Beauty is a must-have of contemporary living, something without which one cannot even go to pee in the dark of one’s own bachelor flat. For you never know who might see you – God, guardian angel, good fairy or death. Ultimately, if you have a conscience, you are the ones who have to be aware of yourself and any possible shortcomings, be self-critical like once the bad old communists. (True enough, they cared about something as inessential and ephemeral as ideology and ended up according to their merits.) The contemporary obsession with beauty is not at all contemporary, but is the consequence of the whole of evolution, is rooted in what people are as a species and is a signal of harmony, fertility, health, perhaps even of faith. If it were not, the whole beauty industry could kiss its arse goodbye. Our service-based industry, without an industrial base, would vanish faster than the pong of a fart. Beauty is too important a thing to be left to fortuity and the anarchy of individual amateur predilections, most often unchanging, and no kind of Platonic idea would rise out of the ooze of what is called life.

Then there is Fashion. Fashion as structured beauty, like law, like regulation, the provisional eternity of every single thing. When I say a thing, I am mean what we see around us, nature and society, clothing food, housing, plants and animals, countries, lands, ideas, art, feelings and human relations. For fashion having crept in everywhere, we have to thank the good blood supply given contemporaneity by the media. The first law of every ancient wisdom is rootedness in the Now, and fashion as our ancient wisdom follows this knowledge. And so the Now rules our lives, and since the Now has the unfortunate property of impermanence, the result that we are constantly behind Fashion, being outside the trends and having, in consequence, a feeling of guilt. The Interview is a performance that celebrates beauty, aestheticisation and oppressive standardization in contemporary society. Good taste is good, and bad is evil. Fashion, of course, is everything.