What is beauty today? How has it changed in the digital era? These questions were discussed during a recent seminar titled “Beauty in the Digital Age,” held at the Arabic Cultural Institute of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, a department headed by Professor Warel Farouq.
Two distinguished speakers participated. Brandon Vaidyanathan, a professor of sociology, Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and founder of Beauty at Work, a platform featuring podcasts and video content dedicated to exploring beauty. The scholar also serves as a consultant for fashion brands such as Chanel. Among his most significant projects is “Can Beauty Save the World?”, a study that explores how beauty can generate meaning, social connection, and human well-being.
The second speaker was Guido Tattoni, Director of NABA since 2019 and a sound engineer and sound designer. His research and artistic practice span generative composition, contemporary music, artificial intelligence, interaction design, and audio technologies.
The seminar focused on an increasingly connected world where technology is no longer limited to displaying images or content, but becomes a space in which beauty is collectively constructed, shared, and experienced.
From social media platforms to immersive channels, from podcasts to digital videos, aesthetic perception is constantly being reshaped, influencing cultural narratives, personal identities, and fashion-related practices.
Warel Farouq opened the workshop by emphasizing that questioning the meaning of beauty is a theme dear to all cultures and shared across many fields.
Beauty can be found in various stages of one’s life, but also through art, science, and technology. This theme is also used as a stimulus to boost sales, to cite a few examples discussed during the conference.
“According to Christian culture, for St. Thomas, beauty is considered the splendor of truth. In Muslim culture, every prophet is a bearer of miracles, and Muhammad’s miracle is the beauty expressed by the Quran,” explained the director, emphasizing the universality of this theme.
“In general, beauty has always been a central element in human culture because it has always represented the attempt to go ‘beyond.’ Technological development, for example, is in itself a form of beauty because it aims to go beyond the limits of our body, whether it be a microphone, which allows us to amplify our voice, a lamp, which allows us to improve visibility in a room, or a camera, which allows us to focus our attention on a specific moment,” he explains.
“What has been revolutionary is what technology has made possible in the realm of information and, consequently, knowledge. If Google was revolutionary before, now ChatGPT is.”
Within this broad context, the day addressed various topics that raise different questions regarding the role of beauty in human knowledge.
Reimaigining our encounter with the real
Professor Vaidyanathan emphasized that everyone has a personal approach to beauty, drawing on childhood memories and individual experiences.
In particular, he highlighted the many dimensions of beauty—beyond St. Thomas Aquinas’s view of beauty as the splendor of truth—such as the connection between beauty and justice, between beauty and technology, as well as the approach of scientists and mathematicians in experiencing beauty through observing nature or solving an equation.
“Beauty is always decentering as it pulls you outside of yourself,” he said, noting that, for instance, in the field of science there are three types of beauty—sensory beauty, useful beauty, and the beauty of understanding.
The expert has also conducted a research which sought to measure perceptions of beauty in various countries, including the UK and the US, as well as a study on the Venice Carnival, concluding that beauty is the power of reality’s attraction.
In analyzing the era we live in today—the digital age—sociologists have recognized that we are facing a severe attention crisis. According to a 2004 study, researchers found that it was possible to hold people’s attention for two and a half minutes. Today, that time has dropped to just 47 seconds, and whereas in the past people had the capacity for “deep-attention”—that is, the ability to focus on a single topic—it is now increasingly difficult to maintain focus on a single subject. In fact, as a distinguished Research Professor Katherine Hayles said, we have been experiencing an overall shift in society from “deep attention” to “hyper-attention”, that is the need to multitask, get bored more quickly and tend to follow multiple topics simultaneously, but in a more superficial way.
Since the perception of beauty online and offline differs, we see how highly sophisticated organizations have devised ways to create new experiences, such as capturing and leveraging this differing perception of beauty for commercial purposes.
In fact, he acknowledges that the observer may feel they are in control of reality. Through this sensation, companies and brands can appropriate and use this feeling to create a need or induce a specific behavior, ultimately leading to a hyper-specialization that causes us to lose the ability to see reality in its entirety.
This approach can lead, for example, to a desire to resemble stereotypes of perfect beauty—yet far removed from reality—and to draw our attention to highly specialized online platforms, and so on.
There is a way to regain a positive outlook without having to follow paths that erode our sense of self and our ability to fully appreciate the concept of beauty.
The inspiration comes from an approach similar to that of scientists. They can recognize examples of natural beauty that evoke a sense of wonder, respect, and reverence. This attitude can spark a sense of gratitude—an attitude that allows us to reconnect with nature and feel like part of a whole. In this way, it is possible to change our attitude and move from a fragmented approach to a reconnected relationship with reality.
Beauty and the Bit
The second part of the day featured Guido Tattoni, who focused on various art forms that can stimulate the idea of beauty. It is no longer just a matter of classical and ancient art forms, but also modern ones where, for example, it does not necessarily express harmony—such as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man whose body is designed according to exact mathematic proportions. It also may not have to do with the classical idea of beauty that fascinates. Other forms of art have to do with transgressive formulas such as, for instance, Duchamp’s “Fountain,” processes or interferences such as screen reproductions where certain connections are faulty and create interesting graphic effects, or a DJ’s scratching, which produces sounds that are, in a sense, “wrong,” but precisely for that reason interesting and, therefore, appealing.
In fashion, some examples of alternative visions of the body come from Comme Des Garçons, as early as 1997 Rei Kawakubo introduced the “Lumps and Bumps” collection, which featured silhouettes that broke from convention and championed the idea of body positivity—at a time when models were all identical in size, proportions, and facial features. That collection was revolutionary.
The use of artificial intelligence makes it possible to create entire photo campaigns without using models, with no connection to real people or places.
A striking case occurred in 2023. During the COVID-19 pandemic, model Shereen Wu walked the runway for the brand Michael Costello. When the brand published the photos from the show, the model’s face looked different from her real one. The model complained via TikTok and filed a lawsuit because her identity had been altered, and thus she had not been respected.
In this case as well, they delegated the decision of what is beautiful to a mechanism, an algorithm. They chose the standard version of beauty—made more Western, whitened, and slimmed down.
“This choice shows how the use of AI relies upon, once again, the dictatorship of stereotypes and trends. It tramples on people’s rights and is limiting because it does not allow for grand narratives, but only for great fragmentation,” said Tattoni.
“Will this spell the end of the appreciation of beauty? No. Beauty will always exist. Only the way we approach it, discover it, and experience it will change,” was Tattoni’s closing comment.
We like to also add that the action of tools like AI need to be strictly monitored and eventually limited in order to prevent it from abusing its power.