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.
There is such a demand for beauty. As PhD student, I keep asking myself how I can inject beauty into my writing, research, and eventual teaching. How do I make things not only informative but beautiful?
It feels additionally important for me as a Catholic. So many great Catholic voices of the past several decades have emphasized the need for beauty.
Somehow, making things more beautiful feels fundamental.
Au contraire, mon ami! Quelle horreur! Mein Gott!
When I lived in Germany for two years. I went to bakeries every single day. The breads are famous, but the pastries I found spectacular. Substantial rather than airy, which is my preference.
The worst wurst almost assuredly beats the best sausage in the US. Germans raised very, very good pork.
Spatzle! Sauerkraut! Kartofflen!
One thing I could not find in Germany was peanut butter, because apparently after WWII, the US practically drowned Germany in it – – cheap & nourishing – – and they basically learned to hate it. Also, one day a neighbor girl was over and we were eating popcorn when her mother popped in and about had a heart attack. Corn was PIG FOOD FULL STOP. We may as well have been eating little Friskies cat food.