Julia Minarik

Tamera Lyons doesn’t experience human beauty. She has been raised with calliagnosia (or “calli”), a technology which prevents her from recognizing whether someone is attractive or unattractive. In “Liking What You See: a Documentary,” Ted Chiang imagines a world in which the perception of human beauty is optional. Some characters in Chiang’s world embrace calli wholeheartedly, viewing the technology as a new frontier for equality and empowerment, and a solution for preventing discrimination and harm based on looks; calli is an “assisted maturity” that allows one to “ignore the surface and look deeper.” Others reject calli, for them, beauty is worth the risk—an encounter with beauty is one of the most joyful human experiences and to give it up is to give up on something rich and wonderful. If it is wrong to enjoy the beauty of others, we can no longer admire the beautiful face of a photograph’s subject, the allure of Mona Lisa’s smile, or the electric appearances of our favorite actors and actresses. So we choose the ability to experience beauty or easy morality? It is one of the world’s great misfortunes that our moral and aesthetic interests appear to be so incompatible.

Some tattoos are artworks. This paper claims that art-tattoos have an interesting ontological feature: their artistic properties are partially determined by the people they are tattooed on. In other words, tattoos are artistically contextualized by their recipients. I further suggest that this contextualization is ongoing: that the artistic properties of a tattoo aesthetically change over time as the tattoo recipient changes. I present an ontology of tattoos that focuses on this feature of tattoos. The argument in this paper notably rests on an inference from aesthetic intuitions and art-historical facts about tattoos to claims about their ontological features.