The Beauty Revival?

let's hope so

Bullet point summaries of remarks given by Patrick Collison about beauty at a recent conference, as reported here. I love these comments and would point to Ruskin’s Edinburgh Lectures as one answer to the problem. (I wrote about them here, but it is paywalled.)

Some notes from @patrickc talk on New Aesthetics yesterday with @lukeburgis:

- People miss that many architectural movements post-1930 had the stated goal of destroying beauty
- Beauty is a bearer asset. It's not a layer or a facade
- There are degrees of objective beauty. Most would agree Toledo, Spain > Toledo, Ohio
- One measure of how beauty has lagged...there used to be far more agreement across social classes about what's beautiful. The disparity today is huge
- The Brown Decades post civil war were underrated for beauty. Despite the depressive backdrop, great work got made ie. Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park
- From 1870-1920, the US undisputedly produced the best architecture in the world
- Like all tortured philosophers of our time, he's too become conspiratorial around the question, "WTF happened in 1971?"
- International architecture might be the first legible form of the new aesthetics. Iranian brick movement, Scandinavian revival, work coming out of Latin America and Spain
- Loss of the sacred is one reason progress in the world of atoms is so slow
- "Can anyone name a great piece of artwork made by AI yet?" *ducks*
- Germany is an interesting case study on aesthetics. They invented the discipline itself (Baumgarten coined "aesthetics" in 1750), dominated classical music and philosophy, gave us the Bauhaus, Braun, and the Dieter Rams design language. But they've never produced great food. Why? Maybe they simply have never cared enough. Maybe it was never the priority.
- As Stripe has increased its emphasis on beauty (Stripe Press and other initiatives) and it's become a cultural value the team rises to maintain
- THERE IS SO MUCH LATENT DEMAND FOR BEAUTY. IT'S TIME TO UNCORK IT.