Another great quote from Trinh Minh-ha, this one from an interview conducted by Rob Stephenson in Framer Framed.

This widespread tendency to condemn beauty in certain political and artistic milieus should be situated in an ideological context, which views beauty and politics, beauty and politics, beauty and life as being mutually exclusive. Both those who believe in beauty for beauty’s sake and those who avoid it like the plague partake in the same ideology. Much, not all, of the anti-aesthetic trend in the avant-garde scene today can be viewed as nothing more than another form of aesthetics. Instead of trying to understand show beauty functions in dominant ideology and drawing a possible difference with this same notion in your own or other non-dominant contexts for example, many merely censor it, indulging in the illusion that if you break with dominant narrative traditions (plot, dramaturgy, emphasis on technical sophistication and perfection as formal beauty), reality will yield itself up in its spontaneous, most authentic form.