Editor: Dra. Daniela Musicco Nombela

What is the current situation of beauty, what meaning does it have, what sense does it give to human existence; it is searched from philosophy, psychiatry, history, theology, in different media such as painting, photography, cinema or advertising. From Plato to Nietzsche, from Frank Capra to Fellini, Sorrentino, Benigni or Monteverde, it is answered in different ways, it is perceived in different ways, but beauty has its own truth and in that path of encounter is found neatness, purity, goodness.

Artificial Intelligence is advancing and cosmetic surgery is subject to the laws of algorithms creating canons that correspond to the acceptance of the idea of beauty resulting from the analysis of Big data. Landscapes, houses, animals are created for the metaverse and movies like Avatar (2022) are also conceived following shared canons. Everything seems to be more and more controlled, but it is worth asking, outside the performance of any machine capable of collecting, storing and processing information, what is beauty in the 21st century.

Cinema, painting, architecture, literature and the human body itself are formed and transformed on the basis of aesthetic criteria that are constructed with tools such as analysis tools (MIT, 2022), which score beauty on the basis of metrics preconceived by machines that take surveys and transform the answers into numbers and data that later determine standards. Fortunately, however, the beauty that attracts us seems to escape the machines and algorithms and maintains a high component of subjectivity, of irrationality; it is the beauty of Barthes’ puntctum explained in Camera Lucida (1980), that which touches us emotionally, inexplicably, to each one in a different way; it is the intangible beauty, of goodness, of the purity of that human ideal that transcends, escapes from the material and mundane and is achieved in the Divine. The question of beauty in communication opens this new issue of the journal Comunicación y Hombre.