The Cult of Beauty
By Charlotte Stace
The CCCB’s latest exhibition, The Cult of Beauty, takes one of the most loaded ideas in culture and pulls it apart. Rather than treating beauty as something timeless or innocent, the exhibition looks at how aesthetic ideals have been built, enforced and sold across history by art, religion, medicine, politics and the market. It is adapted from a project first shown at London’s Wellcome Collection and arrives here with a clear critical edge.
It moves from Antiquity to the present day and looks at skin, hair and flesh as sites of control, while also asking who gets excluded when beauty becomes a norm. It brings together artworks, historical documents, objects and contemporary installations, with names including William Hogarth, Laura Aguilar, Juno Calypso, Colita, Regina José Galindo, Lorenza Böttner, Arvida Byström and Sandra Gamarra.
Tickets cost 6 Euros and it will be running until November.