welcome;

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.

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.

Open wounds. What are open wounds? A taunt not forgotten. A joke that hit a little too close to home.

Anxiety. An open wound to live with, your entire life. You might get used to it gradually, but it's always present at the back of your mind

Burning like embers after a bonfire, and if added a little more wood, it would burn a little too brightly, a little too painfully.

And the smoke makes it a little harder to breathe, the initial smoke that is. Later on, you would need oxygen masks for it.

And when your chest tightens a bit too much, when the wound is poked a bit deeper, and you really cannot breathe. It gets harder and harder, more difficult, like an out-of-body experience.

You watch and watch, helpless to do anything because what can you do? how could you stop it? how could you hope for it to stop, when it hasn't for years.

But then it does. Slowly, steadily, like a train coming to a stop. And then it's gone and there's relief. Relief as it's gone and relief that I don't have to feel like that anymore.

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.

There are a multitude of dimensions that make various mediums ideal for therapy.

They tend to be low-demand for attention while requiring movement and repetition, so you can think and track how present you are by your speed and progress.

Needlework like embroidery and sewing require focus to avoid pricks, which can also be grounding if you can work with pain in a controlled manner.

Plus embroidery can be done on most mass-produced clothing, so you can do it with the clothes on your back with some floss (embroidery floss) or thread and a needle— we embroider our sleeves and tuck the needle diagonally into our ring when we’re not using it.

Some yarns can be crocheted or knit into fabric with just your fingers. Crochet hooks are similar in size to a pencil, and you can pause by closing the last loop you worked on and starting a new strand next loop.

Beadwork is so nice to touch. Embroidery, weaving, knotwork and jewelry. It’s not so easily portable, but it’s easy to make pretty without much technique.

Have you ever made your own rope or yarn? That’s gratifying, starting from plants and animals and ending up with netting and blankets.

"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

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・

So, you wanna know how to study art and the other fields under the umbrella (art history, portraits, landscaping heck even architecture). Well this post has a general idea on what you can do-! just a note, I'm no art student, but i do take note on art in itself, how to shade, color theory, other tips from illustrators and such and this is basically what i do. Step 0: get a notebook or pad papers no seriously, i know you are either a notebook hoarder or have little to no notebooks so just get something to store your notes Step 1: Look into art tutorials that you are interested in Yeah, its an easy step, you can look into different shadings, and listen attentively, at least this time its not some subject in class but something you're interested in and want to learn. When listening into the video, take certain notes, heck even do example doodles to help practice while learning It's also best that you create a list of things you want to learn (this can apply to other things like history, geography, science and so on) on the art ex. How to draw an (animal) How to draw a landscape and the list can do on But also just for another note, you don't only need Youtube tutorials, if you can try to draw by eye to hand then you can! Sometimes I, when trying to draw accurate animal anatomy (namely deers) i would look up pictures on how they lay down, sit down, what their legs look when folded and etc. you can try it yourself, looking into animal proportions or random buildings in your place and try to draw them for fun! Step 2: 20% knowledge creates 80% work you might not believe in it, but then again that's how art works, you may not know how to draw a body perfectly or hair in a certain way, or not know how to shade clothes, but taking notes or learning how to do it then doing it yourself is how it goes. you probably did this with your favorite/famous artists on the internet whether it was tracing or copying it. Come on, i know you did it. And when it comes from learning, comes practice to which practice makes perfect I mean that's how you can draw anime girls, animals, trees, birds and whatever. Well i hope this post gave you some insight and something for you to learn! Just remember to be kind on yourself and don't be so harsh when you aren't able to capture what you had in your head perfectly, we all go through that stage, hut eventually we end up with something that we are proud of. always remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.

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I encourage you to have a seat and read this little ‘essay’ I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I’m doing today. I would be really grateful and I’m sure you’ll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be “painted” but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating…

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the “warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing” first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the “erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous” characters or the concept of “famonimity”; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the “leftovers” after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc….. With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ’paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting…. Except for the birth of new “isms” within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation… Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. “Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers…

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art” are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

In una scuola o un'accademia di fotografia e pubblicità, o qualcosa del genere, ho chiesto ai ragazzi di dirmi il nome di un fotografo o di una fotografa che gli piaceva. Silenzio assoluto. Va be', cito Koudelka, Cartier-Bresson, oppure Berengo Gardin, Ugo Mulas, per parlare degli italiani... Niente. Dico: "Ragazzi, ma avete mai sentito parlare di Pier Paolo Pasolini?". Giuro, hanno risposto "No". Gli insegnanti non gliene avevano mai parlato! Questi ragazzi sono letteralmente "vuoti". Ho chiesto loro: "Ma allora cosa studiate, di fotografia?". "La tecnica". Che è il peggio che si possa insegnare, perché ormai la tecnica non esiste più: fai degli scatti, e basta. Mentre il linguaggio, la trasmissione, il racconto, il documento, l'invenzione... niente!

lo sono sempre stata fortemente ancorata nel presente. La fotografia bella ed elegante mi interessa, mi piace, ma mi interessa di più quando racconta e denuncia lo stato delle cose. La resistenza la si fa anche con le piccole cose, come una mostra, un dibattito... (...) Non è che mi metto lì a fotografare i trulli di Alberobello, no, io fotografo quello che mi è vicino, che mi interessa, che mi coinvolge. Qualcosa da difendere, da amare, da apprezzare, da odiare..."

Happy Monday, everyone! I’m back with some more motivation to start your week off right (and write) ✨

I’ve received some amazing DM messages this past week, both supporting my works and asking for writing advice. So, I figured I’d share a little bit of my own philosophy here:

Your writing and art doesn’t have to be perfect. Seriously. Humans aren’t perfect, so why should we hold ourselves to unreachable standards? It is inevitable for us to make a mistake, and that is perfectly okay.

Do you know how many times I reread and edited Peter Hart? A lot. There were still a few errors that made it past the final draft. I kind of chuckle when I read them now, and recall that there were typos that made it through print on some of my favorite childhood books. It happens. But…I don’t remember the typos. I don’t remember the minor errors—I remember the stories.

Think back to your favorite book series—do you recall a typo or printing error? Even so, it’s most likely not a big deal. What matters is you’ve tried, you polished, you’ve presented the best possible art you could. And, most importantly: you ENJOYED it.

Art without passion and emotion from the soul is hollow. This is why AI can never “create” art like we can. People get their feelings of anger, joy, sorrow, love, lament… deeply human emotions, out there. It’s vulnerable, it’s beautiful. It’s human. That’s why writing and the arts are part of the humanities.

Look, I get it: If it’s a job, sometimes you have to push through feelings of lower motivation to reach a quota. But I always harken back to the beginning: Why did you begin in the first place? What inspired you to pick up writing or art as a career? What sparked the creativity in your soul, that you wanted to share your passion and vulnerability with the world? If you lose sight of that, you lose sight of what makes art enjoyable: the fact that it was created by YOU. Do you know how freeing that is? YOU are the masters of your own world.

Wonderful people, your art is beautiful because it is uniquely yours. And nobody can take that joy away from you other than yourself. So why not enjoy what you do? Why not find happiness in your penstroke? Why not lift yourselves up, instead of tearing your beautiful hearts down? Life’s too short, lovelies.

So even if someone is technically/artistically able to create something on the level of a gallery piece (and, to be honest, I think substantially more people have that ability than anyone would be likely to admit) they do not exist in an environment where they have the financial freedom or recognition for that to be possible or worthwhile.

I assure you that there are millions of people who absolutely could and would want to make Pollock style abstract paintings or giant time-consuming sculptures made with garbage or whatever, but they're currently stuck in a low wage job and if they quit in order to make their masterpiece then nobody would bat an eye and they would go broke because they wouldn't have the sociocultural weight to impart that special numinous reverence that "high art" is granted, and which makes it financially viable as a thing to spend your time doing.

It is also true that a lot of people who have that cachet are able to spend their time making pretty much whatever, and will still be able to support themselves even if the art itself is fairly mediocre outside of the time dedicated to its creation.