The pursuit of beauty meets with the desire for eternal youth at the doors of operating rooms in clinics and hospitals. That atavistic idea of beating time, of preventing our bodies, our faces, from deteriorating, losing smoothness, shine and beauty seems increasingly palpable. They become what we do not believe, what we do not want to be because the problem is always time, its passage and the impossibility of reliving it, stopping it or controlling it. If we could only return to the youth of a twenty-year-old body with the mind of a forty-year-old and the experience of a fifty-year-old!

The cult of the body, the desire not to age, to continue being attractive, shapes a society in which youth is a value that is practically listed on the stock exchange. However, let's not deceive ourselves, what lies behind that wish to be young and beautiful is a yearning to be loved, the overwhelming need to be desired. For that we are willing to kill ourselves little by little, to inject ourselves with Botox until our expression is that of a robot, to get so many operations that surgeons refuse to do anymore, to obsess over sports and, eventually, to hide from everyone.

For Artificial Beauty we have sought artists whose images can reveal different points of view, different experiences, and who all offer answers that are inevitably partial, like beauty, to the questions about what beauty is, and about what we continue to seek beyond the corset, the dyes, the make-up, the cosmetics, the gyms and the prosthesis. We have divided this issue into several sections that may encompass gentler or harsher methods of redirecting the material of our bodies toward an idea of beauty: Retouch, Construct, Mould and Imagine. Herein we can attend bodybuilding championships, beauty pageants, or hairdressing, massage and make-up sessions, and, of course, we can approach the threshold of operating rooms. We shall see the body, the place and the means whereby efforts are made to change it. And finally we shall see that beauty is never natural or artificial, that it is a mouldable concept, that it is constructed, retouched and above all imagined.


Editorial:
Someday We'll All Be Cyborgs. Rosa Olivares

Essays:
The Body Never Lies. Joanne Finkelstein
Authentic Nose Jobs to Authentic Face Transplants. Sander L. Gilman

Artists:
Ana Laura Aláez, Susan Anderson, Valèrie Belin, Nancy Burson, Andrés Carretero, Melanie Cleary, Lynne Cohen, Nicola Costantino, Lucinda Devlin, Brian Finke, David Field, Fiona Gardner, Maya Goded, Laureen Greenfield, Mariana Gruener, Suzy Lake, Lawick y Müller, Marilyn Minter, Fernando Moleres, Paloma Navares, Zed Nelson, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Erwin Olaf, Cara Phillips, Jesper PMAN Petersson, Bernhard Prinz, Benjamin Roi, Valèrie Rouyer, Scheltens and Abbenes, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Phillip Toledano, Iké Udé.

BUY YOUR DIGITAL COPY HERE: