I think the word aesthetic has been stretched to mean far more than it was intended to mean in the 18C when it first became a topic. It is historically related to those other ambiguous words, taste and beauty with all their connotations with class and custom. Among newer uses of the word -- stretched beyond what was once possible -- is its opposite, the ugly and other such notions. Aren't we asking too much of a rather simple word when we insist that it not only suffices for the concept of beauty and taste but also for whatever is opposite to beauty and taste? Yes...and no. I do agree that a descriptive word, any word, can be put to whatever service one chooses for it and by that I mean that the context defines the sign, not the other way around. If we want to therefore say that the word aesthetic now includes the beautiful as well as the ugly then we are obliged to invent a context that embraces both. This does happen all the time in irony and I suppose that the idea that aesthetic can imply both the ugly and the beautiful is curled up inside the fascination for irony in our time. Although I think we are now at the end of the age of irony we are still very much affected by it, particularly in how it allows us, encourages us, to pretend that we can perceive something that's inherently subjective from an objective perch. One of the chief goals of post-modernist art is to present an ironic contradiction -- opposite values or contents -- from a distanced position, presumably objective and indifferent. But whenever we think of the aesthetic or of its disposition, taste, and its body, beauty, we are submitting to a fully subjective encounter, one that can't be made objective without taking the life from the subject. This is why I think the ironic view is a dead view, as if imagining a living body as a corpse devoid of subjectivity. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tue, June 26, 2012 11:38:31 PM Subject: RE: Bad Aesthetic Design? Frances to William and others... The traditional tendency to align aesthetics only with say beauty and nicety and efficiency, to the exclusion of say ugly and nasty and inefficiency, has been a thorny stretch for me. There seems after all to be a logical need, in addressing the many issues of art and tech and science, to hold the "beauty" of the unbeautiful as well as the beautiful. Perhaps the umbrella should be whether aesthetic properties and objects are bad or good, in their being say ugly or sublime or beautiful. Tentatively deeming what is aesthetically "good" as a global artistic standard might be a step in the right direction, regardless of the specific problems this deeming will encounter in certain local situations. The unpredictable elementary alternative is simply too chaotic and volatile and hostile for rational thinkers. (The relation of "forms to feelings" and of "designs to signings" in these poles as being structurally similar are old theories, yet are seemingly relevant here, and maybe they should be revisited, especially in light of recent psychical advances in the cognitive sciences.) William Conger wrote... Yes, of course. The limiting word is aesthetic. Define that word and then find correspondence in design examples. I realize that your question presumes a deconstructive answer, one that feeds the hopelessly rigid and vain hope that a stable universalist definition can suffice for a subjective and infinitely variable subject. Why do you persist in this elementary quest? However, logic notwithstanding, there is a vague sense that the human brain does have 'aesthetic preference' for certain kinds of patterns that one might say are efficient, that is, lacking excess. The basic human aesthetic standard is probably the human body because an attraction to it is essential for eros and propagation at least. So what is an aesthetic design for the human body? It is amazing in a way that with the human body few inches this way or that, a bulge here instead of there, and so on can elicit a sense of either aesthetic delight or repulsion. We can easily find historic periods where one sort of aesthetic body was valued over another that today is found repulsive but these socially constructed bodies need to be balanced by the longer term preferences for a standard form, one that was actually measured statistically by both the ancient Greeks and the Italian Renaissance sculptors, among others. For example, a stout or heavyset 19C American male image was considered a sign of prosperity, authority, manliness whereas today it is scorned. Similar reversals can be found for images of women at different times. When the notion of 'efficient' is applied, a leaner, more supple, graceful, healthy, unexaggerated body form is the most prevailing human body image and is thus probably an aesthetically pleasing image to most people at most times (yet, again, always in balance with changing social constructs). Designs that conform to a preferred human body shape, however abstractly, may be as close to a universal definition as we can get for the 'aesthetic' (or beautiful, using the traditional definition of the word). Joseph Berg wrote... Is there such a thing as that anymore?
