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While the African continent is vast and its peoples diverse, certain standards of beauty in artistic expression and physical appearance, of propriety of comportment and demeanor are held in common among various indigenous African societies. Taken collectively, these standards are thought to comprise a generally accepted African aesthetic, the constituent components of which are:

• luminosity of motion ("looking sharp")
• youthfulness
• smoothness (patina)
• clarity of form and detail, complexity of composition
• composure of the face, or cool.http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/exhib/93.ray.aa/Elements.html]]

Luminosity of motion

Youthfulness

Smoothness

Composure of the face, or cool

Mystical coolness and the "mask of the cool"

In his work African Art in Motion , art historian Robert Farris Thompson (1974) divides cool into five distinct elements: visibility, luminosity (of motion) or "looking sharp", smoothness, rebirth and reincarnation and composure of the face (the "mask of the cool").

Manifestations in the African diaspora

Thompson explains the cool aesthetic in African and African American movement in African Art in Motion:

The mind of an elder within the body of the young is suggested by the striking African custom of dancing "hot" with a "cool" unsmiling face. This quality seems to have haunted Ten Rhyne at the Cape in 1673 and it struck the imagination of an early observer of strongly African-influenced dancing in Louisiana in the early nineteenth century, who noted "thumping ecstasy" and "intense solemnity of mien." The mask of the cool, or facial serenity, has been noted at many points in Afro-American history.

It is interesting that what remains a spiritual principle in some parts of Africa and the rare African-influenced portions of the modern U.S.A., such as tidewater Georgia, becomes in the mainline Afro-American urban culture an element of contemporary street behavior:

Negro boys…have a 'cool' way of walking in which the upper trunk and pelvis rock fore and aft while the head remains stable with the eyes looking straight ahead. The…walk is quite slow, and the Negroes take it as a way of 'strutting' or 'showing off'....

The…cool style of male walking in the United States is called bopping…. Mystical coolness in Africa has changed in urban Afro-American assertions of independent power. But the functions, to heal and gather strength, partially remain. And the name cool , remains. And the body is still played in two patterns, one stable, the other active, part energy and part mind.