Rising Beauty, 2006

What motivates people to entrust their image, and their rights to it, to an Internet portal and let themselves be posted and assessed on a website? Is it all about seeing and being seen? A virtual exhibition? An objective estimation of the impression one makes on others?

You enter the contest anonymously and you yourself make your judgment even more anonymously, at the click of a mouse. The vote is equal, free and secret – i.e., democratic – and you find yourself among millions of others, united as an Internet people, categorized according to attractiveness, each in their own place, a place allocated by the democratic mass, who for once makes use of its voting right with enthusiasm: so far, 12 billion votes have been cast with the market leader HotOrNot.com alone, for about 25 million images.

In his series Rising Beauty, Benjamin Füglister has documented the battle for a beauty rating, sorted on the basis of gender and using astoundingly banal examples. The series tells of the advantages of wearing a bikini, of your limited possibilities if you are Asian, but also of strange existences in military no-go areas, and wet-look leather sofas.

Finally, at the top, where the voting approaches the magic number 10, the question that remains is what all these beautiful and not so beautiful have people in common? The answer seems simple: the weaker a person’s self-confidence, the greater their vanity, the more value they place on the judgment of others. To judge at least from the surfaces.

Boris von Brauchtisch