Yes. I know. You love your bike. You gaze lovingly at it when you’re not riding it. You likely also feel this way about your, let’s be honest, homely children. I get it. Your bicycle gives you a lot of joy, and that translates to an appreciation that is more emotional than objective.
The bicycle is one of the best tools humanity has conjured, but utility doesn’t confer beauty, not in any classical sense.
So what are we looking at? Two triangles (most of the time), asymmetric and canted on their sides, with two circles appended, again asymmetrically. There is something cubist about the underlying structure. Then we bolt on handlebars of various shapes, and cranksets, and then we jam a seatpost and saddle in it.
If there was an animal the shape of a bicycle, we’d shoot it when it crossed the city limits…for its own good. You know how those things get once they’ve discovered a tacqueria dumpster.
If you look at a bike head on, you don’t get much sense for it. You have to view it from the side, and yet that throws up a whole ‘nother problem, which is, in the physical area the bike occupies, the bike itself only takes up a fraction of it. Bikes are by-and-large see-through. As a person charged for a couple decades with marketing bicycles, let me tell you that the difficulty of properly photographing a bike has never left me. You have to pick a flat, neutral background, or it’s very hard to see the bike at all.
When dual suspension bikes proliferated, I had a hard time even thinking about riding one, because they just didn’t conform with my idea of what a bicycle looks like. Doing a little backwards math from that conclusion clued me in that, actually, I was already contorting my sense of “beauty” to include bicycles in it at all.
I would guess this has something to do with why there is so little good bicycle art. It’s all a bit kitschy and homely. Maybe a chainring turns into a flower, or a wheel (not a bad, symmetrical canvas) gets incorporated into something not entirely terrible. Very few artists portray the whole bike effectively, a hint that it’s an awkward, ungainly object to begin with.
And yes, I know, that symmetry isn’t everything, but the bike is like an abstract work that is also literal. It’s a mess of pure utility, like a hammer, or the human brain.
I don’t know that I could agree that all bikes are ugly. Many of the more modern ones, probably (I own a lot of those). They are often more functional than older bikes but at the same time often more ugly. The character that old bikes had seems to have been mass produced out of newer bikes – newer bikes are more homogeneous, overly “smooth”, “computer cut” and often made uglier than they need to be for the sake of improving some (necessary or unnecessary) functional aspect or for the purpose of cost reduction.
Could we say the same for other modern goods compared to their older forebears? Cars (you knew I’d drag those into this)? Probably. Houses? Yep. Household items like crockery? The ubiquitous, ready available stuff, for sure.
Maybe current modernity is generally starved of artfulness, culture and creativity. Maybe we’ve sleepwalked into an artless, utilitarian void (hello, AI). Maybe the perception of the beauty of things made by humans is relative to the point in time that we view them from. Maybe the bikes that are held up as “pretty” today were perceived as ugly in their heyday.
I think if there isn’t beauty in bikes now, there was in a previous time or, at least, some bikes of yesterday are pretty now (ok, not that Softride). Lugs are surely things of beauty, as are old style forks and older polished cranks. The geometry of a bike makes it pretty or not as well – those having spent enough time around bikes see that quite quickly.
The bike is hard to see
We also say that when it fits, it disappears from under us.
Maybe thats the point.
The beauty of a bicycle lies within its underlying form (to borrow a concept from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I have thought of bikes as kinetic sculptures ever since I was introduced to that concept.
Regardless, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder.