The mid in fake midcentury modern
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The mid in fake midcentury modern
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Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#2Why is it the articles which would most benefit from pictures are the ones with the fewest?
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#3I don't reject goodness, rightness or truth. If you reject any of these things you receive ugliness.
A building can be right - fit for purpose, beautiful.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#4"I don't like the $CURRENT_STYLE".
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#5World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had
that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism
the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (called innovation)
recommended reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
it is interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#6It could be the case that in 30 years, we look back at the aesthetics of our current times with fondness and nostalgia.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#7Related: Whither Tartaria? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
Follow up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#8There's so much in this essay to unpack, it's all over the place -- more of an extended rant than any particularly cohesive argument.
But one of the early points is "why is everything so gray instead of colorful?" Which is easy to answer -- when all your cars and buildings are super-colorful, they clash. They become garish and ugly and screaming for attention. Thank god we've moved to more neutral tones that actually tend to go together and recede into the background... so that we can use accent colors instead! If someone chooses to wear an attractive bright red or yellow top, let the accent be on them as a person, rather than their surroundings.
But otherwise, the answer to most of the rest of the essay is: economics. New construction (and furniture) looks the way it does because it's the cheapest to put together in terms of initial cost and maintenance for the building's desired lifespan.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#9We're asking for it though aren't we?
Anything non-conventional to beauty is being embraced right now. For generations we only saw the most visually presentable, and in that saccharine world of nothing-better the only thing that stands out are things that are unique from that aesthetic.
Re: The mid in fake midcentury modern
#10There are two schools of thought: those that think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and those that think, like Steve Jobs famously quipped, that some people just have no good taste.
After fighting with this concept for years, I decided to embrace the superiority and smugness that comes with the latter: the vast majority of people have no understanding of beauty and aesthetic.
The only thing that stops the world from becoming uglier is social norms and peer pressure. Otherwise there'd be more people very proud of wearing socks with their flip flops in public and choosing serif fonts for their computer UIs.
Mind you: beauty doesn't have to be conformism nor normative. But like music, you need to understand the rules first, before trying to break them.