, anybody who performs surgeries, or injections, needs to be a student of beauty: to have the opportunity to please the human eye and the lens of the camera equally.” The brain, research shows, reacts to a murals the identical way it reacts to like. Who wouldn’t dream of their face playing the identical trick on everyone who sees it?

Kanodia’s work, as pleasing to the attention and to the camera because it’s possible to be, is fantastic enough that Twitter is awash with women begging for a signature Kanodia nose, a pair of perfect Kanodia cheekbones. Most of them cannot afford them. That is one last way that cosmetic surgery is like fantastic art: to have a look at it and to get pleasure from its loveliness or in its daring extremity is free, but to own it is pricey. As a financial investment, Kylie Jenner’s overhaul is rumoured to have cost as much as a minor Picasso, two-thirds of a work by Sterling Ruby, or about half of a Lisa Yuskavage. It’s undeniable that surgeon could make a prospective supermodel or Instagram influencer a star by doing smart work, however the work will only be done if the would-be supermodel or Instagram influencer has the cash spare to pay for it. This shouldn’t be un-Warholian, either: individuals who had family money were the artist’s bread and butter, being each the women that he made into “superstars,” and those buying Marilyn or Jackie silkscreens in a shade that matched their lounge. In surgery and in art, money opens doors whose thresholds are invisible to a civilian.

“Earning profits,” Warhol once said, “is one of the best art.” Spending it on making yourself into art looks as if a logical next step. Choosing the appropriate recent face is like hanging a Richard Prince up in your lounge: it shows your wealth, your good taste, your ability to spin what you’ve or are given into something everyone else wants. I said I had no definite opinion on elective cosmetic surgery. Perhaps I meant to say that, given money to burn, I’d not personally have any in any respect. It’s invaluable to me to recognise myself when looking in a mirror, just as one of the best art feels invaluable and in contrast to anything, exactly, apart from itself.

When Warhol made his silkscreens, they appeared at first to be equivalent even in several colors, every Marilyn or Jackie carbon-copied from the last. In actual fact, the method is simply too human and imperfect to create a really perfect copy. There’ll at all times be some flaw — some minor act of nature within the manufacture — to make every one its own work of genius.

This text was originally published 1 May 2019.