# Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 6

​Pulchrism
Pulchrism is a New Beauty which offers a simple, intuitive solution to the now very dated question of the definition of what is beautiful: Beauty is objective. Beauty can be decided upon by individuals and by consensus. Beauty can be seen by masses of people who instinctively agree upon it. Beauty is only relative to sick, dishonest or gullible minds. Not everyone will agree on everything, but most will agree that certain things are beautiful: flowers, sunsets, stars, waterfalls, butterflies, the healthy human body, etc. Frankly anyone who cannot see beauty in these things is mistaken or incapacitated in one way or another.
Pulchrism's detractors have created a situation in which those who advocate the objectivity of Beauty are immediately sent to a psychological concentration camp for the politically incorrect. Thankfully, this ludicrous and highly illogical, not to mention disturbingly unintelligent, anti-beauty mass hysteria is coming to an end because the tide is turning.
Pulchrism is a juggernaut which cannot be stopped. Regardless of whatever hate any self-appointed, pseudo-avantgarde, mock-intelligentsia might hurl at Beauty in its place as the Purpose of Art, they are destined to fail. Humanity has finally divested itself of the hoodwink under which it suffered ugly, foul, negative, nightmarishly wrong, degenerate art in the 20th century.
The marketed controversy as to the purportedly precarious nature and validity of beauty in art, versus ugly degeneration in art, has been nothing more than an artificial dialectic foisted on the gullible masses by social engineers who seek to propagandize people into believing that beauty and ugliness are indiscernible from one another.
The truth is that human beings have a natural ability to recognize beauty and contrast it with ugliness – in exactly the same way that they can differentiate between light and dark. Beauty is not relative, but identifiable, and to be celebrated. All that has happened during the past century or so is that ugliness has been hoisted up onto the pedestal formerly occupied by Beauty. There is nothing at all more to this parlour trick. And the only variable left is people's adherence to faulty dogmas of ugliness’ preeminence. It's time to swallow our pride and admit that we have been fooled.
The jig is up. The shark in formaldehyde has become nothing more than a joke. Paul McCarthy’s Tree (butt-plug) was slashed by Parisians who saw right though its veil of lazy, cheap, ugly irony. Apparently ugliness and irony have depreciated in value.
It must be conceded that the cellularization (see my short film Tracing Cellular Reduction), deconstruction, and obliteration of art that happened and was designed to occur during the 19th and 20th centuries, may have served a great purpose after all: to spark cognitive dissonance in our minds and provoke us to critically question art world 'authorities' which present ugliness as beauty.
I believe that Pulchrism realizes the highest, ultimate, and most absolute Truth – that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Jesse Waugh Cascading Orchids 2013 Oil on canvas
Jesse Waugh Sleeping Cupid 2015 Oil on canvas
Jesse Waugh Wall Lettuce in the Rain 2014 Oil on canvas