YouTube Beauty Gurus of Babel

My goal with our final project was to collect various YouTube beauty videos from all over the world and string them together to form a new makeup tutorial in hopes of shedding light on the global beauty village that we are all a part of as a reference to the idea of the global village in Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Massage."

Although I sat through about 12 hours of YouTube makeup tutorials in over 20 languages (Google translate was my best friend), this project was a refreshing reminder that there exists a world of beauty outside of the United States.  It was so interesting to see all of the different nuances that certain countries play up with regards to makeup application.

For example, in South Korea they really value a light application of makeup.  Anything beyond that resulting in a "cakey" or heavily made up face is regarded as undesirable and unnatural looking.  South Koreans would not fare well in India where they apply layer after layer of makeup and really spackle it on.

What's most interesting and refreshing to me is that there are so many different definitions of what beauty is depending on your place of origin, where you reside now, your parent's definition of beauty, etc., and how they're all 100% valid.  Who am I to say that your faintly filled in brow is not as beautiful as someone else's heavily drawn on brow?

If you'd like to browse through all of the videos I looked at for the project, you can view the playlist right here.  You can view my final video on YouTube by clicking this link.

Thank you for a wonderful class, everyone!!

Charlotte Moorman | The Topless Cellist

We were recently tasked with a research report project based on people found within Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage."  Upon denial of Marilyn Monroe, I chose Charlotte Moorman solely based on the fact that she was a musician like me.  Well, that and maybe this super awesome "cello bomb" that she used in an art piece once upon a time.

"Cello Bomb" Who woulda thunk?

Charlotte Moorman was an essential player in the world of performance art born in Little Rock, Arkansas.  She attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin (shout out to Texas, yawl!!) and did postgraduate studies at The Juilliard School.  She was a classically trained cellist, but made the transition into performance art during the 1960s Avant-Garde movement.  Researching her history and huge involvement in the promotion of avant garde art was largely inspiring to keep doing what I do with my own art.  Although she was arrested for performing semi-nude (interview video link), she kept pursuing what she loved and didn't stop for anything, even through her battle with breast cancer that eventually took her life.

I'm thankful for the opportunity to research an important figure that paved a way for an important period of our art history.

Charlotte Moorman with John Lennon and Yoko Ono