Showing posts for Culture
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Actually good stuff continues to be good
Yesterday I wrote about a trend towards plainness and dullness as exemplary of the foibles of Modernism. Yes, the diversity of colour in art is decreasing. Yes, Mark Rothko's colour fields are getting more and more expensive. Yes, the places that we live and work are increasingly converging on dull beige boxes.
But:
Changsha Meixihu International Culture and Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid 
Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie These are both a ton of fun! The bottom one is nearly 60 years old. What they lack in colour they more than make up for in sheer panache.
I think that at least some of the explanation for the observation that things from the past are more aesthetically pleasing comes down to plain old survivorship bias. Neither of these hold a candle to Nôtre-Dame de Paris, but I'll bet they knock the socks off 99% of NDdP's contemporaries.
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Bad stuff is now good stuff
Feels like there’s a weird amount of dialogue about how things suck these days and that they used to be good:
I liked this comment in particular:
There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of buyer's remorse, etc.
There is a tangent here that intersects with refinement culture as well. Among the group of society that (subconsciously) care about these "expedient" choices, you see everyone and everything start to look the same.
The "article posted on here" referred to in the first paragraph is this one (in a discussion, actually, about one of Robin Sloan's books—though not the one that I read recently, and which I didn't like very much.)
Or Alexander Scott on Tartaria and the aesthetics of the modern world vs the old world: Scott bemoans that societies the world over have given up on elaborate, technical aesthetics in the last century or so, converging on a sort of modernist middle ground of steel and glass (or equivalents across artistic disciplines) lacking in interest or staying power.
Personally I wouldn’t mind if architecture and style were a bit more diverse and interesting these days—why are we no longer building for thousands of years? (Expedience? Scott also seems to have some hypotheses, most of which revolve around wealthy people being public weirdos.) Pretty much everywhere has an extensive and rich history of building, dress, and art—but in broad strokes the money has moved towards generic “global” art, architecture, and music. Maybe that’s a function of the explosion of communication technology in the last 50 years.
And as a counterpoint the average westerner’s diet is orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting today than it was even 100 years ago. Aaand fashion continues to push boundaries by mixing and remixing cultures.