In an article in today’s New York Times entitled, “The Sum of Your Facial Parts,” we learn about the “beautification engine”—a new computer program that transforms the particular features of a given individual, as they appear in a photograph, into the “ideal” looks for that person. Instead of God knows best, or even your genes know best, it’s the computer that knows best.

The “beautification engine” works very differently from the myriad philosophical attempts (beginning with the ancient Greeks) to come up with what constitutes “ideal” human beauty. In practical terms, “ideal” human beauty was always useless—Leonardo’s golden section theories about the human form and face notwithstanding. Beyond youth and symmetry, there’s nothing else people can agree upon as forming an incontrovertible definition of beauty that stands the test of time. Ideal beauty, it turns out, is an exhausted idea, and the “beautification engine” has arrived in the station way too late.

You can judge for yourself whether the “beautification engine” transformed the two individuals (a man and a woman) offered in the article into their “ideal” selves. Their “Before and After” photographs are posted on the Web site.

Me? After a quick look at the two examples, I think the program works. But so what? There’s little chance that there will be much agreement that the more “beautiful” versions of people look more beautiful than their “real” selves. More important, I doubt most people—save for the disfigured, or the truly homely—would ever want to exchange their own faces for the ideal versions the program delivers. We love our faces, if only to hate them, and we hate them frequently—especially in moments when something like the “beautification engine” comes along, uninvited, to remind us that our faces are invisibly tethered to a better-looking version than that which shows up in our mirror.

I can tie this directly to my experiences in the studio as an abstract painter. Because of the way I paint, I’m forever pondering beauty. I wrestle with it every time I lay down a smear of pigment. I want my paintings to press certain beauty buttons in the people who see them. At the same time, I want them to bring something new to the table of art, and to express my individuality.

What I strive for in my paintings is akin to what truly beautiful faces manage to do. The most beautiful paintings and faces share with one another an ability to oscillate in a viewer’s mind between perfection (a Platonic beauty that’s infinitely inexpressible) and imperfection (a collection of identifiable, concrete, and idiosyncratic details that are always individually flawed).

I said earlier that “ideal beauty” is an exhausted idea—and it is, as far as putting it into practice goes. Modernity—particularly globalization—has affected our ideas of beauty, broadening them to include deeper expressions of the human condition than those that are offered by ideal beauty. Even so, we continue to sustain a weakened version of an ideal beauty, to which we quietly peg our actual experiences of beauty. Without this abstract notion, beauty would—bizarre as this may sound—probably dissolve into ordinariness.

In one of dozens of astonishingly insightful moments in his essay Laocoön, Gotthold Lessing (the 18th-century Enlightenment author) figured out an element of beauty that the “beautification engine” entirely ignores. In identifying “charm” as “beauty in motion,” Lessing understood that even physically beautiful people, if caught in an awkward moment, can easily appear grotesque, and that character and expression can generate a sensation of beauty even when it’s not physically present. Beauty, it seems, depends as much on effect as cause.

I’m sorry, my pretty little “beautification engine,” but you’ll never pull a beauty train. As long as human beings believe in beauty, it will be bigger than any algorithm. As we used to say, in the days before you arrived, beauty is more than the sum of its parts.