A loose set of notes about aesthetics.
What are aesthetics? Why don’t you just say beautiful, or pretty? Why use this… pretentious word? I hear you. If there were a simpler word that worked, I would go with that. But I haven’t encountered one yet. And I mean something quite specific when I talk about aesthetics.
This post is going to sound a little wooey, maybe. I don’t really apologize for that, but I will say that I’m quite committed to trying to understand and talk about these things in a practical way.
I suppose I’ll start with a Steve Jobs quote:
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
Now, the nature of the limitation of language is such that Steve almost couldn’t help but accidentally insult interior decorators. But I’m sure that he too would’ve acknowledged that there are surely interior decorators who operate at the highest level, who seek to properly embody the aesthetics of whoever is living and working in a particular space. It matters.
I often use Jimi Hendrix as an example when I talk about aesthetics. Hendrix was celebrated as a true master of the electric guitar. A musical genius. And he was also a very fashionable man! And I believe that these things are quite related. He dressed like he was living in the cinematic universe of his music. They were both forms of his aesthetic expression.
It took a while for Lemmy to grow into his aesthetic.
I want a browser todo list app with X-COM style video game aesthetics.
Sophia Amoruso of Nasty Gal, who coined the term #GirlBoss, has consistently had great personal aesthetics. Why not just say “she’s fashionable”? Well, I’ll admit that does work. But she’s not just fashionable by herself. The fashion is not just how she dresses. Her sense of aesthetic is something that expresses itself in success outer layers, in her books, in her fashion company, in everything.
The aesthetics of my ebook covers.
“Imagine building an entire cinematic universe around a particular object.”
“Aesthetic resonance is when your jewelry, your clothes, the way you speak, your home, your body of work, they’re all in alignment. Each thing feels coherent with the other bits. I find that to be a very rich idea / experience. Callbacks and inside jokes, reward you for paying attention.”
“A talisman is simply an object that has a meaningful story to you. The wedding ring is the most common and widely understood talisman. It’s imbued with narrative meaning at a wedding ceremony. A ceremony is when people come together to witness a ritual of symbolic meaning.”
You are capable of imbuing things with meaning. You can DIY your own meaning. Mementos and gifts are objects that are pretty intuitive examples of meaningful objects. You can turn them into talismans by treating them with reverence. You have to recharge your talismans with fresh thoughts, otherwise they will decay.
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to be updated.