To truly understand the role of beauty in our lives, it’s helpful to first acknowledge our unique vantage point in the modern world. While technological advancements have brought incredible improvements to humankind, they have also fostered a flawed, expansive consumer culture, creating a kind of dysphoria—peculiar to our age—that makes many of us unsure how to value or achieve real beauty.
This results, I believe, from the way modern consumerism has debased aesthetic values into fleeting commercial assets, denuded of greater meaning. In contrast, the aesthetics of a traditional society are largely well established and regarded: the result of slow, incremental change with a shared understanding of beauty and worth. In such a world, the way in which people build their homes, dress themselves, or even tattoo their bodies is done within a set framework. Industrialization has forever changed that dynamic.
MODERNITY & THE CYCLE OF TRENDS
As a consequence of modernity, the link between people and their environment has become much more tenuous. Meanwhile, great emphasis is placed on the individual, with each of us called to make countless aesthetic judgments within a constantly shifting cultural framework. The Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni describes the resulting dysphoria—which she calls “factory syndrome”—this way:
“The problem is that with the advent of globalization and its favourite tool, modernity, the machine [industrialized society] has become the dream of the few. Its gears rotate monotonously, generating a consumerist way of life that sells but does not satisfy.”
At the level of aesthetics, this factory syndrome manifests itself in an endless cycle of fashions and trends. The pattern comes sharply into focus when looking at old photographs, where the decades of the last century each seem like their own world. While technology and social movements have had a strong hand in driving this transformation, the shear force of consumerism has led much of the change. As a result, items like fast fashion and flat-pack furniture have replaced their more durable antecedents, and mass marketing compels us to upgrade every conceivable good.
To help fuel this cycle, an endless march of aesthetic fashions has taken hold. The key ingredient is novelty that challenges established norms. While it typically takes generations to develop a beautiful traditional style, mass marketing seeks to interject new forms quickly and repeatedly to generate demand. The pattern is the same among the artistic establishment, where the avant-garde pursues recognition and cultural influence, propagating this view among young designers through higher education.
Below are some of the common strategies employed to work around the difficulty of creating true beauty:
Subversion: a deliberate turn away from aesthetic norms, often with the cudgel of ugliness—effective at grabbing attention and signalling empowered rebelliousness (think punk rock).
Utility & Appetite: justifying any choice that optimizes function or satisfies desire without the need for greater meaning. This often plays on our baser instincts: for example, junk food and sex appeal, but it also delivers ugly buildings that provide function without beauty.
Scientific Authority: presenting evidence—however reductionist or incomplete—as argument for a particular product or aesthetic. Biophilic design (essentially a case for elaborately installed indoor plants) exemplifies this trend in architecture.
Social Morality: an appeal to solving cultural problems with specific aesthetic choices, like advocating for the use of reclaimed lumber to lower a building’s carbon footprint.
Sometimes strategies are used which essentially recycle beauty as fragments, often with the result of eliminating it in the process:
Exoticism: incorporating foreign cultural elements, exhibited in the eclectic architecture of the late Victorian era and more playfully in the tiki-inspired decor of the 1950’s. Presently, of course, the taint of cultural appropriation limits this approach to less controversial genres, like cuisine.
Kitsch: relying on instantaneous gratification and broad appeal, as opposed to complex originality rooted in beauty. This is evident in mass marketing as well as fine art—for example the work of Jeff Koons.
Retro: when cultural stagnation stifles creativity, the easiest form of new is the recent past, providing nostalgia for the old but fresh appeal for the young (beautiful or not). For example, thirty years after Kurt Cobain’s death, a new generation of teenagers now wears Nirvana t-shirts, seemingly oblivious to the band’s music.
This incessant reinvention of aesthetic forms also depends on a particularly modern viewpoint: the myth of progress—the belief that technology and cultural change inevitably point us to a future of continuous improvement. Even where serious obstacles present themselves, like climate change, the thinking is reinforced: societal forces need only be properly mustered to correct course. This often casts a shadow of suspicion on the ways of the past, which to many seem forever blighted by superstition, oppression, and negligence.
BEAUTY DYSPHORIA
The modern cycle of fashions and trends churns at an incredible clip compared to other periods in human history. We are now called upon to make countless aesthetic choices about the many objects and images in our lives. But because the personal and social implications of these decisions are forever changing, we quickly lose any sense of their meaning.
As a consequence, our view of beauty as a timeless virtue is greatly diminished. Instead, we’re more likely to think of it as merely one ingredient mixed with others, which, if conditions are right, may coalesce in a new ascendant style. When this occurs people quickly grasp at the result with excitement, only to later mock it when it falls from fashion, snickering at the out-of-touch who seem to live in the past.
One deleterious consequence of this cycle is that it drains genuine meaning from the aesthetics of our lives. If beauty is fleeting, how is it possible to define it? And without the anchor of beauty among evolving moral values in a secular world, what lasting meaning can be taken from a particular piece of art, music, or architecture?
Modernist and post-modernist artists have been trying to fill that void (one that they helped create) ever since Marcel Duchamp signed his name to a urinal in 1917 and called it art. The subsequent explosion in increasingly detached and experimental styles has emphasized continually shifting aesthetic and moral values. As a result, beauty is now mostly considered a subjective quality, with the word usually just meant to signify one’s preference for a particular thing, as opposed to belief in a universal value.
I believe this lack of deep meaning, coupled with the pressure to adapt to constantly changing aesthetic norms, induces a kind of beauty dysphoria: making people overly anxious about their aesthetic choices, unsure of the implications and fearful of choosing wrongly. Some are driven to forsake the idea of meaning in aesthetics completely, and either show no regard for them or forever chase each new trend.
THE MYTH OF PERSONAL LIBERATION THROUGH AESTHETIC FREEDOM
One resulting paradox is the false promise of self-fulfillment through the abundance of options. On the one hand, we today grant remarkable leeway for personal aesthetic choices as a means of liberating the individual, including what constitutes appropriate clothing and body decoration. But because people have evolved to live in social structures, there will always be a limit to non-conformity.
Like language, we use aesthetics to reinforce social bonds and convey meaning in everyday life. Just as you would have difficulty communicating with words of your own invention, your clothes and manner have a similar function in the world. For example, the ability to dress with total self-expression is largely left to the confines of costume parties. Dressing that way in regular life is generally avoided because it would befuddle the people around you, making normal social interactions needlessly difficult.
Instead, stepping outside of conventional aesthetics is mostly limited to identifying with a sub-culture, where the price paid for non-conformity is offset by the exclusivity offered from the in-group. But even with the increase of options provided by such niche aesthetics, there still persists the tension between fitting in and expressing individuality. For many this dynamic further distracts from the consideration of beauty, and the anxiety of making the right aesthetic choices only grows.
OVERCOMING BEAUTY DYSPHORIA
It is, of course, possible to find beauty in the modern world, but doing so often takes a measure of self-reflection and effort to escape the dysphoria. The first key is vigilance against the manipulations of changing fashions: you must recognize when cheap aesthetic tricks are employed against you to guide your actions toward ugliness.
It is also necessary to embrace and nurture your instinct for what is beautiful. Part of this newsletter’s mission is to help reveal how that complex task can be accomplished. One insightful idea put forward by the architect Christopher Alexander is to recognize the being-like quality of the things around us, noting the degree to which you can relate to them, almost as you would another person. In this way, what is beautiful often seems to perfectly balance complexity and order.
Another source of clarity is to note what stands the test of time. And when acting on this observation, it is helpful to bear in mind the longevity that aesthetic choices will have. For example, the lifespan of clothing is much less than that of a building, and consequently architecture must stay relatable across the generations in a way that your clothing need not.
Likewise, it is important to respect the obligations toward those at the receiving end of your aesthetic decisions. For instance, a musical audience may be self-selecting (e.g., at a bluegrass concert), or quite mixed (as when you attend a large wedding). The appropriateness of the music played is therefore dependent on the circumstances rather than the aesthetic preferences of the musicians. In this musical analogy, buildings are more like weddings: there is a duty to respect the heterogeneous groups they serve.
For those who do manage to overcome modernity’s dysphoric pressures, they may find themselves working against the sensibilities of elite, mainstream, or popular sub-cultures. However, as I’ve noted, modern society provides significant latitude for self-expression, and there is always room to lean into beauty, even in a world of ubiquitous athleisure and minimalism. And since, as I believe, beauty is a shared phenomenon, it will always bring a measure of satisfaction and appreciation, not just among its dedicated adherents, but potentially to every person who encounters it.