⚡️

It started on tumblr [citation needed], we've all seen the "a e s t h e t i c" tags and all the blogs dedicated to the many many different types of aesthetics. I have spent the better part of 4 years collecting, studying, and categorizing theses aesthetics. I do have a formal education in art and architecture so I sort of know what I'm talking about. I'd like to share with you what I've found. I've also made a chart (link) of my findings. This chart is very rough and not meant to be taken as fact. It is how I've categorized almost 700 different aesthetics but that is not even close to how many there are. I do plan on expanding it more. If I get some attention, maybe I'll make more posts that dive deeper into defining this new art movement.

In short, today's use of the word "Aesthetic" is a noun that refers to a title/word given to a specific atmosphere, emotion, feeling, or vibe that a collection of images evokes when viewed together. A comparable approximation would be a "mood board".

Anything can belong to a particular Aesthetic; an art piece, a song, an entire show, an outfit, etc. In my opinion however, its very rare that a singular work can express an entire aesthetic. As stated, an aesthetic is a very specific emotion. Thus, in most cases, a singular work (work here referring to any form of expression) is likely to be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. The only exception to this is if a particular aesthetic is based on a very specific motif found in a particular work that is unique to only that work and from there new pieces can be made that also carry that motif or relate to the original work that the aesthetic was built upon. This will be discussed later. Not every genre of art can express an aesthetic, for example, some aesthetics may not translate very well to fashion, imagery, music, etc. That is to say that it may not be possible to express the emotion evoked by the aesthetic through other mediums other than the original medium the aesthetic was created in.

In summary, an aesthetic is a collection of images that evokes a specific emotion. Most often, this emotion is evoked through the combination of particular motifs found in each work that contribute to an overall "vibe" or atmosphere. These motifs can then be used to create new original works that belong to this aesthetic.

There are a multitude of categories of Aesthetics that I have identified and some of them may seemingly contradict this definition. We will discuss these later. There is also much overlap between specific aesthetics, it is extremely common to find that an art piece may belong to multiple different aesthetics.

Art history is the knowledge and study of art. To interpret and analyze art, its characteristics, its reason of being, its function, it has to be placed in a context, and it is the context of its production that informs about its value as human activity. To do history about art is to relate it to the culture that produced it, to learn about its geography, to place it in the chronology of its evolution. Art history, then, follows a methodology that aspires to be as scientific as possible, and so it adapts to evidence, emerging technologies and evolving sensibilities. Kleiner outlines several criteria used by art historians, such as age, style, subject matter, authorship, and patronage, to learn about an art object or an artwork’s history, about what it represents about its culture and human history at large.  

Art is an activity best defined by its function: it communicates, it expresses a message. To somewhat narrow it down, art pertains to culture, which is largely understood as all human activity. Before what anthropology considers civilization, there were examples of people creating iconography, communicating a message that might have had some relevance, some practical function, as it is speculated. Art too can be created for mere pleasure, as the manifestation of personal will, of identity. Whether art is an individual or a group benefit, it is not an either/or question. Art is a social activity. It can take the form of small objects or large buildings, it can be manifested in many aspects of society. As it is a social activity, it has value: material monetary value and intangible cultural value. 

Art is in dialogue with other disciplines of knowledge. When doing art history, it is important to determine when an artwork can serve as an historical object - because it is part of an antique infrastructure or it depicts a historical event - and when it serves a communicational purpose that is not historically accurate. It can represent ideas - or ideals, more precisely - just as it can represent observable reality. Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware conveys not a historical occurrence, but an idea about a historical figure. This same dynamic applies, more clearly, in representations of mythology and religious texts, which are taken as different from historical facts, yet they serve an ideological purpose, and they can inform much of a society’s history. 

Art history is a discipline that intertwines the often literary and subjective world of art and the scientific exercise of history. The purpose of art history is, as it is of any research, to better understand humanity using the totality of the past, the cumulative corpus of creative activity. It examines perspectives, ideologies, temporalities, norms, hierarchies, and therefore it is a valuable branch of the social sciences.

Reference

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

"Abstraction is flying. Abstracting is ascending to higher and higher levels of conceptual generalization; soaring back and forth, reflectively circling around above the specificity and immediacy of things and events in space and time, from a perspective that embeds them in a conceptual framework of increasing breadth and depth, a framework without horizon, ceil-ing, or basement; a framework composed of increasingly comprehensive concepts that generalize over increasingly comprehensive classes of things, organize them relative to one another, unify them into a coherent tapestry, a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.

Abstraction is also flight. It is freedom from the immediate spatiotemporal constraints of the moment; freedom to plan the future, recall the past, comprehend the present from a reflective perspective that incorporates all three; freedom from the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, freedom to imagine the possible and transport oneself into it; freedom to survey the real as a resource for embodying the possible; freedom to detach the realized object from oneself more and more fully as a self-contained entity, fully determined by its contextual properties and relations, and consider it from afar, as new grist for the mill of the possible. Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual uni-verse, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to. Abstraction makes one love material objects all the more."

--Adrian Piper

They pretend art has always existed to appeal to the greatest number of people and appeal in a way that is simple and explicable. If you look at the history of art that could not be further from the truth. Even art that was performed to an ‘illiterate’ public often maintained layers of meaning and ambiguity throughout long periods of history (just look at the global historical traditions of oral storytelling)

The simplification of art and the expectation that everything should appeal to a wide audience is the result of commodification not democratisation. Art has arguably never been less revered than now and still there are people who think it has further to fall in esteem. Just look at the AI movement’s desire to undermine artists while stealing their work.

I believe that the ‘it’s not that deep’ crowd who is eager to wield the accusation of pretentiousness whenever something doesn’t connect to them is part of an anti-artist, anti-intellectual movement to do away with mainstream non-consumerist (non-recuperable) art.

There has been a concerted effort by corporations and those purely interested in consumerism to erase the notion that art is primarily a human expression that is not necessarily made to pander to a wide audience. Every day we see more efforts in the social media & technological culture wars to devalue art and demonise artists who wish to create artistically fulfilling works rather than crowd-pleasing content.

I thought we'd passed through it

I thought thing's going back to normal

Thought our scars were healing

But I guess I was wrong

After so long

After all this time

After I tried my best to

Show you everything's fine

You brought him back

You thought I was talking about him

When all you could think was that

I wanted some time alone with you

There was no context for you to

Bring him back

But you did

You thought about him asking me to

Go to a motel with him

But everything the context told you

Was that I'd like to go to a motel with you

And spend quality time with you

I'll not deny that

You bringing him up again

Hurt me

I just want to overcome it

Just wanted to leave it behind

Like it never happened

But you had to let your insecurities speak

Louder than reason

And now here I am

Writing about it

Because I can speak to no one

About it

I was sauntering through Charlotte this last weekend.

I was with my new lady friend and headed to The Mint Museum.

When all the sudden a very colorful alleyway appeared.

With some of the most rich and vibrant street art I’ve seen.

I mean, look at this… the quality was unbelievable. 

Had to catch some of it on camera.

This was the most artful alleyway I’ve seen in my life to this point.

What an ideal way to beautify your city.

Between a garage and high rises around 100 E. Fourth Street.

Finally, near the museum.

i didn't mean to make my grief too loud.

my pain is beautiful

only when you don’t have to see it

only when it made me strong

only once its healed 

and you don’t have to see 

the mess it made me.

sorry for taking up the space

you thought was yours

with all my heavy thoughts 

and impenetrable experiences.

my pain is beautiful 

only once it's better

only when you don’t

have to look it in the eye.

i am loved

only when I am silent

only when I am the one

shining the light on you.

so sorry

that it got the best of me this time.

so sorry.

so sorry.

truly, 

my deepest condolences 

for the grief that isn’t yours

but is still somehow

Sit down, grab some reference images, draw ten poses in twenty minutes (or do ten poses in ten minutes if you’re feeling adventurous or confident) and take a step back and look at your work after the fact. Be sure to move from drawing to drawing quickly once your timer is done. Pretend you’re in a model drawing class and the model has already changed pose whenever your timer hits - finish up whatever lines you were drawing, move on to looking at what the model is doing now.

You will make a lot of shitty drawings, of course, but that’s not so bad. You only spent a minute or two making each one. Focus on the drawings you do like, and look at them as a whole.

Look at all the drawings together and how they fit together on the page. Look at little details and lines you’re proud of. Take note of things you found difficult to get right in such a short time. Take note of the things you liked doing. Do the exercise again, and focus in on the things you want to improve or explore.

Maybe you want to focus on how the torso conveys its weight on the legs. Maybe you want to focus on how shoulders and arms bend around the neck. Maybe you want to focus on how to convey depth on the torso. Maybe you can learn something more about how to draw a body if you only draw using sharp lines and angles. Maybe you can learn something more if you only draw using squiggly, overlapping lines. Maybe you can learn more about how to draw a body if you only fill out the shadows with thick, quick lines. Congratulations! You’re not just learning how to draw a body, but you’re now also exploring your tastes!