In fact, the actual Bauhaus set out to question and overturn, among other things, the ideology of beauty successfully propagated by the bourgeoisie for over a century. The criteria of the beautiful and the ugly becomes a weapon of cultural and economic domination when it is not relative at all, but monopolised by the wealthy, requiring the authority of great power to impose it on culture-at-large.
So why then does she recriminate herself like an insecure twit? The backstories of the two leads are similarly confused. Why not just say Auschwitz? This looseness with detail reveals an indolent relationship with the specific or merely inconvenient evidence of history.
So we go on: characters nod seriously as they make avowals of this beauty and that ugliness, but what in fact is this beautiful-ugly stuff? The Ugly: chintz, low ceilings and Pennsylvania granite. Alas, taste without argument is ultimately arbitrary. Much like filmmaking, which is perhaps why the movie finds sympathy in a tale of concession and economic exploitation.
And yet, there is an architectural community, not just cruel rich people. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production is the dominated section of the dominant class, one that nonetheless self-defines its legitimating principles. These principles often invert the logic of its overlords, who privilege economic success above all.
The community of cultural producers, though sometimes locked in competitive struggles with one another, still in practice define the criteria and limits of their field. But in any master-slave dynamic, or creativity-as-victim-of-patronage narrative, there is a dialectic in which power runs multifariously, though of course never equally.
