Considering that Hemingway was a Castro sympathizer and Orwell was a socialist, I'm not sure this theory has much going in favor of it. I believe in fact it was the Soviets who promoted simple, realistic art and literature in opposition to the decadent modern art of the West, whereas the CIA promoted, in the form of funding, more abstract art, precisely because it was perceived as being more Western.
Recently I heard that the CIA "wrote" The Scorpion's hit song "Winds of Change" about the fall of the Berlin Wall. So they eventually supported a simpler art style, I suppose.
You mention a theory that the CIA supported a "plain" writing style via writing workshops. I'm not saying you are wrong. I don't know anything for a fact; I'm trying to make an educated guess based upon the evidence.
Is there evidence that a more "plain" style emerged after the CIA supported these workshops? It seems to me that late 20th century writing became all the more complex, with writers like Pynchon, Didion, Eco, Barth, Barthelme, David Foster Wallace...
Now you can argue the CIA failed in that mission. But if you agree they failed, why bring it up? If they had no effect, it doesn't explain anything.
I'm not trying to be rude or argumentative for the sake of it. I'm genuinely interested in the question.
I don't know if this is necessarily true. Yes, I have also heard the argument that modern art evolved to be abstract and non-representational due to the invention of photography, videography, and other means of reproducing the natural world cheaply and easily.
On the other hand, as Scott points out, today I can press a button and step into a world of breathtaking beauty, inhabited by gods, demons, or merely men (*) -- and all it would cost me is about $60 and a decent gaming PC. So, clearly there's some demand for painstakingly rendered representational art; it's just not called "art".
My point is not merely that representational video games exist; but rather, that beautiful, elegant, and emotionally moving representational video games exist. Are they in the majority ? No, of course not; but then, very few buildings looked like the Notre Dame back in 1700s, either.
Frank Gehry's best buildings are inspired by his love of sailboats. His Disney Concert Hall in L.A. is basically a standard box building with a giant shiny abstract sculpture that has a clear sailboat-look placed around it.
It's hard to go too wrong with sails as an artistic inspiration.
This is random and not productive to the overall conversation, but where does the phrase "Whither [X]?" originate from? My boss used it recently and I didn't get it and felt bad about myself.
"Whither" is a somewhat archaic word generally meaning "towards where." It's kind of the opposite of "whence," which is a somewhat archaic word meaning "from where."
That's assuming you're asking about the literal definition and not the memetics connotation, haha. That I don't know, but my guess is that it comes from the same direction as "whomst".
What and that are from the same paired cognates in latin, but e.g. in norse they are from either specific ( sá, sé, þat) or inspecific (er, which can mean what, which, or when) demonstrative pronouns, and the interogative prnoun hverr is a completely different word altogether. IIRC anglo saxon is similar, although the word hvat ( pronounced "what") is an interjection in AS.
Dont forget "and yon" hither, hence, whither, thence, thither, thence are from English's germanic roots where words were careful to distinguish between motion and stasis, and in the case of those pairs, direction as to or from.
This is implicit in your post, but I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that "from whence" (e.g. "return to the X from whence you came") is as redundant as, say, "ATM machine."
Should be "let them ooze to the primordial slime whence they came" since the "back" is covered in whence. It would be like saying "let them ooze back back to where they came from"
I think I disagree here. "Back" is functioning as an adverb, not a preposition. It indicates something about the manner of their return; one could replace it with "quickly" or "triumphantly" or "slimily." The fact that the adverb and the object refer to the same place doesn't make the sentence redundant or grammatically incorrect. You wouldn't blink an eye at someone who said "I'm going back to my hometown," for example.
"Whither X" served as a parody of old fashioned self-serious foreign affairs journalism: e.g., "Whither Indonesia?" In other words, the implication is that the newspaper's expensive Indonesian correspondent doesn't have any headline news about Indonesia, but he has some thoughts about its future that he's going to share.
My guess is that it must have been a fairly common flourish in the nineteenth century, maybe cemented by Trotsky's book "Whither England?" I definitely first encountered it in Monty Python's "Whither Canada?" To be perfectly honest, I still don't know if it means "where, in an abstract sense, is country X going?" or "how do we get to the idealized, perfected version of country X?"
John 13:36. In Latin this question reads "Quo Vadis?" which you might have encountered in art. The New Testament verse may well refer back to Book of Ruth, but I'm positive that most citation links go through the New Testament.
‘ Part of a longer promise of fidelity, spoken by Ruth to Naomi, her mother-in-law. The longer text reads: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”’
i think you might be ignoring the role of novelty here. like, if youre the sort of person who is very interested in a given art form (say, designing buildings), youre gonna study them a lot, and then get bored of the types of buildings that already exist, and want to see and create new weird buildings. i mean, i agree that its weird and maybe bad that weird artsy buildings have become a thing for government buildings, but i dont think its surprising that the architecture world is interested in buildings that the average person isnt, because the average person doesnt want an interesting or novel building, they just want a good building (a reasonable desire!). its like stravinsky's atonal music. it sounds worse, like, aesthetically, but its very clearly weird and novel, and if you think about music all the time, (maybe) you want that.
but yeah, thats where i think the modern art communities' tendency toward weird unappealing stuff comes from. all the appealing-to-normies stuff got discovered already, and now people are trying to find weird new ways to work in the form
I don't think modern buildings look more different from one another than traditional buildings do. I just saw the Sagrada Familia today, which seems interestingly different from every other building but still clearly ornate and more in the "traditional" than "modern" camp.
Do other people think modern buildings are more varied?
i dont think the version of modern architecture that ends up in like, corporate buildings is particularly diverse, but i think the most famous and esteemed architecture of the last 50 years is *extremely* diverse. frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid look like they come from different planets.
The divergence correlates with mass media, so your theory makes sense. In the 1800s, an elite person had probably only seen a few dozens magnificent buildings in their life. Today, every architect has seen (pictures of) nearly every magnificent building on Earth. So as the pool of comparable buildings has exponentially expanded (from dozens to thousands), novelty has become much more prized.
Prestige within a creative field is so tightly bound with novelty that it’s pretty much inevitable that ambitious new works must abandon older forms, even when many of the artists and elites may prefer them.
Personally, I think the greatest music ever written was from the Romantic era, specifically Beethoven’s symphonies. Plenty of music critics (classical ones, at least) would agree. And yet, nobody writes in that style anymore, and nobody seems to think anybody should be writing in that style. Romantic music is done, like it or not (I don’t).
If I discovered an unknown symphony by Beethoven, as brilliant as any of his others, and I passed it off as my own work, would I get any traction? I think the same critics that lionize Beethoven would dismiss my symphony as some kind of silly, Beethoven impression. Maybe they would concede that it’s a particularly well-executed impression, beautiful and clever and all that, but nothing that advances art form.
I think it’s interesting that there may be an exception here, albeit a middle brow one. If you want to write Romantic music, make it a film score. You won’t get the same level of elite respect, but everybody will love you (see Williams, John).
People do write music in that style. It's just that one can't make a living just writing in that style. Of course, a symphony requires a big commitment in time and energy, but getting one's symphony performed by a decent amateur orchestra is often a personal high point and money be damned.
The only composer I can think of who has had the ego to compose directly in the style of Beethoven is Carmine Coppola, father of Frances Ford Coppola, such as in this scene in "Black Stallion."
There's Louise Farrenc. Her music is wonderful and very much inspired by Beethoven, but she's only a little later than Beethoven-- respectable music hadn't turned ugly in her time.
I had forgotten about dramatic composers who write music for movies, video and live productions. They don't produce symphonies, but they'll use a lot of the same emotional mechanisms and musical mechanics.
There’s an interesting extension in there — parody gets close to this. I enjoy P.D.Q. Bach for the music just as much as I do for the weird musical jokes that require at least serious band geek background if not full on Bach historian reference material. Similarly, some of the stuff from people like Bo Burnam is only good for the humor, but some of it is legit catchy and fun in its own right (note the massive spread of tiktok memes based on the recent Netflix special.)
Parody works best when the person behind it really knows what they’re doing. I sang some serious choral pieces composed by Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach back in college. The piece about Mary Queen of Scots from his “Three Meditations” was one of my favorites.
No, we mustn't. We may. If we wish to. Or if it was at least as pretty/as good as what came before (or better, though 'better' gets a bit complicated in arts).
But exalting rubbish just because it's novel? What's the point? And, if it takes years of training to see that something that looks/feels/sounds rubbish isn't actually rubbish - well, that's a technical accomplishment, sure but an artistic one? I have my doubts...
Maybe reading too much into things, but something bothers me about this as an argument. Surely being a reactionary is bad if the new development you are reacting against is good, but being a reactionary is good if the new development you are reacting against is bad. Using the word to dismiss someone like this *presupposes* that the modern development is better than what came before. Which may well be true, but it would need to be argued for. And I am not sure that it is all that obvious that modern music surpasses Beethoven.
The people I knew writing in that style considered it a way to understand the music better. It wasn't about more or better, it was about understanding what was under the hood, so to speak. It was a way of appreciating it. I had a friend who wrote her thesis on using AI to generate fugues in the style of Bach. It was her way of appreciating how good Bach's fugues were.
Personally, I don't "get" music, but I know a lot of people do.
Even metal bands like 3 Inches of Blood suffered from this, with music critics unable to comprehend they weren't writing heavy metal in the 00's *unironically*.
I think if you can accept that Beethoven wrote as well in the style of Beethoven as it's possible to write, then a modern imitator could only write *as well* as him, and not better. And since Beethoven's music came first and is heavy with mythology, the modern stuff would never catch on.
However, there are plenty of times when a composer has essentially copied someone else's style, and because the imitator did it better than the original, it's the imitator that we remember. (E.g. J. S. Bach imitating Buxtehude, or Mozart imitating J. C. Bach.)
Fully agree. I don't think anybody should be trying to sound like Beethoven specifically. I do think there's space for new masterpieces within a Romantic-type style.
And "Romantic" shouldn't be used dogmatically either; if someone wants to add a didgeridoo, go for it.
> CORENTIN: Always wanting to experiment further, to move forward, is part of human nature. The use of new chords and more and more complex rhythms in order to express as closely as possible the spirit of the new times has led to the dissolution of tonality. As long as it remained natural, this evolution produced masterworks in which tradition and novelty coexist in infinitely variable percentages. The dosage was sometimes explosive, sometimes tousling, but often successful.
>
> Today, I’m more convinced than ever that there is no natural border between styles. The schools may be opposed but not the styles, which should complement each other. But in the 1960s, suddenly it was all about serialism and electro-acoustic music; there was the quasi-institutional obligation to wipe out the past, and the subsidies only went to what has been called “contemporary music” (the word “contemporary” being abusively linked to a style instead of just meaning “of our time”). Without this political, ideological, and basically non-artistic doctrine, there would have been a natural complementarity between tradition and innovation, in music as in all other arts.
>
> [...]
>
> ERICH: I know some great American composers, like Arnold Rosner and Harold Shapero, have spoken of having felt alienated in American music departments, due to the dogmatic serialism there. In your experience, have the conservatoires of Paris been more accepting of 19th-century idioms?
>
> CORENTIN: Absolutely not – quite the contrary! Western Europe, and France in particular, has spearheaded this systematic destruction of all artistic tradition, of any style that could be related to the past. The conservatories have been forced to practice a clean slate policy. This undermining action, well supervised by the institutions and the media, has had the disastrous result that, for several decades, composition – in the original sense of the word – is no longer taught in the conservatories. I did all my musical courses at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) of Paris. I obtained five Prizes … but I was not able to attempt the “Composition” Prize since this Prize is only for composers of so-called “contemporary” music, that is to say “experimental”.
Reminds me of Fritz Kreisler, who did the opposite...
> Some of Kreisler's compositions were pastiches ostensibly in the style of other composers. They were originally ascribed to earlier composers, such as Gaetano Pugnani, Giuseppe Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi, and then, in 1935, Kreisler revealed that it was he who wrote the pieces. When critics complained, Kreisler replied that they had already deemed the compositions worthy: "The name changes, the value remains", he said.
Obviously there’s no right answer, but FWIW Gaudi is generally considered a modernist icon, and that seems very right to me. Sagrada Familia to me seems far closer to something in the 20th century than e.g. Notre Dame, the U.K. parliament.
Gaudi was a unique representative of the general trend in later 19th Century taste toward Art Nouveau, which was a decorative style based on flowers and other living things.
Art Nouveau was succeeded by Art Deco (e.g., the Chrysler Building), which is similar but based on rectilinear shapes without as many biological references.
Both were beautiful but expensive. Art Deco took a hit with the stock market crash of 1929, which accelerated the trend toward streamlining. The small number of buildings put up in the 1930s, such as the Rockefeller Center, are quite elegant.
But WWII changed elite tastes in favor of cheap-looking buildings in the name of egalitarianism and a general we-don't-deserve-beautiful-buildings self-loathing. On college campuses, for example, the good old buildings are generally from the affluent and tasteful 1920s, then the really ugly buildings are from c. 1950-1980. After that, many colleges tended to try to put up buildings that look rather like the old buildings that everybody likes, often just with bigger windows.
That last part must be an American thing, possibly because the people who donate buildings to colleges are the sorts of people who like that sort of thing.
In my country where nobody donates money to universities, new university buildings look like new office buildings, which means a bunch of glass in a more or less interesting shape. They give the impression of a slow and incomplete recovery from the awful-in-every-way buildings of the 1950s-70s.
Architects like to distinguish themselves professionally by developing a new look. For example, the New York Times just raved about Swiss architect Valerio Ogliati's "Architecture that Makes the Case for Discomfort." Ogliati builds houses out of concrete that look like opened cardboard boxes that you would need to stomp flat to fit it in the recycling bin.
Lots of architects have built ugly concrete houses before, but Ogliati has come up with a way to make them more expensive. So Kanye West is hiring him to build an underground artist's colony for him in Wyoming.
In contrast, until about 2000, even though I follow architecture a little, I never even heard of the man who had been Architect to the Stars in my hometown of Los Angeles in the 1950s, a black architect named Paul Revere Williams. Creative people like Frank Sinatra would call him up and tell him he wanted a house in, say, Japanese modern-style with world class acoustics for his hi-fi.
But despite this great back story of a black man making it to the peak of the home architecture pyramid in postwar Hollywood, I never heard Williams talked about by architecture critics because he didn't propound a new look or a new theory. He was dismissed because he designed homes in whatever style Lucy & Desi or his dozens of other famous clients wanted.
> Ours, he believes, is a globally mashed-up era with no meaningful shared references or objective truth. And so buildings, he says, must stand on their own. … takes his own inspiration, for example, from the monolithic rock pile structures of the Aztecs, for which historians cannot find an antecedent.
Art is the refuge for philosophers who can't stomach rebuttals, so I'll just say we seem to have different worldviews.
Paul R. Williams sounded familiar, he should be more famous, I heard about him from 99pi:
Much respect for the artist who can work in any style. I think in F is for Fake they talk about the forger often having phenomenal technical skill, because they can fabricate or source the equipment and mimic the stroke style of many other great artists from different periods. Yet if properly attributed, their works are often worth nothing.
Make sure you see Parc Guell, impressed me far more than the Sagrada Familia. The Dali museum in Figueres is also a really extraordinary experience - it's not a museum so much as a single giant work of art.
To the extent that new building methods have arisen (and living in New York City) I think architecture has really taken a turn. But like any other human endeavor it has cycles.
I think it is important to remember how many buildings people put up that fell down immediately because they didn’t really have a clue about what keep, building up. Flying buttresses were an engineering necessity before they became an aesthetic fetish.
That number was virtually zero. People might not have had as much theoretical knowledge about what keeps buildings up as they do now, but they knew what kinds of structures were sound.
I am reminded of the Code of Hammurabi: "If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death."
That wouldn't need to be in there if there wasn't at least the perception that badly-designed buildings that collapse on their occupants were a problem worth legislating against.
Something can be common enough to be worth legislating against whilst still being very uncommon. Modern countries all have building codes, but it would be false to suggest that modern buildings keep collapsing because nobody knows how to make them structurally sound.
The legislation is probably necessary not because builders didn't know how to build good buildings, but that you can make a lot of money by building a deficient one and charging the client for a good one.
The client often can't tell the difference, so you make the builder liable for failures.
I can do a design of anchors in concrete, but there's very little chance you'd know if I did it wrong--not because you couldn't understand it, but because ACI 318 Chapter 17 is a pain in the dick and few people who don't design anchors for their job will put in the effort. (Indeed, even if it *is* your job, you'll learn to do it, then use software provided by manufacturers thereafter.)
And if I specify adhesive anchors, those are *very* sensitive to proper installation. But it's cheaper for the contractor to do it wrong, because one major requirement is doing a good job cleaning the hole after its been drilled. (Dust left in there will dramatically reduce strength.) It's very unlikely you would catch a contractor who did it wrong, and once the epoxy hardens you have no way to tell if it was done wrong other than pull testing, which is very expensive--it can hold well enough to survive casual effort, but still be too weak for the design-basis load.
While this exact example is modern, the dynamic it describes hasn't changed in the past 3,000 years, hence Hammurabi's dictum putting the onus on the builder.
There's a Chinese robber problem going on here. Given the vast number of buildings constructed throughout history, it's easy to find examples of ones that collapsed. That doesn't mean that the percentage of buildings which collapsed was a particularly high one.
It doesn’t have to be common. It just Hass to be. It was when people tried to build buildings higher that they ran into trouble. Minarets and such. It took trial and error
If you look specifically at *famous old Japanese temples and shrines*, a very specific reference class, *all of them* fell down and were rebuilt, usually several times. And those were ones that people put an unusually high amount of work and expense into, the cathedrals of their day. Admittedly, this is due to fires and earthquakes, but those are things that modern engineering is much better at preventing as well.
Alternatively, _To Engineer Is Human_ by Petrowski. The theory is that new ideas in engineering are built much stronger than necessary. As time goes on, the reserves of strength are pared back until there's a disaster. Things are then built more carefully. Lather, rinse, repeat.
FWIW, I would have put the Sagrada Familia in the modern camp. But modern as in the Gaudi/neo gothic/art deco ways of the 1920s. EDIT: just checked Wiki. "Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (/ˈɡaʊdi/; Catalan: [ənˈtɔni ɣəwˈði]; 25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926) was a Catalan architect known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism."
So definitely "modern".
I think Summer is on to something. Personally, that's why I dislike almost all paintings/fine art post the impressionists/art deco/1920s. It gets to be rubbish very fast, mostly because (imho) fine artists are just jerking each others off.
Bassed on some reading I did related to this post, I think Gaudi doesn't actually count as "modern" in the contemporary usage of the term. "Catalan Modernism" basically corresponds to Art Nouveau, which comes earlier than what's called "Modernism" in other contexts ("Art Deco" comes between the two.)
I'm surprised you don't think of Sagrada Familia as the perfect example of a "beautiful building with modern technology". I thought it was more beautiful than any of the old cathedrals I've seen, Haga Sophia, Notre Dam and the likes included.
I mean, just the sheer amount of detail in every corner and the almost-pattern present everywhere, not quite symmetrical but still satisfying, meant to keep your gaze slowly moving.
It was genuinely psychedelic, it's a building, it's static, but I could swear it was moving and "breathing" while looking at it.
It's fantastic. But visiting it does tend to both provoke and immediately answer the question of "Why don't we build things like this any more, with the exception of this one actual thing?" Because it took 150 years to build and it's not finished yet.
I remembered this comment from nine months ago, so I came and found it to say that it has stuck in my mind and that has to say something good about it.
The Sagrada Familia is an outlier. It is plausibly the weirdest large religious building in over 2000 years of Christian history.
It's also one of my all-time favorite religious buildings (alongside the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia). Gaudi, in his strange and very individual way, was an absolute genius. And until his architecture became a symbol of Catalan nationalism, it was absolutely loathed by much of the contemporary public.
So I have no idea how Gaudi fits into a discussion of popular versus elite taste.
In some cities they totally are (think Singapore, Abu Dhabi, even Chicago has some pretty unique buildings). One aspect that drives some of the lack of purely ornate architecture (I'm guess) is the shift from noble wealth to commercial wealth. Google needs to continue to be profitable which constrains the amount they are willing to spend on a new building (and how long they are willing to wait for it) while the King can just jack up taxes or the Pope can sell indulgences and steal all of the marble in the Colosseum.
I guess there's a risk with equating modern with minimalist. Whereas minimalist, suggest reducing to a simple (single) form, there's no such limit on modernism. Considering the variables: colors, materials, shapes, structures, etc. there are infinite possibilities for exciting/inspiring modern design. Perhaps we're just in the mud hut period of modern design and it hasn't yet evolved.
I think modern architects try very hard to be varied, and if you score them on their own terms they contain diverse shapes, visible surfaces, historical references, etc.
But that type of score-keeping may not make much of an impression on somebody who thinks modern buildings are all ugly, leaky, and built to be torn down as soon as the 39 year depreciation schedule has run.
This is how I interpret really out-there fashion shows, too. But, at the end of the day, the fashion industry has to sell clothes at Target, so all the designs have to be reinterpreted back down to reality.
Great line about this in the movie (and I guess the book) “The Devil Wears Prada”. Paraphrasing here but Streep’s character says to the young assistant who doesn’t understand the subtle differences in sweater color tones something along the lines of “You know how many years of research, trail & error went into that particular shade of green that you randomly snatched from an isle at JC Penny? Many fucking years!”
The trouble with that is if it was a randomly chosen shade of green, or just the same green as they sold back in '78, it would also be fine and everyone would be just as happy.
The Anna Wintour-character in The Devil Wears Prada has total recall of every change of fashion of the last half-century and a strong knack for discerning whether the world is ready or not to bring a particular old look back into fashion.
The real Anna Wintour got to where she is because she really has that kind of brain.
If you want an uber-nerdy analysis of the role of novelty-seeking in the arts, there's a book by Colin Martindale called The Clockwork Muse that tries to fit equations of novelty to poetry, paintings, etc. I don't think it's really baked (too many parameters given the data), but it is a very interesting cut at the issue.
This is my interpretation of free jazz. "Why bother with rhythm or melody" sounds bad/weird to normal people but if you've spent your childhood and professional life playing highly structured music, maybe it's more appealing.
I've often thought of a notion of stylistic saturation, that once an art form has more (premium and varied) content than any human being could experience in a lifetime, the drive within the field for further development largely ceases. While no one writes like Beethoven, as a cellist I can say that many many musicians still play his music, and many audiences still appreciate it.
I think novelty is an important explanation in another way. Since modern style buildings are common and classical style buildings are rare and prestigious, many people think the classical style is better just due to novelty. But if we started building that kind of building en masse, people would quickly get tired of them.
In fact, we can kind of see this in the fact that it is *very specific* old buildings that people think are pretty. Modern imitations are just considered gauche.
> Maybe our civilization is still on probation after a multi-decade-long mass murder spree and we need buildings that carefully avoid inflaming our emotions. I don’t think anyone has ever claimed this seriously, but it makes a certain kind of moral sense.
people have ABSOLUTELY claimed this seriously, so so much postwar art is exactly about this, clearly and explicitly. please read some midcentury criticism or like any art history or theory
With all due respect to Jews, that's bullshit. If it wasn't barbaric to write poetry after the destruction of Troy by the Achaeans, after Athenians subsequently to the famous dialog had killed every male Melian and sold their women and children into slavery, after Romans had utterly destroyed her sworn ally Carthage and sown her fields with salt, after Temuchin's coalition defeated the Tartars and killed every single male taller than a wain's wheel hub etc. etc., then it's not barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, and vice-versa.
Nothing boils my blood more than seeing an author stifle the flow of his own post to express epistemic humility i.e.
> I am sure you will link me to great resources about this in the comments. Until then, some speculative responses that one might give...
Only for comments like yours to then chastise the author for a lack of deep reading. Suggesting a book that sheds light on the subject of the post makes sense, but your tone is unnecessarily dismissive. The author's hedging statements are specifically for people like you, and given that I find those statements slightly kill the experience as a reader, I would hope that their target audience would take them seriously.
lack of deep reading is not a big problem unless your entire point is that people within a system are thinking wrong but then you make it clear you have no idea what they’re thinking
I agree that deeper reading would shed light on much of this post, however I want to know, from a strategic perspective, do you think that using an uncharitable tone to deliver that message to the author is better than a charitable one?
Given that this was just a casual remark that wasn't part of any argument being made in the piece the "please read some..." manages to come across as an attempt to deligitimize any criticism or suggestion that maybe modern art isn't special and valuable made by anyone who hasn't proved they agree with you by wasting (insofar as they don't enjoy it) a bunch of time learning about 20th century art.
Im sure you didn't intend this but it comes across like an astrologer saying: how dare you question astrology when you don't even know what it means when Venus is retrograde and Jupiter is in Leo or whatever.
the whole “argument” is a weird combination of speculative narrative detached from reality/the historical record, and half-baked aesthetic theory about what’s valuable in art and why people like the things they do. I mean imagine using a single uninterrogated figure from a suggestive survey question to ground your opinion that this is all bullshit and spending the rest of your time trying to figure out why the elites could be so wrong. also zero awareness of practical considerations like resource constraints, relevant events in economic history, engineering, etc. it’s fine to critique it on the grounds that it’s wrong and un-rigorous by pointing to an especially egregious example of obliviousness.
if you’re gonna try to explain why people who listen to astrologers behave as they do and the way that that might have changed over time, you better have some knowledge of what astrologers actually say and what people behaving according to their advice take them to mean
Nice, the most reactionary post on this blog in a while, and yet it probably won't anger anyone.
I'd say the apocalypse did happen - we know it better as WWI, WWII, the New Deal/progressive governance, and the rise of the Soviet Union and the Third World.
>the most reactionary post on this blog in a while
Or: the clearest example in a while where reactionaries happen to share the correct opinion? I mean it's unlikely that reactionaries are wrong about _everything_. They must get _some_ things right.
IMO the architecture thing is somewhere where (as elsewhere) reactionaries have correctly identified a problem but don't get at the core issue, instead hazily blaming a perceived group of "elites".
The big issue is cars. We destroyed a great deal of our cities to make way for cars and the resulting infrastructure is bleak and ugly, and so now our cities are bleak and ugly. The most encouraging recent trend for beauty in our built environment is cities that are reducing the amount of space that is given over to cars, and making room for mass transit, pedestrians, and greenery (COVID-related outdoor dining is a part of it but the trend was happening before). A kinda plain building on an inviting street with people and trees is way better than a super-awesomely-ornate building surrounded by parking lots and highways where it feels dangerous to walk around.
My go-to for Tartarian History (though I've never seen him use the term) is AgarthanSchwab, on Twitter. Unfortunately, he's deleted many of his most relevant threads for this topic (such as one proposing that the Hindenburg was sabatoged and that the media was in on it), but this is the kind of rationale he uses as to how apocalypses could be collectively forgotten.
That was interesting. He seems to have it all lined up in his head as a nice theory. It's a good job that all women are primarily concerned with social standing and conformity though, because if they weren't there would be a gaping hole in his suggested compliance mechanism. Still compliance to the norm being what it is explains why I'm typing this in the religious (Church of England naturally) and moralistic society of the modern United Kingdom and not in some secular, tolerant society where women might have the vote and homosexuals be tolerated, or even worse socialists tolerated in polite society.
I prefer the idea that there was a prior civilization on this planet before the Permian extinction (which they obv caused). It's just plausible enough to feel real despite being super unlikely.
One day I'll write a story about them leaving us some records or info...maybe stowed on moon.
Spain has a lot of surviving fascist art. It's basically just neoclassical art. Good example is the Valle de los Caidos (super controversial within Spain, of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Fallen
Their whole shtick is to imitate stuff to bring back the great era. So they basically do art to imitate whatever origin myth they feel like they have, with their megalomaniac/overexpressed/righteous twist of course.
I don't know which group of embalmed cadavers voted "Three Dancing Figures" San Francisco's best public art, but they haven't got a clue. The correct answer is obviously the Bay Lights on the Bay Bridge. If you relax the "public" requirement, the Serpent Mother was made here and is on a completely different level than "three dancing figures".
AFAIK construction costs (specifically contractor prices) and building codes are a huge deal with why all buildings look the way they do today. Even the billionaire's house didn't involve a hundred artisans painstakingly sculpting around all doorways etc and would cost a lot more if it did. Also there's a lot less supply today of construction workers who can do intricate wood carving so even if you wanted to have carved sculpted doorways it'd be hell to source them, so unless you really really care about it you might as well just get nice airy construction filled with natural light.
Poetry no, but it would explain clothing. The thing about the ornate clothing of past eras s that you generally needed a servant (or two) to help you gets dressed.
I have an outfit that looks a bit like this: http://www.muslimmarriagecenter.com/site/muslim-groom-in-bangalore . It is pretty easy to put on and comfortable, but I never wear it except for costume purposes because people would think I was insane. I cannot think of any labor-related reason why people don't wear outfits like that one anymore.
People certainly wear clothes like that in India, and presumably in other countries too, for special occasions like weddings. I think this must be culture-specific, with American/Western influence slowly making it spread to the east - the image of the Chinese high-status man in a Western suit made me think not of how Chinese men's tastes must have simplified a lot, but of how businessmen in Asia today feel the need to dress in Western clothing, perhaps to appeal to Western business partners (along with colonial influences, etc.).
Perhaps this gives more strength to the Protestantism/Catholicism hypothesis, as something that applies to the West more than the East?
iirc there was also a gender aspect to how Western clothes got so plain. In the industrial era it came to be viewed as foppish and unmanly for men to prettify themselves, so for a long time in the nineteenth century you had this situation where women were still heavily ornamented while men were walking around in plain black all the time. The in the twentieth century, women took on more masculine-looking clothing as a way to reject Victorian sex roles.
Just why ornamentation came to be viewed as unmanly is another issue, but I suspect it had something to do with the shift in power from the aristocrats to the business class.
Men's clothing simplified in the Victorian era when England was at the height of its political, military, scientific and industrial power. I know that by mid-century, men's formal wear was getting darker and simpler. Maybe the English decided that they ruled the world, so they didn't need fancy clothes to show off, just the Union Jack a regiment and a battleship or two. I'm guessing Queen Victoria's widow's weeds after Prince Albert died cemented the style.
People copy the rich and powerful. It's the idea of cargo cults and sympathetic magic. When Olga of Kiev converted from paganism to Christianity, she issued commemorative coinage with Allah Akbar in Arabic impressed on it. Why a Muslim religious slogan? Because Islam ruled the Mediterranean in her day. When Japan opened to the west, its leaders adopted Western garb just as their armies adopted Western rifles and cannon and its industries adopted Western technology and processes.
When there is a "forward" power in the world, it becomes culturally powerful and people and nations tend to copy it. That's why modern men's clothing all around the world was borrowed from the Victorians and later the Americans. When China was a rising power in the East, nations like Japan and Korea adopted its symbols, methods and writing. It was similar with Greece and later Rome in the West.
If you want to do the Victorian theory, the short version of it goes, George IV was a flamboyant embarrassment. The new queen's policy of modesty was intentionally reactionary. The rest was mimetic desire.
I'm from Canada, and now live in the UK, but lived in India for a bit in-between. I *loved* getting dressed up formally for weddings etc whilst I lived there - I have never before or since felt so aesthetically beautiful.
Nah. There's a considerable difference between signalling that you are dressing differently but have put effort in (generally more acceptable) and signalling laziness (even if you'd actually never normally wear such an outfit).
I believe the invention of the electric washing machine was a *huge* revolution in domestic life, and ended up causing similarly large changes in how people dress. Women still have some fancy clothing that isn't machine washable, but not that much.
For guys machine-washability is almost everything. But a lot of women's clothing is not machine washable, either because of delicacy (eg attached rhinestones) or because of the fabric (ie requires dry cleaning).
I think at least part of what's going on is one has to disaggregate what clothes "do".
One job is "show off", and, as I pointed out for St Johns, that mostly now requires subtlety rather than showiness. Creating a garment that *looks* fancy is easy; creating a garment that *has* to be expensive because it involves constructions that few (and very expensive) machines can perform, or is obligate human-manufactured, is now how you show off.
Alternatively the job of the garment is "protect from weather" or "do exercise" or suchlike, and for those we now have vastly superior technology (eg gortex for cold, spandex for many purposes) BUT a side effect of that is that we now want to optimize for functionality.
If the only thing you can wear, no matter what you are doing, is some uncomfortable poorly-fitting woolen thing, maybe you try to compensate via decoration. But if the garment can be improved along functionality dimensions, that begins to be where you put much of your effort, both as manufacturer and as consumer.
And so women might buy $15 amusing sneakers with rhinestones on them, in the expectation that they are for wearing on weekends while doing errands, and will last a year then fall apart; but if they are hikers they will also buy serious walking boots which are optimized to the heck for walking -- and with no fripperies like rhinestones.
As I've said, I think we also have this with private homes.
Busy decoration is cheap (we all have that grandmother or aunt whose house is overflowing with knicknacks and collectibles) and is no signal of anything.
Meanwhile those who have owned a home for a while realize the joy of optimizing the home for functionality. Busy decorations built into a wall are nothing but a magnet for dust and form a space that cannot be modified as desires change. Whereas a turntable in the garage, or a heated pool, or very quiet variable speed AC system, continue to delight day after day, decade after decade.
In a way this is the triumph of Le Corbusier "a house is a machine for living" but (when you look at it) optimized along the dimensions people care about.
ie I don't think there's a question here of "why do the commoners choose the clothes and homes they do"; it's almost ALL in
- why do the artists and architects reward and judge as they do?, plus
- why do (some fraction of) the rest of us accept this in (some) architecture as we do?
If the explanation were "creating a garment that *has* to be expensive because it involves constructions that few (and very expensive) machines can perform, or is obligate human-manufactured, is now how you show off," then rich people would walk around in garments crocheted from fine silk thread, since crochet is easily distinguishable from any other form of cloth-making, and has not yet been automated. Nalbinding would be an even more extreme version of this and would have the advantage of making the garment more durable instead of less. But as far as I can see, crochet and nalbinding have essentially zero presence in high fashion or even business suits. A Brooks Brothers suit might cost US$1500 but it's machine-woven and machine-sewn.
I did wear a Muslim shirt at work one time (I work in IT), quand people did think I was crazy. They thought it looked ugly and told me as such. To my Muslim relatives, this was on the contrary a very niece piece of clothing. The difference in appreciation was striking.
I have this pink sunset silkscreen dragon shirt I wear to martial arts practice sometimes. It gets about 50/50 "that's awesome/that's horrible" reactions.
Haute couture / art fashion is extremely ornamented - in fact, the more common criticism of art fashion is that it's /too/ over the top. Some high status people do wear such ridiculously over-ornamented art clothing, as eg the Met Gala red carpet demonstrates, but the types of people you've chosen as emblematic of high-status aren't them. The average political leader or business person just doesn't wear high fashion clothing, they wear sensible, well made, expensive but essentially normal clothing.
An off the rack suit made from spun woven plastic is all of ridiculous and nonsensible. A property structured bespoke suit made out of the right foundations and the right weight of wool or linen always looks good ("it makes fat men stout, and skinny men imposing"), plus pockets, all the useful pockets.
And very very rich men and powerful statemen like them because the jacket foundation can be thin armor plate.
I think that if you look at how much less there was to do or read or whatnot, how many fewer things there were to buy or invest in, etc, then you see that the opportunity costs of the time and labor that go into good poetry and good statues are much higher today than they were say 500 years ago or even 150 years ago.
The common denominator between all of these examples is that they're labor-intensive and labor becomes more expensive over time. We're materially more wealthy than earlier civilizations for mass-producible goods, but not for hand-made, for Baumol effect reasons.
Ornate clothing could be mass-produced. A formal suit in an interesting color could certainly be mass-produced. Ornaments on buildings could be mass-produced, unless you insist on each ornament being unique.
Yes, and Menard's sells a white plastic Federalist doorway. Federalism for Dummies, a brick box with some white kinda-Greek pillars and a doorframe stuck on, works great for one through maybe three story buildings. Smart people can make a real Federalist Style work a little beyond that, but you look at the White House and it's stretching things. If the damn thing was twice as tall everyone would laugh. What can you do with a twenty-floor skyscraper? It's too far off the human scale. You might as well just make it a glass box, the Yale Box if you can afford it, and shrug.
I like arching walkways though. Maybe something could be done.
Poetry on the other hand got swamped by all the students taking and retaking Bonehead English over and over. No really good poetry can be taught to people who just can't read well, so they might as well do whatever fad is 'teachable'. And once women started getting real jobs outside teaching, the quality of teachers tanked.
Ornate clothing IS mass produced. We just don't think of it as "ornate" for cultural reasons. For example quite a lot of outdoors-wear has a billion stringy tie-pulls, pockets, hoods, hoods that roll up into more pockets, layers of unobtanium to keep you cool in summer and warm in winter, etc. We don't perceive this as ornate-ness because it is justified with practical value, but if you took it back to the 11th century they'd assume it was some symbolic artistic display of wealth.
Another example: t-shirts often have very ornate and unique designs on them. We don't think of t-shirts as ornate clothing because the underlying fabric is designed for practicality and mass production, but people find lots of ways to express all kinds of complex artistic sentiment with them.
This is a good point - I get shirts from threadless.com, and they are often very beautiful and ornate designs. Which is interesting that this only finds a market on low-status clothing (t-shirts).
Interesting colors can easily be mass-produced. But I believe that for buildings, that isn't exactly true. My understanding is that if you're making a building out of hand-carved stone blocks, then hand-carving them into ornate patterns isn't that much more work than hand-carving them into a flat block. But if you're making it out of drywall and a wooden or steel frame, then making that drywall or frame ornate is going to take a lot more labor than making it flat (even if both are much less than the labor involved in making flat hand-carved stone blocks).
Lace is an interesting example. For a while, it looked as though people had an insatiable and possibly innate desire for lace. After it could be mass-produced, it was used less and less, except for vestigial amounts on women's underwear. And now even that seems to have pretty much faded out. Not gone completely, but not the most common thing.
I don't think lace does well in washing machines, and now that we have washing machines, convincing someone to wear something that isn't machine-washable has a much higher bar to meet.
It machine washes pretty well, if you have a front loader washing machine, andor can trust everyone doing your laundry to use a washing bag. I'm seeing more and more lace again on young women, mostly on dresses they buy from or sourced from Taobao. Taoboa merchants care about what people want to buy, and care zero about what the "high fashion" industry wants to sell this season.
I think higher ratio of cost-of-labor to other costs and lower amount available of specialized artisan labor explains at least a lot of the consumer goods side (like for example making clothes with lots of sequins and patterns industrially is harder, and making a nice taylored suit is still ~hours of work by a taylor while earlier ornamental clothing was much more labor intensive). This doesn't explain poetry, but can explain statues.
To mass produce a brocade 17th jacket for $199 would be fairly easy. But when any Tom Dick and Harry can wear a fancy jacket - the real power players wear a hoodie.
When making things “fancy” becomes cheap the rich got for simple. There is also a status game - yes I’ve come to this meeting in my pajamas. You got a problem with that?
We (=the First World collectively) are the richest society in the whole of human history, if people in ancient Rome or the middle ages -- or heck, even the 19th century -- could afford to build beautiful buildings, we certainly can.
Also, it's just false to suppose that nice-looking buildings have to be ornate and expensive. I've seen plenty of attractive buildings made almost entirely of plain bricks.
If the minimum wage today is 10x some sort of bare subsistence level, then someone with a given level of wealth in the past could have gotten labor 10x cheaper. But we surely have more than 10x the wealth of the past.
Maybe it's a question of relative rather than absolute prices? Whatever you were trying to do with ornamentation in the past (signal something, make yourself happier to be in a space) there are cheaper ways to do it now, since labor is the good whose price has decreased the least?
Instead of getting ornamentation on your mansion (which, if you are going to do it tastefully may actually require you to train a bunch of people or to hire out the only 2 or 3 people in the country/world that are experts in what you are looking to do, I dunno), you could start a space travel company.
There are only 3 people in the country because there is more opportunity in other fields/pursuits and because, with the set of possible goods to choose from being much more vast than in the past, people prefer computers, cars, appliances, etc to fine arts.
These 3 people are the few obsessives who became fascinated with some niche skill and also had the business/entrepreneurial ability to be able to provide for themselves. Most people don't obsess over a trade when they could instead make a much easier living or an easy enough living in some other industry.
I knew a guy who travelled all over the country just restoring historic Spanish tile. Living like a high end corporate lawyer jsut being "nation's leading Spanish tile guy".
In a hypothetical world in which we are as wealthy as we are now but in which communication is slower and markets aren't able to operate well over large geographical spaces, couldn't one imagine that there would be more people willing to try out making a space travel company? Having the most ornate mansion in the surrounding 100 miles in that counterfactual world means something, whereas having the best space travel company in the surrounding 100 miles is fairly meaningless in our world.
Architecture has run into diminishing marginal returns. Over the last 10,000 years, most of the potential good building styles have been tried, so most of what is left for an ambitious architect who wants to come up with a novel look are bad building styles.
Isn't this just Baumol's cost disease again? The productivity of factory workers went up a zillion times, while the productivity of Florentine woodworkers stayed constant because they're carving stuff by hand (and if you did find a way to mass produce it out would be considered tacky instead of fancy), and the result is that Florentine woodworkers become massively more expensive relative to a factory worker's output.
It's because back in Florence, society was mostly divided into peasants (with no money) and rich elites (with tons of money). If you wanted to make it big, financially, you had to cater to the elites.
In the modern world, society is dominated by the middle class. Catering to rich elites can still earn you some nice cash, but you will never make it rich that way. As I said above, it's the difference between making the Emperor's coronation dress for $1M, and running a T-Shirt factory that makes $1M per day. Thus, virtually all of the modern artisans are trained to optimize mass-production, not to create bespoke decorations.
Let me see if I understand you correctly - in Florence, buying power in the economy was dominated by rich elites so the things that got made and to a lesser extent the things which became popular were things that satisfied them. In now, buying power in the economy is dominated by the middle class, so the things which are made and become popular are things which satisfy them. Ornate decorations and monuments satisfy rich elites, space flight companies satisfy the middle class? That seems like it still leaves us back at the original question of why we get the kind of buildings the (current) middle class claims not to prefer doesn't it?
Mansions, business buildings, and public buildings are three separate spaces with different incentives. When it comes to mansions, you can absolutely see ornamentation side by side with (very expensive, but plain looking) special wall finishes. Look at any wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood!
In that space two issues are
- you don’t want to look TOO a different from every else bcs resale value, and the neighbors will complain (probably always true), and
- there are different things to spend money on. That mansion with fancy ornamentation has terrible insulation (temperature and sound), imperfectly straight lines (still hard to get right, especially high up) and lousy plumbing. Today I can spend that money on a three-head shower and a hot water
I'm sure there is a cost desease effect going on, which would explain why your average building is much less intricately ornamented than Sagrada Familia. Still, at the high end, there should be intricately ornamented mansions.
This stuff definitely still does exist, it's just rare. Much as I agree with Donald Trump on many things, I don't think I'd want to live in his apartment, I would genuinely prefer a simpler and cleaner approach to interior design.
Agreed, some of people who are rich enough to pay for it, actually choose to decorate their homes this way (although this particular example will strike most as extremely tacky).
Now, most heavily ornamented places (even the ones I find beautiful) tend produce in me a sensory overload effect, that makes me not want to have my house decorated that way. I wonder whether that is just a product of a culture that doesn't reward heavily ornamented places, or a more fundamental cognitive/psychological effect.
I look at that and I say "New York City". And I mean it, whenever I've stayed in a NYC hotel or visited someone in a nicer NYC condo or townhome, there is a certain heavy baroque ornateness to everything that I would see *only* in NYC.
That's true, but the forms themselves aren't too bad - it's the monomaniacal obsession on gold that ruins it. The Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi has a similar issue, at least in the public areas I got to gawk at. Lots of gold and marble, but it's so monotone it gives everything this offputting air. If they'd done more contrasting designs it might've been better. A gold and white monotone isn't it.
Many labor-intensive art forms like Persian rugs are dying because people have better opportunities now, even in a country with a basket-case economy like Iran’s wrecked by incompetence, corruption and international sanctions. Also time horizons have changed, no one is willing to wait a century for a new cathedral to be built.
But our wealth is much higher exactly because of mass production and standardization. It's not because we got physically 10x faster at carving wood with a knife. The only reason we feel richer is because there are factories churning out mostly standardized components like concrete, steel girders, large glass windows that are then quickly assembled using more standardized machines and processes.
Don't underestimate the impact of better glass. If you can't make windows bigger than a postage stamp then filling the outside walls with griffins makes sense. If you can make your walls entirely of glass then basically everyone will pick natural light over the griffins.
That's why I agree with the top of this thread: modern buildings look samey and boring because when everything is done by hand and every window is tiny due to limits in glass manufacturing, the cost of adding fiddly bits to the outside isn't that large compared to the overall cost of building. But when an entire skyscraper is expected to be built in 24 months from scratch, the architect is limited to what can be done within the toolkits society provides him with.
<i>Don't underestimate the impact of better glass. If you can't make windows bigger than a postage stamp then filling the outside walls with griffins makes sense. If you can make your walls entirely of glass then basically everyone will pick natural light over the griffins.</i>
New housing (one of the few types of building where architects have to actually pay attention to what average people want) aren't made entirely of glass. Not to mention, buildings made of glass are generally very expensive to keep liveable -- you need lots of heating and air-conditioning, else anybody living inside is going to freeze during the winter and roast during the summer.
Fancy housing does usually have pretty big windows. But again, if you're making a house out of hand-carved blocks, then hand-carving the blocks into an interesting pattern is not much additional work. Whereas drywall and 2x4's are extremely cheap compared to the plainest hand-carved block, and there's no easy way to make drywall and 2x4's ornate without getting back up to the hand-carved expense level.
I was thinking about this recently with respect to "Clickspring"'s playing-card press: https://youtu.be/3PwAQZNLy0I. Evidently it took him six months to make, using a lot of modern machinery and high artisan skill. So if he had commissioned another artisan to make it for him, rather than making it himself, he might have had to pay US$50k. Which seems pretty expensive, but still within a Bill-Gates-mansion kind of budget.
And accountability! If you're a dictator king or a servant of God himself then spending a century building a giant cathedral by effectively "taxing" the peasants is no big deal. You can do what you want, you're the king!
If you're a functionary in a democratic government then your options are much more limited. If you blow half your budget on stone sculptures put so high up hardly anyone can see them then heads will roll.
Most new buildings in Manhattan are intended to look attractive. A general criticism is that they look like perfume bottles: shiny, unique shapes that don't blend in with other buildings near them.
On the other hand, some misanthropic starchitects such as Thom Mayne go out of their way to build hateful buildings.
I think we can afford to build as many beautiful buildings as the people of antiquity or the medieval period did, and we probably do. It's just that we can *also* afford ten times as many plain buildings. Whereas for them, a plain building would cost nearly as much as a beautiful one, so they just didn't bother.
As someone who recently had a small house built, and who thinks that old fashioned architecture looks nice, I feel compelled to point out that something as simple as a brick wall is massively more expensive than standard construction techniques - neither bricks nor bricklayers are cheap, and not all bricklayers are good at their job.
(I actually wanted a stone wall for one of the walls, but got told that was impossible at any price due to overly restrictive building regulations; and that stone was terrible for thermal insulation, besides)
Where do you come from, and what are "standard construction techniques" there? Here in the UK, building new houses out of bricks is very much the standard.
Yeah, as a small-time developer my biggest obstacles to ornament are not matters of taste, but of cost and availability: Adding any kind of intricate ornamentation to the homes I build would add *enormous* cost - far out of proportion to any marginal increase in value - and there simple are not many craftsmen who can do it. Bit of a chicken and egg situation - if no one is building highly ornamented architecture, no one will learn how to do it, then you can't find anyone to do it, so no one builds it...
Have you read the Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist? He ambitiously (some would say over-ambitiously) takes this question on, as well many others, by examining brain hemisphere differences. His thesis is basically that left hemisphere dominance has caused an increasing reliance on the abstract (vs the experienced) , the right-angle (vs the “organic” shape), the interchangeable (versus the unique), etc. in art, communication, relationships, work, etc.
I’m not going to do it justice since I’m on mobile right now, but he has an interesting background: English Literature PhD at Oxford, before moving to neuroscience, brain imaging at Johns Hopkins, clinical practice at a London psychiatric hospital. So he brings a pretty unique (unique to me at least) approach to neuroscience, philosophy, and the arts.
Even if his literal claim about brain lateralization is weak, it’s an incredibly useful metaphor by which to view the world (and don’t get that guy started on metaphors), so it’s worth checking out.
You and McGhilcrist would agree on this point. I haven't read the entire book, but the introduction and first two chapters rattle through a litany of popular misconceptions regarding left brain / right brain differences, arguing most of them are false. I will say, I'm not fully onboard with all his conclusions, but some of the insights he draws from reviewing studies of stroke victims who suffer damage to only one half of their brain seem compelling.
IMO you’d be disabused of that notion if you read some other books or articles about other claimed and contradictory brain lateralization ideas and note that the claims have similarly supporting studies. One of the big things I’ve seen from this blog is “science is an idiot sometimes” - even Real Science regularly gets things badly wrong, and more so in softer areas like neuroscience and psych - and that pop science books will just either openly lie or terribly misrepresent evidence and ideas to prove a point.
I’d absolutely bet a grand that a 3/4ths majority of his brain lateralization ideas are entirely and completely wrong. Even if he claims “the popular ones are wrong but my new ones are correct”. And “even if it’s literally wrong it’s still a good metaphor” is IMO suspect to the point of actively harmful in the context of neuroscience
I’m not trying to be combative here, I genuinely want to know so that I understand where you’re coming from: have you read the book?
I agree that making literal claims about the brain that turn out to be metaphorical can be harmful for neuroscience. My claim is that those are useful metaphors for philosophy and ways of coming to terms with the world. And if that’s the case, if our phenomenology aligns with these deep metaphors he develops, then - regardless of how you think the brain relates to the mind - there must be some neurological basis to these ways of coming to terms with the world.
every single time I have heard of a “claim made about the brain” that’s used to inform or explain that isn’t literally true, it’s metaphorical implications end up being between laughable and ridiculous, and most aren’t literally true. And already in this thread the other guy who liked it used it to make some false and seriously misleading claims. The enlightenment and rationalism and industrialism and technics blah blah have seriously shaped everything we do nowadays! The world clearly has more of that or something. But trying to intermediate that with “brain region” seems to me actively harmful. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve gone into a lot of different other claims about hemispheric division to be rather confident that it only detracts from the existing wide ranging debate about the enlightenment and machines and such
> And if that’s the case, if our phenomenology aligns with these deep metaphors he develops, then - regardless of how you think the brain relates to the mind - there must be some neurological basis to these ways of coming to terms with the world.
no? What’s the neurological basis in water for vortices or fish swimming? What’s the neurological basis in a computer CPU for being able to run Quake or a black hole code? There isn’t necessarily a “detail process” and an “abstract process”, or a detail region and an abstract reason - just like water doesn’t have a “vortex part” and a “laminar part” somewhere within each molecule or in the individual particles equations
I.e. the statements and inferences that are implied by your “neurological basis to these ways” are false, even though “for all X: X has some basis and explanation” is tautologically rationalismly true
So, actually you should read the book, because you and McGilchrist would see eye to eye on this stuff. I, too, have read too many pop-science neuro books to be familiar with all of the reductionist simplifications and pitfalls. But as I said at the outset, the Master and His Emissary is very different.
I'll take the bet, happily: he's enormously erudite and serious. Reading 'The Master & His Emissary' on a Kindle is slowed by checking the (thousands) of references linked. It feels like the most demanding sustained reading work I've done pretty much since the harder stuff (e.g. 2 and a half D perception, etc.) I occasionallly had to read at Oxford ('Experimental Psychology, Philosophy & Statistics'). The new book is even more weighty. He's more than earned the right to be considered seriously.
Ignoring the correctness of the brain bit, I'm very bad at noticing those details which I don't consider relevant. I also prefer all the modern examples to the older ones, other than the statues which just look dumb.
Those two tendencies (not easily noticing what isn’t considered relevant - really a narrowing of what “is relevant” - and a tendency toward the modern/post-modern aesthetic) fit completely into his thesis of left-hemisphere dominance (which can be a short hand for a series of phenomenological and cognitive traits that correlate to one another, if you want to set aside the brain stuff. Though the brain stuff is reasonably persuasive.)
This book was discussed hereabouts before, tangent to the Julian Jaynes book. That got me to read it. I thought it was poorly written - too difficult to understand and very repetitive. With a better editor it could have been 1/3 the length and easier to read. The content struck me as plausible, it agrees with my perception of my consciousness. But beware of typical mind fallacy.
I like all of the modern pictures more, except maybe the last one. I really, really do. Completely instinctively. So much so that I'm finding it impossible to wrap my head around the idea that I'm in a small minority, or that people might think I'm faking it for status. I have no artistic/humanities background of any kind. So...just...what? I'm so confused.
I prefer modern buildings too. Guess I'm part of that 30%. Shining towers of glass rising into the sky, gleaming in the sun. Elevators that pairs every trip to your cubicle with a breathtaking view. Floods of natural light during the day, beacons of light (=warmth, safety, progress) during the night. Oh, and preferably with a nice water feature at the bottom to cool everyone off in summer, please.
That said, the sort of modern buildings that are just plain concrete boxes with no attempt to even hide the seams - puke. Only public sector buildings seem to go in for that though. You wouldn't catch Goldman Sachs building something like the Milan university.
BTW the image of the Google HQ is misleading. I've worked there. The HQ is a sprawling campus where most of the buildings were bought from other companies with more normal levels of wealth, but the centrepiece of the HQ is a public park surrounded by the old SGI buildings, and it looks like this:
Could you specify which company you are talking about? I presume google, but Alphabet is not the most valuable company in the world. Apple is, currently, ,and there HQ would not be characterized as a construction site for a Toys r Us
And so much easier to get lost in. I've visited that building. My host got lost walking back from the entry desk to her own desk.
That's not the only time I've had that experience. I've visited the Menlo Park Facebook campus designed by Frank Gehry, and my host got lost walking from his desk to the receiving desk, and then got lost again walking to our assigned conference room.
And then there is the Frank Gehry pile of glass trash that is the MIT Stata Center. I was at a tech meetup programming unconference there, and we eventually had to keep three volunteers running to find the people who kept getting lost just walking back from the washrooms. Which was to be expected, because despite having turn by turn directions, a MIT CS grad student got lost trying to guide us to our meeting space, despite that being the building she spent most of her time in.
I agree. Hospitals, even huge sprawling ones (I think of my experience doing daywalks around the interlinked buildings of the Mayo Clinic complex) generally don't have the "get lost in" problem.
As a counterpoint to my experiences in the Google, Facebook, and MIT complexes, Amazon building that the company built for itself also have the "you don't get lost in them" nature. If you gave me the location code of an arbitrary desk or conference room in a building built by the company, I would instantly know which airport to fly to, and then once inside the building probably could walk to the desk with my glasses off.
Boring economic answer: labor is massively more expensive.
All of the highly ornate clothing and buildings require a lot of labor to both create and maintain You can't actually dress yourself in the elaborate formal attire of previous eras and the intricate details of classical architecture requires a lot of painstaking labor to create and maintain. Some people are wealthy enough to afford an army of servants now but the number of such people is relatively few so the style is less elaborate. I think it was Agatha Christie who said "I never thought I would be so rich that I could afford a car or so poor that I couldn't afford a servant."
Yeah, sculpture doesn't really fit in, but I think it would explain somewhat why billionaires don't build elaborate mansions (or at least mansions that don't look particularly elaborate from the outside). It looks too weird and out of place to build something like the Cardiff Castle now even if you could afford it. At some point in the past there were a lot of people who could afford to build a castle so rich people competed to build the most ornate, magnificent castle possible. But now there are many fewer people who can afford that so it would seem weird to do it.
One other thing that occurred to me reading your response is that I think simple is not an accurate description. They are less ornate to look at but much fancier inside. Maybe part of it is that when it is not possible to differentiate the interior of a house (with appliances and computers and other technologically sophisticated gadgetry) you pour your money into ornate decorations.
Plenty of informal clothes (t-shirts etc.) have fairly elaborate patterns (not to mention bedsheets, curtains, and other fabric items), so I don't think it's cost that prevents formal clothing from being patterned as well.
And as I said in reply to another comment, beautiful buildings don't have to be elaborate and ornate. Many old buildings are beautiful because of the harmony and symmetry of their parts, not because they're festooned in sculptures.
I'd also about relative costs. All clothing used to be extremely expensive (like a year's salary). Expensive clothing still exists, but it's a niche. Everyone has switched to cheap clothing.
Look at something like St Johns dresses or suits. These are gorgeous, expensive, and technically very sophisticated (in ways you only appreciate if you know something about textiles).
But the cost is being spent on subtle displays of difficulty, not in your face ornamentation. That’s the question. And I think, in fashion, the answer is simple — you need to know a lot to know just why it’s so difficult to make such a dress.
Or to put it differently, it’s easy to fake rhinestones; it’s not easy to fake a full print design (wider than the average machine) or a flared knit… There’s a proof of work there.
I would like to find more things that are straightforwardly pleasing to an unsophisticated consumer. Are there any good sources of content recommendations that filter based on the judgment of thoughtful but not high-status individuals? Especially interested in the cases where the content is also undervalued by the market, and e.g. you can buy cheap art that also looks fantastic.
This problem seems mostly solved in music, where there are tons of ways to discover new things and explore popular content. But in art, clothing, furniture, poetry, architecture, etc., it seems much harder. Would love recommendations!
Browse through DeviantArt. I often bought art from there when I was younger. Lots of really skilled artists doing stuff in a realistic, non-post-modernist way, but still very creative.
"Beside ... St. Peter’s Basilica ... dwell savages in mud huts."
I think that an unexamined possibility here is that 99% of humanity was living in mud huts when St. Peter's Basilica was built, and that they don't exist any more, so we only remember the buildings of the richest members of those societies. Maybe we have successfully reduced inequality, to the point where those buildings are no longer worth it to build, but now no one lives in mud huts. (note that e.g. Brutalism is explicitly about this; the building of non-ornate civic buildings is to signal that the building serves the public, not the ruling class.) Obviously this doesn't explain everything, but it's worth considering as a factor.
"I think that an unexamined possibility here is that 99% of humanity was living in mud huts when St. Peter's Basilica was built, and that they don't exist any more, so we only remember the buildings of the richest members of those societies."
I'm guessing you must be an American, because in Europe, there are plenty of quaint, non-elite historic streets, picturesque villages, old cottages, and the like, which are widely considered beautiful in their own right.
"Brutalism is explicitly about this; the building of non-ornate civic buildings is to signal that the building serves the public, not the ruling class."
Except, of course, that it's the ruling class which supports brutalism, whereas the public consistently prefers traditional buildings by an overwhelming margin. So in reality, brutalism is about pretending to serve the public whilst actually forcing them to submit to elite desires -- like 99% of modern politics and culture, in other words.
Even in Europe, the beautiful house of the past that survived were owned by wealthy people (poor people's house tend to degrade quicker and were not maintained enough to survive even 50 year). And those house of rich merchant/farmer looks more a Google HQ than a mini Versaille.
Plenty of villages have old cottages, which weren't rich people's homes (the local rich guy would be living in the big manor house on the outskirts of the village).
> Even in Europe, the beautiful house of the past that survived were owned by wealthy people (poor people's house tend to degrade quicker and were not maintained enough to survive even 50 year).
That is false. Many people in France live in 200/300 years old houses, some of which were old barns that were transformed. Farmhouses were not rich people's home.
The Romans didn't live in mud huts, and their descendants didn't either. St. Peters was built by a rising power. Western Europe was emerging from its post-Roman setbacks and the increasingly wealthy popes wanted to show off by building something impressive. They even moved an Egyptian obelisk into the middle of it. The Vatican has preserved the various proposals for moving it including the winning entry by Fontana. Getting it from Egypt to Rome was no big deal for a Roman emperor, but it took serious engineering funded by a wealthy pope to move it a few hundred feet. By the time NYC got its obelisk, it was all steam power and rail. Nowadays, it would be a pain in the ass because it wouldn't fit in a 40' container so breakbulk rates would apply.
I think it's not so much wealth per say, but rather people don't tear down and make efforts to preserve the prettiest things (with prettiness of course correlated with wealth)
It's plenty clear to me that lower classes embrace ugliness as well. Rap music and everything related to hip hop culture being the prime example. Altogether, there seems to be a diminished capacity for feeling disgust.
Is there any way to distinguish what you are saying from "I dislike art from genres I'm not interested in" other than the reflexive disdain for it being low status? If you saw people wearing traditional Mongolian clothes and throat singing and didn't like it, you would naturally assume it's because of differing tastes. But low status members of your own culture are just inherently wrong?
It’s an aesthetic judgement but literally all statements about architecture are such, and “a cancerous lump on a face is bad” or “that smells bad” is an aesthetic judgement too, so aesthetic judgements can’t all be bad. I love some blues music, but have nothing but revulsion for rap - you’re assuming that disliking rap comes from disliking the minority popes and that is not true.
Smells bad is not purely asthetic. Certain smells (rotting food, human waste etc) are pretty much universally accepted as bad smells, presumably for evolutionary reasons. Humans quite probably have similar reactions to cancerous growths and the like, although I suspect a more asthetic element kicks in here with the ever-mutable ideal of human beauty/perfection.
So you can't justify your dislike of rap by comparison to a bad smell, because all that shows is that you've categorised rap as equally unpleasant as things humans tend to avoid, without actually justifying your asthetic choice (it's also frankly insulting to people like me who like some rap). Rather there's a different class of asthetic experiences where we have much less automatic human tendencies to react and therefore our engagement is purely asthetic: whilst you can still dislike rap because for some reason you find it repugnant, it might be polite to realise that this is a personal reaction, and perhaps to seek to indicate what causes this reaction.
Incidentally, I would suggest rap is another area where in the US there seems to a cubic-building tendency in action, with the stuff that is played on radio often lacking the skill and ornamentation of older songs. Although I could just be getting old...
Aesthetic isn’t a synonym for “not universal”. I don’t see why the senses of beauty people agree and disagree on are categorically different at all. Someone who has their smell receptors knocked out wouldn’t see an Olympic pool worth of pig feces (used to hold it near industrial animal farms, and quite unpleasant), and I don’t see how that’s any less aesthetic than disputed fine fragrances. One finds a beautiful woman beautiful in similar ways for agreed and disagreed elements. One with a hearing disability might not distinguish between a metronome and Mozart, does that diminish the difference to the shahid of aesthetics?
Aesthetics are innate and innate ness can be aesthetic? Just as people may differ in their judgements and those differences mah be important. Of course it isn’t justified, although I’d offer as justification the complexity in voice tone and variance and the longer scale of patterns and emotions across classical music VS rap constraining itself to much less complex stuff - that’s kinda obvious and not important but you did ask. How is the human reaction to cancerous growth and different from that to Mozart?
I can't say about the cancerous growth for certain, although no doubt the research exists. My supposition is that a growth that is obviously unhealthy would likely trigger an instinctive disgust, akin to the bad smells. It's probably relevant that these smells are actually produced by things generally regarded as visually unpleasant as well: feces, mouldy food, corpses (less so skeletons, which are less dangerous to us). Whilst these can be used for visual asthetic purposes, all of these things are still normally transgressive in their use. I'm going to take some convincing that universal reactions and clearly-recognisable transgressive areas are not of a different class of asthetic preference to Mozart versus Public Enemy.
On which subject, when did Mozart become more complex than rap music? Different complexities sure, since Mozart was working in a radically different set of media to any rapper whose work I've encountered, but each has its own asthetics. You can appreciate both, one or the other or neither, but actually stating one is better than the other is frankly just an opinion. For what it's worth I think on average Mozart is better than rap, but would prefer to listen to the best rap than Mozart, but that's just my asthetics now. It's not something I can expect anyone else to agree with though, because their asthetics might be different.
> Certain smells (rotting food, human waste etc) are pretty much universally accepted as bad smells
food that smells like human waste = stinky tofu in Taiwan and much of China. It smells like someone wiped poo on the bowl. But they LOVE IT!
Plenty of foods smell pretty rotten/rancid, etc, various cheeses like Limburgur (smells like cat shit to me) or even blue cheese which to cultures that don't eat it smells horrid but if you "learned to like it" it suddenly smells delicious.
I know for me the smell of shrimp paste when first added to the pan in south east asian cooking really stinks but I love it because I know it means the delicious things are coming soon.
And you don't think its possible that your perception of what is "ugly" is at all influenced by cultural factors? Given art and fashion are the archtypal examples of culturally determined things?
I would say clothing and personal hygiene is the prime example of how the „lower classes“ in America have embraced ugliness. Not that lower classes in Europe are that much better, but overweight, ugly tattoos, wearing camo cargo shorts, a black t shirt with an aggressive ugly message and a baseball cap is still a mark of American distinction. The Eastern European track suit and jewelry look is brutal but not as sloppy.
Would you be prepared to consider that fans of hip-hop simply hold a conflicting ideal of beauty to you? I am a bit self-interested here, as I prefer what I see as good hip-hop to classical, and I'm not adverse to films that might well induce disgust.
Also, I suspect the strongest opposition to these things are also found in the lower classes (whatever you mean by that). The upper classes tend to be more tolerant of differences in opinion even if they can still use these as social markers.
"...I'm not adverse to films that might well induce disgust."
Sure, eg. Eraserhead is one of my favorite movies. But that's because it still manages to be a work of art. I would say that the ability to embrace something devoid of esthetic value might result from a lack of disgust. But that by itself doesn't place disgust and art in opposition.
"...I suspect the strongest opposition to these things are also found in the lower classes..."
Possibly, but the point was that embracing ugliness is seen in both upper and lower classes.
Man its almost like aesthetics are subjective. Which rather undermines your claim to objectively determine certain subcultures fashion and music to be bad
I was responding in kind to ksdale. However, this discussion is about a change in esthetics, away from a 'universal,' towards something cruder and/or something that people pretend to prefer. *Given* the premise of this discussion, then yes, rap definitely fits the pattern: a 'musical' genre that manages to do just fine without *melody.*
The idea that people are pretending to make meaningful distinctions between good and bad rap music is pretty easy to test.
For example: In 1987, The Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone was so taken with the new genre, that he decided to make a rap album himself. You can Google "Dee Dee Ramone Funky Man" to see the result of that decision. The year of 1987 was also the year that Eric B and Rakim released their debut album "Paid in Full." Most people who know rap music would regard him as one of greatest, if not the greatest, rappers of all time and acknowledge him as one of the originators of the technique that almost all rappers use today.
I can believe that you just won't like Eric B and Rakim. But if I played you both Dee Dee Ramone's "Funky Man" and the title track from "Paid in Full" and offered you $1,000 to tell me which is considered one of the genre's seminal tracks and which is a failed novelty record, I have some confidence that you could win the money.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe you are wealthy enough that $1,000 is insufficient motivation or maybe you really cannot tell the difference. Hard to make a case with an N=1. So, we could increase the pool of listeners and increase the sample of music.
There are plenty of examples of non-rapper celebrities who have recorded rap songs either because of the novelty or because they really wanted to be rappers. What would the result be if I randomly played both well-regarded rap songs and novelty attempts to a large enough sample of people? My guess is that we would find that people could successfully discern the two categories at a high enough rate that it would statistically rule out lucky guessing.
Oh I'm perfectly willing to grant that a horse turd tastes *better* than a dog turd, but that hardly implies that either is *good.* An objective indication of rap's vacuousness would be the fact that young children, with no real training, can become accomplished rappers. Heck, even someone with an IQ in the 60-70 range can be an accomplished rapper...
"Rap" was called "Beat Poetry" when whypepo did earlier. Rap improved on it by adding more interesting articulation and more interesting complex rhythms.
I don't like the *content* of 90% of rap, but I am first to say it's more musical and more pleasing to listen to the sounds of it than 90% of the flat thin soup that is "Modern Jazz".
Wow. I seem to have touched a nerve there. Half a dozen posts, with no content other than "I don' like it, so it's intrinsically badness". I will just use this whole exchange as an example of why having sumptuary laws for the arts is generally a bad idea, because someone like you will worm your way onto the committee.
(There was another precursor to rap, that was a bit like scat, but I don't remember what it was called.)
And yet even with the accompaniment of a few musical instruments, beat poetry didn't really pretend to be music. That would have been *dumb.* The 'improvement' that you see seems to me nothing more than a *strident* expression of ghetto attitude, a grunting leaning-into the (bad) poetry, that's then passed off as rather monotonous 'music.'
I like some jazz. But not even the worst jazz comes close to offending my ears the way that rap does.
I'm always baffled by these "but did you ever hear X" challenges. A bit like telling someone say that you don't like menudo, and they respond by suggesting that you try swimming in a pool of menudo. X always turns out to be something absolutely *awful,* and I end up all the more certain that there's *nothing* of value to be found in the entire genre. Yes, I've (attempted to) listen to Eminem before. He's been suggested to me several times. I'd rather have a nail hammered into my eardrum than listen to more than 30 seconds of his stuff.
Your point about academics getting caught in loops of talking to each other is interesting. For a while in the field of international relations it's been "low status" to do work that engages with things happening in the policy world. This has in part led to the scholars who engage with politicians being somewhat more crackpot-y than we'd like.
Lots of pretending to be philosophers (internal debates about realism vs structural realism vs offensive realism vs liberalism vs neoliberalism vs constructivism vs everything else) + intentionally obscuring everything you say to the point where you and your RAs are the only ones who know what you're talking about.
I should be more clear — this was my experience at UChicago, which is particularly known in that space for being cursed in this sort of arcane/ivory tower academia way.
I read a post from (I believe) Anatoly Karlin on the theme of "There are tons of politicians and businessmen in Russia who would love to understand more about how modern China works for good political/business reasons, and they are all frustrated by the state of Sinology in Russia, in which any question you put to an expert on China receives an answer beginning in the time of the (mythical) Yellow Emperor".
<i>On the other hand, business and bureaucrats aren’t too satisfied with the academic Sinologist community either. “There is no practical benefit from communicating with them. You ask them a simple question, and they start their answer from the time of the Yellow Emperor, and don’t end up clarifying anything. Typical professors,” says one federal bureaucrat.</i>
So kinda like the opposite of Marx's "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
Though it's not obvious to me why not making a difference would be high status and making a difference low status. The only think i can think of is that there are some academics who don't make a difference, who policymakers ignore, and who are secretly jealous of colleagues who do make a difference. Consequently these people affect not to care about making a difference.
The idea is that if you're "making a difference" then you've clearly dumbed down your stuff enough for the politicians and policymakers to understand it, which means you aren't a real academic.
The people who push these views do in fact wish they were philosophers and that people would climb the mountaintop to hear them proselytize or whatever.
This is the stated reason but my gut feeling is that the true reason is that to make a difference you have to actually say "we should do X" and then if X turns out to be a disaster you're screwed. If you only ever say "a constructivist analysis of X shows that under neoliberal capitalism blah blah blah" you can never be the person who got X wrong.
Seems like at least some of this can be traced to the popularization (among some elites) of utilitarianism and more analytical, "scientific" approaches to things?
You can certainly see that with architecture, which, in addition to being aesthetically pleasing, now also have to be energy efficient, cost effective, not fall over in an earthquake, etc.
And per Wikipedia, the modern men's suit was popularized by Beau Brummel, who was apparently inspired by military designs. As to why military outfits became simpler around Brummel's time, that's pretty well known. Officers dressed more extravagantly than other soldiers are more likely to be shot by snipers.
If I remember right, I think this is something Grant helped popularize. He was a little more scruffy than Lee or McClellan, and I believe that carried over with guys like Pershing and Eisenhower (with notable exceptions.)
Kaffee - Played by Tom Cruise wearing Navy officer dress whites
Barnes - Played by Kiefer Sutherland wearing Marine cammo
===============================================
Barnes: [in Barnes'humvee] I've got some camouflage jackets in the Jeep, sirs, I suggest you both put them on.
Kaffee: Camouflage jackets?
Barnes: Yes sir, we'll be riding pretty close to the fence line. The Cubans see an officer wearing white, they think it might be someone they'd wanna take a shot at.
My go-to source for such things is The Cut of Men's Clothes 1600-1900 by Norah Waugh. I don't have a copy handy to confirm, but I think I remember it confirming something close to Andrew's statements.
Specifically, Beau Brummel was one of the pioneers or popularizers of the Frock Coat look, which had more in common with early 19th century military uniforms than it did with the previous generation of civilian formal wear. It's a generation or two of fashion remove from modern business suits, which are more directly derived from 19th century sack suits (a middle/working-class style that was considerably simpler and more amenable to mass production than a well-tailored frock coat).
The Revolutionary-Napoleonic era of 1789-1815 generally popularized military styles, which you can hear in Beethoven's music, for example. Marie Antoinette's painter Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun looked back fondly on the Ancien Regime as one more culturally feminine than the ensuing age.
So, a jacket in the style of a military officer's field tunic (with the lapels folded back) was in touch with the times.
It is not a reference per se, but there is something like that in Cyrano de Bergerac: de Guiche has dropped his white scarf to avoid being shot at, Cyrano has picked it up and promises to wear it later during the assault.
This was my thought as well. Nietzche was on to something more with the whole God is dead. Moving to an evidence based scientific culture and society seemed to generally mark the broad death of romanticism, fantasy, mysticism, religion, etc. I think a lot of the art and buildings of classic tradition served a purpose of expressing and emphasizing effectively fantasy. Not only am I richer than you, my entire world and being is of a different level. Or in other cases, I and the family are literally gods, hence thr grandeur in outfits, jewelry, etc. But today, our culture embraces that we are all just humans. And very serious and evidence based ones as that, tying in to your utilitarian comment. Houses, art, clothing should roughly be broadly human (it can be too out there or you don't fit in) and anything alluding to mysticism or romanticism or anything of that ilk just isn't well liked anymore. One thing that has held up against this trend? Mormanism and their insane huge eye catching temples.
As a Mormon myself, I was thinking about mentioning that. But you'll notice a very clear distinction between the temples and our regular meetinghouses (or even office buildings), which are very bland in comparison. The temple has a symbolic purpose and is meant, in part, to evoke something of heaven on earth. Even the weirder ones have a symbolism, like the Provo Temple, which is meant to represent the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke.
Your point about the symbology of Mormon temples influencing their architecture is very well taken. Coming from an Orthodox Christian perspective, all of our church buildings are considered to have the same function of representing heaven on earth -- and also to be a microcosm of the universe, which is why you'll sometimes see stars painted on the ceiling of well-ornamented Orthodox churches. Orthodox Christians also sometimes call the normal church building a "temple": we don't have the distinction between temples and meetinghouses as the LDS church does.
For the record, I've been impressed by the Mormon temples, especially the Salt Lake City temple, and I agree with LRG that Mormonism has held up quite well against the trend towards modern architecture. It has always intrigued me, though, that the regular LDS meetinghouses I've seen are not highly ornamented; to my eyes they're less decorated than even many of the low-church evangelical buildings I've seen. As someone in the faith, could you explain why they're decorated so differently from the temples?
Much of older high-status European men's fashion was also inspired by military outfits. For example, the Renaissance-era Doublet and Hose look is based on what knights a generation or three earlier would have worn under a suit of armor: the Doublet in particular started out as a civilian outerwear variant of a Gambeson or Arming Jacket, a padded jacket you'd wear underneath armor to prevent chafing and to cushion the force of impacts.
Similarly, 18th century knee britches we're based on cavalry pants: calvalrymen would wear high boots to protect their legs, and would wear only stockings underneath the boots. The pants would start just below the knee, which would be a bit below the cuff of the boot. The civilian version kept the knee-length britches and the stockings, but traded the boots for low shoes.
You could look at it like that. Although the similarities seem to be more in the cut of the clothes than color or fabric: for example, arming jackets would typically be buff (natural undyed and unbleached wool or linen) or dyed a uniform utilitarian color, while doublets would be dyed bright colors and often richly decorated with inlays and embroidery.
A more precise modern analogy would be the four-buttoned single-breasted suit jackets that occasionally show up in high fashion, and are much more similar in cut to the tunic of a modern non-combat daily wear uniform (e.g. the US Army's Service Greens) than to more conventional 2-button or 3-button suit jackets.
For government buildings in the West and in Communist/Post-Communist regimes, egalitarianism seems as good a reason as any for the drawdown in splendor (brutalism's popularity in the former Soviet Union surely mattered a bunch as well). People like the aesthetics of old buildings, but the people who lived when they were raised may have been significantly more lukewarm towards the occupants themselves. To the extent that mass revolution/execution of elites is a more live possibility now (post-French/Russian Revolutions, etc.), the overt celebration of elite status/exclusion in government may be a provocation whose risk is not worth the reward. As is stated, there are always other ways to signal status.
This is the equivalent of some anti-vaxxer writing an article about how we used to make great scientific discoveries but not any more because now scientists have to do statistics and show error bars to pass peer review, and hasn’t anyone considered all the ways in which humans are irrational so really scientists are just as biased as the rest of us and 80% of people agree that street smarts are better than book smarts, rationalists must just be playing status games they learned in the school system, which overvalues symbolic intelligence instead of teaching people to be practical and get work done in the real world. We need a renaissance of good manly realistic scientific thinking about things we can see and touch not nonsense alphabet soup protein sequencing whatever
This has a pretty high insulting-sounding-ness to comprehensibility ratio, I request you either sound less insulting or explain your point more clearly.
I’m sorry, I suck at writing and I have to get back to work but you made me mad. I suggested a volume of essays by Greenberg below. I would also recommend some Adorno or something. Just…like, anything from within the ecosystem you’re critiquing because everything you’re talking about is *extensively* discussed among everyone involved
It’s as wrongheaded and empirically wrong and maddening to claim that nobody has claimed a thing that was actually a serious and influential school of thought as it is to claim that scientists aren’t trying to manage uncertainty or rationalists the possibility of bias
If AKA can't explain at least a sort of quick general overview of what these people are saying, telling you to "just read this" is kind of shitty — who knows if they actually answer any of your questions or not?!
The book will answer any empirical questions re “what are/were these people thinking?” because it *is* literally what those people were thinking. Greenberg arguably made Jackson Pollock.
The difference is that there exist objectively true answers to questions in biology and medicine, while aesthetics is much more subjective. Therefore, the "Disregard the opinion of the uninformed public, just trust the experts" angle is a lot harder to justify when it comes to ugly architecture.
How much of this preference for older styles is just selection bias at work?
Any building from before the modern period that has survived until today is probably not at all a normal building. I would expect the greatest architectural works of their respective ages, the best exemplars of their architectural styles, to be highly overrepresented in this sample.
If you're comparing a selection of the prettiest buildings of the last thousand years to moderately liked buildings today, it's perhaps not that strange that preferences heavily skewer one way. Everyone has heard of Milan cathedral, but I had no idea what their university was called or what it looked like before reading this.
If you compare Milan Cathedral to the Sydney opera house or Fallingwater instead, you might get different answers.
Go wander round an old European country village full of quaint cottages sometime. Those sorts of places are generally considered very beautiful, and were made by and for ordinary people.
No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%). And those old village that survived survived because they were pretty and considered worthy enough to be maintained.
I don't think the single buildings were preserved because they individually were considered pretty. They survived because people lived in them and the buildings grew organically with the needs of their inhabitants. I don't think that owners refrained from altering the buildings when the change fit their needs (until Cultural heritage management stepped in) for aesthethical reasons
"No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%)" hasn't been true for hundreds of years at least (at least if we count rooms built out of bricks as well). And as for "those old village that survived survived because they were pretty and considered worthy enough to be maintained" -- yes, even ordinary people's dwellings were considered worthy to be maintained. Do you expect people to maintain an average brutalist building for hundreds of years because they like the look of it?
> No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%).
That's absolutely wrong. There are many farmhouses in the countryside in France that stood a few hundred of years. Are you going to argue that farmers were in the top 1%?
What idiocy is this? If they couldn't afford a multi-room house to themselves, they were far more likely to live in a multi-room house with one or more other families than live in a single-room house.
I'm not going to bother to find evidence for this, but I think you'll find people generally prefer pedestrian-focused spaces, and outside of a few places (the Netherlands, mainly), we've surrendered a ton of spaces to cars. Older places are often people-scaled, which makes them appealing on a non-architectural basis.
I think the beauty of some European villages comes not from each single building having special architectural qualities, it's the assembly of buildings different in form and shape, color, purpose, ornaments that appeals to us, maybe it's because they grew organically ...
The Milan Cathedral has not been all that popular in Milan. It was built in the northern European Gothic pointed style rather than in a look indigenous to Italy, and just as Gothic was starting to go out of fashion. Soon after, Brunelleschi's Florence Cathedral topped it by building the first dome in Italy in almost a millennium.
This is my thought as well. Turn on an oldies radio station and its all the hits. Comparatively, a modern station will sound terrible and full of trash. Same phenomenon in my view. This can be extended to art, literature, etc.
I think this argument would be more convincing if people could point to the great architecture, art, etc., being produced now, and say, "Look, here's the stuff that will (probably) be remembered five hundred years from now when all the other dross if forgotten!"
Fascist regimes love classical styles because it allows them to portray themselves as the natural inheritors of those traditions. Plain architecture signals function over form.
In contrast to old elites, modern commoners and elites both tend to dislike what might vaguely be called dignity, stuffiness, or artifice, seeing it as inauthentic. That's why we have both pop music and "Three Dancing Figures". It also explains Brutalism - if a building has a "bad" purpose (as judged by the popular culture of elites), e.g. offices, it should look bad - trying to make it look more pleasant would be covering up the badness within. This may be related to the change from a culture where people were expected to look up to their betters (and where those betters acknowledge themselves as such) to one of greater egalitarianism, where elites try to pretend not to exist.
Anyway, depending on your tastes, good art survives in TCG card art, and among obscure artists on the Internet (some of them with a loyal Patreon following). I'm not sure what this suggests. Maybe there's a golden mean of audience size, where if it's too small, the art becomes low-effort and idiosyncratic, and if it's too big, the artist appeals to the lowest common denominator.
I thought this was largely the result of cost. Before things were mass produced, individual artisans worked on every element. The expense of ornateness relative to the expense of non-ornateness was modest, because the people involved already had the capability to make things ornate.
Today buildings are produced using strategies that are designed to save money. The people involved do not have the skills (or time or resources) to make individual elements ornate. Even at the architectural level, it is far easier to build a big box than a complicated structure in which each element is slightly or completely different than the others.
There is a simple way to confirm this. Get a quote for a building in the style of Milan Cathedral, and a building in the style of Bocconi University but with equal usable square footage. I'd expect the cathedral to be spectacularly more expensive, even if you were ordering 100 of each and thus able to carefully optimize for building each type of structure.
I think this depends on how close you want the "style" of an old cathedral. An exact reproduction of anything old is always going to be more expensive the more exact it is, whereas something that only tries to follow the spirit of the thing with modern techniques will be cheaper.
At the most extreme end, we can literally project an image of beauty and marvel beyond anything the ancients could build onto a flat wall for practically free.
Cage may be less accessible than Glass in general, but his music is still quite difficult to perform. (I'm not sure how to judge the ornateness of pieces composed by random processes.)
Music doesn't really fill the pattern of other arts. Modern music is all over the map in every parameter, but in general the public seems to prefer the simple side of the scale.
Bartók is great for speed fingering exercises for engaged students (guess how I know that), but it sounds like a couple of cats running across the piano in the middle of the night, it's never fun to play, and there is a reason why it's not popular at recitals attended by parents paying for the kids' piano lessons.
I even got to do my Bartók practices on a $100,000 performance grand once. It didn't help. (But the authentic ivory keys did make the fingering easier.)
Except Cage was often making self-consciously weird performance art, making statements about the nature of music and art, instead of trying to have any real aesthetic appeal.
But you're right that plenty of modern classical music is uncontroversial beautiful, even though some of it isn't.
Yeah, Glass specifically, and minimalists as a group, just aren't particularly less skillful or complex than Mozart.
And music in general completely buckles the trend Scott is describing. Established academic composers used to make a lot of simplistic stuff that stood on being experimental, up to the 1960s, but ever since sampling and synthesizers became commonplace, those experiments became commonplace also and were simply incorporated into music at large, while gradually increasing in both complexity/sophistication and, for lack of a better word, pleasantness. Modern music in general, including the poppiest of pop, is extremely polished compared to what came before it. I mean, it's still often vacuous, but not for lack of ornamentation.
I don't think it's a correct description of the genre as a whole.
And to the extent that it describes particular songs or artists, it serves as a demonstration of my point, experimental music techniques being accepted by and accessible for mainstream listeners. The idea that there's more to music composition than melody is relatively new into western music tradition. It's now also widely accepted all across the respectability strata. As a result, I don't think lack of melody can be equated with lack of ornamentation or polish anymore.
(And I was mainly speaking about pop in that sentence anyway. Pop won't cease being melodic, by definition.)
"I don't think it's a correct description of the genre as a whole."
Sure, I should have said that rap can manage without melody. But when melody is heard, it's usually stolen from elsewhere. And whether or not it's stolen from elsewhere, it's usually just a short, looped snippet.
"The idea that there's more to music composition than melody is relatively new into western music tradition."
I don't see rap *adding* anything to substitute for melody. An emphasis on rhythm is hardly comparable to all that the genre jettisons.
I think glass and minimalist music does kinda have similar breaking and simplifying and mutating past structures tendencies and does kinda fit tbh. idk tho
Opportunity cost (and maybe cost disease, if we ever figure out what the actual causes of it are). When the opportunity cost of labor, or even for semi-skilled labor, is "menial drudgery in a field", the rich can build outrageous receiving rooms and wear labor-intensive textiles. When, as in most of the developed world (and indeed by comparison to the past, most of the developing world), laborers have loads of other alternative pursuits competing for their efforts, making the opportunity cost in "other stuff that could have been made with that same labor" much higher. To some extent capital can substitute for labor, but only to an extent -- carving and especially laying intricate stone or creating a delicate and elaborate costume still takes quite a bit of labor, even with the machinery currently available to aid in this. And the time taken to produce a lot (though not all) of the high end abstract art seems, to this definitely-not-an-artist observer, to likely be far less than the time required to paint something in the style of the Old Masters.
I would happily accept this if everything was simply lowest-cost-with-your-choice-of-color-trim construction. But we also have people going out of their way to build expensive buildings which are uglier. Eg. the MIT Stata Center which is both ugly and which the occupants hate.
On the subject of modern architecture, did you know that Edinburgh has a hotel shaped like a gigantic turd? It even has a twitter account: https://twitter.com/TurdHotel
I wanted to say that maybe the "traditional style" of architecture is actually really hard to pull off and modern architects just aren't good enough at their craft to create something like that, but... this seems unlikely given that there is still some breathtakingly beautiful contemporary art that I sometimes stumble upon, so the skill seems to be there, just maybe the top people in the field don't have it?
If it's a matter of modern architects not being able to pull of traditional designs, I suppose that raised the question of when and why this decline in competence occurred.
I think part of it is that building in traditional styles is seen as a regression; we *know* how to do that, *anyone* can do that! But to build in an even more extravagant modern style, now that is unique!
And of course, if you simply slap up a copy of some old building, then that isn't much better, because the world has moved on and it is no longer anchored by temporal roots in the time and place. That's how you get the bad McMansions which took classical architectural elements and just jammed them all in together without sense of their original purpose or their design function.
What is needed is somebody like Gaudi, who has a vision, is a genius, and can pull off a traditional-in-future-style building for today. But I don't know where such a person can be found.
It's not particularly beautiful, nor is it particularly ugly. It's built in a style that doesn't look self-consciously modern, but doesn't look like a deliberate retro throwback either. This seems to be the kind of house that most ordinary people will choose to build and buy if they have the money.
It's because in older times, elites had fewer ways to propagandize the masses. Their architecture wasn't JUST architecture, it needed to send a subliminal message to people. Their clothing wasn't JUST clothing - it was designed to have an emotional impact as well.
Nowadays, the vast majority of all propaganda gets spread through media (typically social media) so the old ways of manipulating perceptions have become a lost art. Sad!
Personally, I like the left in all 4 images. However, if somebody built that now, using new processes and materials to avoid it costing a fortune, I'd think it was tacky or even trashy.
My impression is that the recent past was very fancy and ornate so trying to emulate that style when it's unavoidably temporally disconnected from us is just icky.
Yes, you can't just blindly copy the past. But the umpteenth glass-and-steel-and reinforced concrete rectangle is so boring, even the horrors unleashed by 'starchitects' make some sense there - the Gherkin is a weird building and I don't particularly like it, but it is an attempt at something different.
Unhappily, today the craze seems to be "can we have the technically tallest building in the world?" for large projects, and they are nothing more than dull attempts to beat a silly record:
The minimalist, stripped-back style can be done well, but it costs a lot to do it well, and if your purpose is "we need some sort of box to house our worker bees", then why spend more than you need? The standard glass box will do just fine.
I blame the rise of ideas like "right-wing authoritarianism" and "the authoritarian personality" and the like. Having a love of order and harmony is nowadays considered (at best) a mark of inflexibility and incapability of dealing with the unexpected, and (at worst) outright fascist. But most beautiful works of art (defined so as to include architecture, clothing, music, etc., as well as paintings and sculptures) get their beauty precisely from the ordered and harmonious arrangements of their parts. It's no wonder that a society which pathologises the qualities required of great art should be incapable of producing any great art itself.
I can't help but put some blame on the pervasive socialism and concomitant opposition to everything that is "bourgeoise" in academic architecture, art, literature, etc.
If it were, it would be. But it isn't, so it isn't.
There's only so many national economies and individual socialist workers cooperatives which can fail miserably, resulting in death, destruction, and ruin, before people begin noticing the pattern and realize it's a terrible idea.
Well, not everyone manages to notice, of course, but enough.
But sure, list out all the wildly successful improvements of the modern socialist countries and how much they improved over their non-socialist competitors by doing socialism the "right way"...
"If it were, it would be. But it isn't, so it isn't."
I wish I, too, lived in a world completely free of error, where all things are exactly as they ought to be by virtue of their existence alone.
Without getting into the usual set-piece debate over the merits of revolution on a thread not intended for that purpose, I will say that quite a few of humanity's achievements eluded us for a long time, even with correct theories, before we finally nailed them.
Also, I buy some food from 'individual' workers' co-ops. Haven't been laid low or ruined yet by that practice.
Nah. This trend was taking place a little while before Marxism was even a thing. The post said it might have started after the french revolution, and that's more or less what caused the first Marxists (and Marx himself) to start writing about revolutionary theory. If you're going to blame the opposition to wealth for this trend, you should attack it as an opposition inherent in human nature and not socialist writing. Besides, the soviet union had comparatively way more ceremonious looking art than the US did at the time. Something more is going on here.
one problem with that is that plenty of elitist futurists and rich businessmen and insular aesthetes also dressed/painted/built like that. socialism is modern, and there’s some connection probably, but it’s not mainly that
Architecture is hard to explain through it, I agree, bit fashion? Yes, powerful people dress in nice tailored suits, but check out drag race, where fashion is an EVENT. Like, a kiddie pool in the curve of a dress? A dress made out of cameras?
That is the fashion I love. And so many people talk about it who have a casual interest in fashion.
Most people don't think that a dress made out of cameras is 'beautiful' the way traditional fashion is. Creative and novel, perhaps. But 'dresses made out of cameras' are not a thing because that's what most people think a good dress looks like and nobody is wearing such dresses outside of these kinds of events.
There are some attitudes which are common both in the past and in today; in 1532 Thomas Cromwell started buying up land and property to enlarge his house, which he needed to do both as a result of his increasing status and with the expansion of his household that went along with it.
His neighbours weren't too happy with how he went about it:
"Without pausing to seek permission, Cromwell proceeded to move the fences of his neighbours’ gardens back by twenty-two feet, and offered neither warning nor compensation. ‘This house [i.e. Cromwell’s] being finished, and having some reasonable plot of ground left for a Garden, he caused the pales of the Gardens adioyning to the north parte thereof on a sodain to be taken downe, 22 feet to be measured forth right into the north of every man’s ground, a line there to bee drawen, a trench to bee cast, a foundation laid, and a highe bricke wall to bee builded.’ Even more audaciously, he put the house of Thomas Stow (father of the antiquarian, John) on rollers and moved it, and then started to build a new house for himself on the land that had been thus vacated."
I have no idea why modern taste is as it is, some people honestly do love that concrete Brutalist architecture. Part of it, I suppose, is that classical architecture became over-done, as well as being carried out by second, third and no rate at all builders because your town needs a new courthouse, okay we can slap some Dorinthionic columns out front because that's what you do for buildings like this.
Rococo style went over the top; some German churches ended up looking like chocolate boxes:
Making copies of copies of copies of Neo-Classical architecture became wearisome, trite and lowest common denominator. Eventually a reaction was bound to set in, with more austere and restrained styles. Young architects got all excited over theories of stripping off the excess, and when that became the popular and award-winning style, then the modern era of concrete and glass boxes was born.
Then it became the rich who could afford to be Minimalist, you need a lot of money to be able to afford acres of empty space with perhaps one tastefully subdued couch taking up part of the room (as all the rest of your possessions are stored elsewhere).
That still doesn't explain the Three Dancing Figures, but public art is reliably terrible now it's all selected by committee instead of a pope holding a public competition because "I have a treasury stuffed full of money and I want to show off my education, taste, and claim on continuity of Roman history, so build me a magnificent big fountain AND MAKE SURE IT IS SUFFICIENTLY DRAMATIC":
"In 1629, Pope Urban VIII, finding the earlier fountain insufficiently dramatic, asked Gian Lorenzo Bernini to sketch possible renovations, but the project was abandoned when the pope died. ...Competitions had become popular during the Baroque era to design buildings, fountains, as well as the Spanish Steps. In 1730, Pope Clement XII organized a contest in which Nicola Salvi initially lost to Alessandro Galilei – but due to the outcry in Rome over a Florentine having won, Salvi was awarded the commission anyway. Work began in 1732."
You missed form over function. Rich people dumped fancy clothes because they're not very functional in modern settings (aka, climate controlled ones); modern architecture might not please everyone's aesthetics, but it's easy to live with.
I'm given to believe that the signalling gets even more subtle; yes, they dumped fancy clothes and now just turn up in jeans and open-necked shirt - but the jeans and shirt have to be particular designer brands, not any old pair you can buy off the rack.
And materials used are more luxurious - think of all the marketing around "high thread count Egyptian cotton".
So the apparent simplicity is just masking the same sumptuousness as when they wore silk and velvet and furs.
I wouldn't argue clothes aren't about status—once it became possible to make clothes to distinguish the powerful from the masses, that's been the case. But removing ornamentation from clothes makes the most sense to me as thought of in comfort and convenience terms. Not only are fancy clothes often uncomfortable, they often require fittings, which take time. Contemporary rich people are often very busy.
Likewise, contemporary buildings are more comfortable to live in than they were in the past, and changes to what we expect from a living space due to better HVAC means we want changes that wouldn't work with older architecture styles. Baroque and big windows isn't the same.
To me, Scott struck out on this one—he didn't consider a bunch of fairly obvious considerations with a lot of explanatory power, and also universalized American taste. My understanding is that in much of the world "traditional" future really isn't much of a thing. People buy modern minimalist stuff. Americans have much more appetite for "classical" and "traditional" forms.
Can you explain what you mean by climate-controlled settings? Are you saying that fancy clothes were very hot, and now that we have heaters, we don't need them?
Yes. The three piece suit isn't just about being fancy, it's about staying warm in drafty buildings that don't have effective warm air circulation. The trend since then has been less clothes—hats go away, then the vest, then the jacket. Eventually, you get the modern office where the distinction between work and casual wear disappears almost entirely.
The architecture stuff is like that too: How do you build a 50 story office building with flying buttresses and still have lots of windows? If you look at the history of architecture since the invention of the steel-framed building, at first you get decorative buildings like the Carbon and Carbide building in Chicago (utterly gorgeous on the outside and terrible on the inside). Then the modernists come along and realize, hey, we could have more windows. And wouldn't it be cool to get rid of that crappy decoration. There'a reaction to that and people start making more decorative buildings, but it's hard to pull off. However, eventually, computers come into the picture and suddenly buildings take on fantastic shapes. However, typical buildings still suck because it's hard to make a building that doesn't suck when it's surrounded by parking lots.
For what it's worth, the theory that fine art became a niche that goes deeper into nicheness as it becomes less popular makes sense to me, although that's kind of dated—the rise of the poptimist critics and pop art has blurred the lines between fine and popular art almost to the point of non-existence. Hip-hop altered poetry substantially, for example. You'd have to look at "donor" genres to find things that don't have populist appeal (and it's not like your local symphony is likely playing avant guard pieces, either)
I'm going to wager you have very little knowledge of contemporary art, especially if you think art from 60 years ago represents what's happening today. However, if that's your touchpoint, Warhol remains widely popular among people who don't pay much attention to fine art.
The modern suit coat is a descendent of the sort of thing a gentleman would wear to ride, walk, or go to war. Which is to say, the practical dress of the day. The really ornate stuff you see is courtly clothing, basically a costume you'd wear when showing off your wealth and taste was entirely the point - and doing anything other than stand and bow stiffly was not required. It was also the sort of thing you'd wear while sitting for a portrait, meaning that's what we remember from the period. But day to day, the clothing was not as plain as today - but less far than you might think. A jacket, waistcoat, and breeches with a bit of embroidery is not really that far from the modern business suit.
Nowadays, even the very rich are expected to work - or at least mostly look like the sort of people who work. So they wear stuff more like "practical" than "courtly" dress.
Of course, it's also worth noting that "really ornate" was not a permanent state of affairs. A Roman citizen's most important formal garment was the "toga virilis" - simple white cloth draped on the body. You showed status by how pure white you could afford to make the toga. Senators got a simple purple stripe.
This might be a rather long comment, but I think it's worthwhile to go into some of the points in this post. I happen to be writing a series of articles about architecture, evolution and why modernism has failed in the domain of beauty, which I will start posting soon (still building a backlog).
First of all, because Scott requested it (and for everyone else), I'd recommend reading the book Cognitive Architecture written by Ann Sussman. For my series (which will probably become a book) I've read many books and this one was by far the most informative. In Cognitive Architecture, Sussman explains how our aesthetic preferences were shaped by evolution and what consequences this has for our experience of architecture. She does this by compiling much cutting-edge neurological and psychological research with respect to aesthetics and draws from evolutionary psychology as well. It's very rigorous and a pleasure to read. And that's great because (in my humble opinion) most architectural books are full of bogus and not worth reading. Another book that I'd recommend is From Bauhaus to Our House written by Tom Wolfe. It's a great little book about modernism.
I'm numbering my remarks about this post so that it becomes easier to respond to them. Otherwise the discussion may become chaotic.
1. On the modernist turn as a change from flaunting wealth to hiding it: The degree in which wealth was signalled is not quantifiable and thereby it becomes very difficult to observe a correlation between this and historical events. That said, much evidence does exist to the contrary, such as the many 19th-century Rothschild palaces across Europe and the many lavish townhouses built in this era. This would falsify the purported French Revolution's effect on conspicuous consumption. Moreover, despite the economic crises the world has had to endure, the market for modern means of conspicuous consumption, such as superyachts and supercars, has not disappeared or shrunk significantly.
2. There's a difference between sobriety and ugliness. Amsterdam, historically a protestant city, used to be the richest city in the world from the early 1600s until about the mid-1700s. Nonetheless, although it is not as lavish as Paris, Venice or other Catholic cities, it is not found to be ugly by the millions of tourists that visit it every year. Architectural beauty lies in symmetry, good proportions and ornament, which are mostly independent of prosperity. Even though protestant architecture contains less ornament, it does not violate symmetry or the evolved proportions of classical architecture. Whereas modernist architecture does.
I would therefore not seek an explanation of modernism's ugliness in protestantism. It is also not the case that Catholicism has made way for protestantism, as the hundreds of millions of catholics across the globe attest to.
3. On the concept of new timeless aesthetic truths: Although modern architects love to assert so, there exist no new timeless aesthetic truths. As Sussman wrote in Cognitive Architecture, the experience of beauty is a result of our evolutionary history. It is a feature of our brains that conferred an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors. New aesthetic truths cannot have formed because aesthetics is inherently innate, more or less universal for our species and a matter of evolutionary psychology.
4. We should not rule out the possibility of corruption or failing political systems being behind much modern public art. When politicians' success does not depend on the quality of public art, why would concern themselves with it?
In my series, I provide an explanation for the ugliness of modern architecture. From findings in neurology, (evolutionary) psychology and empirical data we can derive timeless principles for beautiful architecture. It is exactly these that modernism has dismissed (which is what has made modernism unique.
To everyone interested in this topic, feel free to subscribe to medium.com/@casualrealism or send me an email at gijs.kerpestein@hotmail.com and I'll send you my current backlog. To those that can wait: I'll start posting is in a couple weeks.
Yes, taste being based in evolution makes perfect sense, but I don't think this precludes discovery of "new" aesthetic truths. They may have always existed in the platonic realm, but in the past we could have lacked the means to create art pieces that emoby them. For example, rock music was simply impossible before the technology to make the electric guitar became available, and nobody could build skyscrapers before the nineteenth century, ugly or otherwise.
Yes, that is certainly true. What I am saying is that within what is technically possible to make, some sights are naturally preferred over others. This aesthetic preference (for symmetries, (natural) ornament, curves, spirals is innate. This can be seen from the ubiquity of these phenomena in architecture and more recent empirical research.
To avoid dismissing without reading twice this thread, I gave the libgen of that book a skim. I think the neurological and evolutionary claims it makes are unsupported, and very questionable. The “people naturally stick to walls” seems to retroactively justify patterns of walking in modern cities that probably weren’t true 1kyago, and the eye tracking face stuff seems entirely unable to demonstrate any innate ness to the face nature of buildings. “PtSD made modern architecture” is kind ridiculous. The book does the same thing that every popular conception of neuroscience stuff does: take things that are true, radically change the implications of words while keeping superficial similarity, and use that to argue for dumb shit
> Unmitigated stress and terror alter internal brain structure; horrifying experiences overwhelm the human nervous system’s coping ability and actually rewire the brain, causing “people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past” (van der Kolk 2014: 7). In other words, after trauma, the survivor’s body and brain lose the ability to respond normally because traumatic experience subverts the pathways that enable normal subliminal responses in an effort to survive
> So post-trauma the typical human face-bias, described at length in this book, can turn to face-aversion; the normal attraction to visual complexity, also described in Chapter 4, may diminish, with the traumatized brain actually losing capacity to take it in. This new understanding of human brain architecture and its malleability provides a new vantage point for assessing why ‘modern’ architecture looks so different from that of the past—it represents a direct external expression of the internal brain damage caused by the horror of the trench warfare that preceded it.
This is pretty ridiculous. It uses some somewhat true neuroscience statement to make something about human behavior seem way more significant than it is and ties it to architecture somehow.
It’s a smorgasbord of discredited and ridiculous 20th and 21st century pop psychology touchstones smashed together into a polemic about modern architecture. I haven’t cherry picked at all, in my view
I am afraid you are either cherry picking or the libgen doesn't cover all that is contained in the book. Its most important contents (most rigorously researched and most valuable in this debate) are about our innate preference for symmetries, natural shapes and curves.
I mean I literally read the table of contents and first chapter then jumped to random pages and the sections that stood out. I’m not Tyler cowen, I don’t want to read 3 books a day - and his tip for reading is to skip liberally
and I guess there’s not much point in arguing but the “evolutionary benefit of sticking to walls” just feels like the exact sort of psychology mechanical behavior just so story that I’ve seen break down too many times
A possible pieces of the puzzle, specifically about corporate buildings: A traditional building looks nice but it's a bit old-fashioned. A plain cuboid is ugly but modern. Corporations very much want to signal that they are modern, and absolutely not that they are old-fashioned.
A possible piece of the puzzle when it comes to modern buildings that are unique in some way: Individualism among architects. The most famous architects want to signal their own "unique" "artistic" "vision". A traditionalist building may look nice, but it usually isn't particularly unusual and striking. Building an eyesore that looks like a walkie-talkie and scorches the street as a concave mirror (20 Fenchurch Street) will make you more famous.
Yes, I agree about the open offices. It's a pastiche and an unappealing mix of "basic new modern architecture with some native elements slapped on top".
Epitome of grass is greener on the other side. I just moved from an open office to closed siloed personal offices, and I hate it ! Open offices are amazing. Especially when there are a decent number of focus rooms and meeting rooms to compensate for it. With hybrid work-from-home, I can just work from home when I need some quiet and privacy.
Knowing the history of Taj Mahal, I wonder if such opulence is impossible in an era without outright slavery and proper human rights. Within a capitalistic framework, a public company can only afford such degree of unnecessary spending if the cost addition is miniscule (slaves) or if they have endless cash (monarchs and invaders)
I've thought about this and my half-baked idea is that it's the rise of the middle/professional classes and the fall of the aristocracies.
For most of history you had basically two groups: the wealthy and the poor. The middle classes existed but they were a small part of society. Aristocracies were usually less than 1% of society. Power was also much more concentrated: the king was the highest political, cultural, financial (insofar as they had any concept of it), and religious authority. At least within the national borders. The capital was like DC, Hollywood, New York, and Rome all combined.
In between you had a few merchants and artisans mostly in cities. These people could get fabulously wealthy. But most of them were merely "much wealthier than peasants, much less wealthy than aristocrats." How did these aristocrats people make their money? By taxing the peasants. Or collecting rents that were pretty indistinguishable from taxes. This means that the aristocrats are highly, highly interested in appearing awesome to the peasants. As in literally awesome, inspiring awe. You want to tell them that God and your blood and the entire order of the universe puts you above them and requires them to give you stuff. Well, God's appointed representative would be pretty awesome right?
How do you awe the peasants? They're poor. They, like most people, want to not be poor. So simply having and displaying very nice things they can't have will impress them. Looking clean, well fed, and dressing in fancy clothes. Having a well bred wife and then cheating on her with a hotter woman. Some merchants could do this too (and sumptuary laws other times prevented it) but it wasn't really a problem. There wasn't enough of them to be a serious challenge.
Starting in the 19th century these land rents became an inferior source of wealth to industrial production. This meant that the merchants and middle class became wealthier and wealthier. Suddenly business owners were wealthier than aristocrats. And they had no need to overawe the peasants. The lower classes worked for them because they paid them.
In a literal sense the flow of money for aristocrats is peasant to aristocrat. The peasant works, the aristocrat taxes. But in industrial economies the flow of money is from company owners to workers. Your boss gives you a paycheck every two weeks (or whatever). So your boss doesn't really care if you find them awesome. You'll do what they say because they pay you and can threaten to just stop doing that. This is the case in capitalism and communism. The remaining aristocrats, the politicians and bureaucrats, legitimized themselves through theoretically egalitarian ideologies meant to appeal to these classes. Kings used to play act at being gods. Presidents play act at being professionals.
This meant art and clothes lost their function as ways to create the cultural capital necessary for extraction. They instead became about signaling between elites rather than between elites and non-elites. This caused a weird spiral into more and more esoteric forms of art. If the average person doesn't like the art that doesn't matter. Art would have to be impressively bad for you to see it and say, "Wow, my boss's painting is so terrible I'm going to quit my job!" What matters for art now is whether it can help you get one over on your wealthy friends.
As evidence: look at people whose power still relies on appearing awesome to their supporters. People who make their money by being famous among a broad swathe of common people. Rappers, megachurch pastors, Trump even back when he was a Democrat. That's where you'll find grand architecture that would rival Versailles and the hot concubines and all that. And for much the same reason the aristocrats used to have it. They still rely on the common person finding them awesome in a way the political and business elites don't.
And looking like that takes a lot of effort. Those clothes are often uncomfortable. Those fancy looking houses are often not all that good a place to actually live. (If you ever go on a tour of Versailles you get a first hand look at how damn uncomfortable it was.) Money is finite and can be used to do something more productive than building a huge status symbol. If you don't need to do it, then why not just have something comfortable and easy? If it becomes the norm to do something uncomfortable you might go with the flow. But because it's uncomfortable to the people both producing and consuming the trend it'll be harder for it to catch on.
"There is another way of flattering important people which has become very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere. It consists in applying to them the phrases "simple," or "quiet," or "modest," without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom they are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I am rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of noise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great deal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings, and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old soldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have desired to see these things and have not seen them. But in the description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they are used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always says, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple flower in his button-hole." As if any one would expect him to have a crimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole."
So there was definitely the beginning of the idea that "Yes, Mr. Richman is hugely, extravagantly wealthy, but he doesn't *gloat* about it, he doesn't *show off*, because that would be vulgar bragging and boasting and thinking he is better than you, The Common Man" (but of course Mr. Richman *did* think he was better than the common man).
There was perhaps some current of "you have a ton of money, you can swim in luxuries, but if you dress and behave 'simply' and 'modestly', this is meritorious; you have self-control, discipline, and are virtuous". And to be virtuous in this sense was indeed a higher status signal than mere wealth, and then along comes the difference between good and bad taste and old money and the nouveaux riches and all the rest of it.
I see a key example as Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle in 1886. A century earlier German princelings had often spent exorbitant sums trying to be a miniature Louis XIV (who, lest we forget, left France in debt). It was understood as a way to assert cultural authority and thus national and international political authority.
That's not what happened with Neuschwanstein Castle. The castle was seen as an extravagant waste. The king's obsession over it was seen as madness since it was so obvious the money had better uses. This was really just a visible example of a cultural shift that had happened because one person didn't get the memo and literally tried to live in the past. (The castles were designed to look like they were from previous centuries.) But it shows the shift pretty well.
As does the trend of 19th century royals using military uniforms in official functions really. Something Tolstoy complained about in his more pacifist works.
This reminds me of Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussion of how the old aristocratic honor code came to look uncool as the aristocracy lost power. Under the old code, a gentleman was expected to care hugely what people thought of him -- hence the duels over what now seem like minor insults. But the rising new elites started to see that as a weakness, and believe that really strong men have enough confidence in themselves that insults don't bother them. I hadn't thought of it before, but you could apply the same idea to conspicuous consumption through clothing and houses -- what had been an assertion of power started to look like insecurity. But of course people still care hugely what other people think of them, so the whole thing continues in this sub rosa way.
All of those, simplicity, modesty, etc. are eminently bourgeois status markers, just as self-control, discipline, and frugality are bourgeois virtues.
The aristocrats of old made the Kardashians look like models of elegance and restraint by comparison. And those aristocrats were many things, but they were not marked by self-control, discipline, frugality, or the like.
At least part of this seems to be a mix of adaption and survivorship bias? E.g. a lot of people nowadays complain about "gentrification architecture" and talk about how much they like brownstones, but you can look up old articles about how we brownstones were the new style people thought they were tacky and ugly.
And fr survivorship bias - presumably there's a lot of old stuff, but the stuff that stuck around (and is still famous) is presumably heavily selected to be whatever has timeless appeal.
This doesn't explain everything - e.g. the Chinese clothing seems separate - but the parts it doesn't explain also seem more subjective (maybe if everyone dressed like a Chinese emperor we'd quickly get bored by it?)
Some old stuff was considered ugly when new and has come into style, but lots more old stuff was considered ugly when new and stayed ugly, and has since been demolished. Eg lots of 1970’s architecture with the energy-efficient low ceilings and cheap, crappy construction, or lots of 1940’s-1950’s post-war tract housing.
Imagine that I was a billionaire and I decided to build my mansion to look like Versailles. Maybe my office park would look like the Kremlin. Would people find them beautiful, or "fake" and "tacky".
I vaguely recall a conversation I had while in grad school. The campus had a very particular style, and we were walking past a new building. The person I was walking with commented on how much she hated the new building, since it was trying to look old.
I want to get rich so that I can donate a new building to the local b-school, but there's a catch.
Namely, *I* get to pick certain aspects of the architecture, sculpture, etc.. For example:
As you approach the magnificent modern campus, imagine a bronze 18-foot tall bronze statute of Beavis And Butthead, decked out in power suits and wielding briefcases, Butthead jawing fatuously into a cellphone while Beavis picks his nose.
Or, as you open the entryway doors, a vast mural depicting Beavis and Butthead working at BurgerWorld....
I always thought of modern architecture as a result of optimizations. They're everywhere. Art included. Don't waste an inch, grain, electron, bit, bandwidth, energy. E.g. build buildings so cooling them during hot days will spend less energy, as well as heating them during cold days.
The glass siding isn’t optimized around heating, it’s actually a lot worse. I think the big benefit is modularity— if you can resize each rented office to the maximum size they’ll use, you can increase usage of your office and your expected return. It’s a bit “seeing like a state” going on there.
I see Wolfe has been mentioned numerous times in the comments, but I'll just chime in here. I haven't read these works, but nevertheless reading Scott's essay called to mind another piece from Wolfe's oeuvre: "The Invisible Artist" in Wolfe's collection of essays Hooking Up.
On clothes specifically, I wonder if gender norms play some role here too. Women's formal clothing remains relatively more "ornamented" (and varied) than men's clothing.
I'd argue it has to do with the concept of authenticity vs. "fakeness". An architect that tried to copy those old school buildings would be seen as doing something cheesy - the buyers would be essentially buying a knock-off rather than the "real thing".
Yes, if nobody else makes ornamented buildings and you're the only person doing so after a hundred-year gap then it's weird. But why did we have a hundred-year gap?
Maybe a fashion cycle? People wore suits in public casual settings in 50's and 60's - and we can all agree they looked dapper - but if I wore a suit to go to the local bar, people would think I was dressed up for a costume party or something.
I've thought about this many times and decided that we were going to end up testing whether people really preferred architectural ornamentation in the near future. Most of the time it architectural decoration is essentially a relatively thin veneer that could be applied over any surface. Soon (or maybe even today, not sure) 3D printing will allow anyone to copy, customize, and scale any design, frieze, relief, etc. from any point or place in history and apply it to any surface for a very modest cost. I see very little evidence of this happening so far. A construction worker building a niche into a wall is cheap. Having Michelangelo carve you a statue to put in there is very expensive. Printing a copy of that statue that's virtually indistinguishable is very cheap. It seems like if people really want decoration, they'll be able to get it.
So I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone suggest aliens.
I vaguely remember from one of my reference texts, that when India was conquered by Alexander/Rome they had a little shift in sculpture to the Western blocky-style before they shifted back. I might be getting details a little wrong, but the point holds, that sometimes you can lose traditional art forms if someone else conquers you/has enough influence. This probably also has happened to a degree with western culture permeating other cultures.
So, maybe aliens with very bland tastes have made contact with our leaders, and we haven’t been told yet, but the elites are still picking up their styles
a lot of the original modern, tasteless architecture was referred to as “the international style”. The old beautiful architectural styles look distinct to a region. if you were building a tech office in San Francisco and decorated it like a 1300’s Milan cathedral, it would look like you’re deliberately tying yourself to European people, culture, etc. maybe at the expense of everyone else. You’d look similarly oddly partisan if you styled it after historic yemeni, Chinese, etc styles.
Modern architecture is flavorless, neutral ground. It’s boxy styles let you refit it to adjusting purposes — most old historical buildings are pretty inflexible.
Our airports, because they’re allowed to be tied to a particular local place and purpose built without subsequent modifications intended are often very pretty modern architecture — I love DC’s DCA or Honolulu’s airport. The ugly bits are security, etc, stuff that got added on recently where there wasn’t meant to be space in the original design.
I'm sure that James C. Scott would attribute this to the aesthetics of High Modernism: straight lines and right angles, even if they make people's lives worse. Many of the founders of modernist architecture, like Le Corbusier, were also heavily involved with large-scale urban planning. I think that the most egregious of Le Corbusier's buildings is the convent Sainte Marie de La Tourette. Although Le Corbusier was an atheist, he knew that the best way to make a sacred and spiritual environment is using rough concrete squares.
Trump issued an executive order banning Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles of architecture in new federal buildings, and establishing an official preference for Classicism. This was met with criticism from elites (and warnings about fascism), even though I suspect that it was popular among the public. Biden has since revoked the order.
While I see similarities in your examples, I think there are three different stories here for 1) clothing and interiors 2) architecture and 3) art.
1) For clothing, the modern Chinese High Status Person is just sending a very different message than the ancient one. He is not claiming he is a demigod and that shows. Also, his clothes are much more comfortable and practical. If you compare a formal female dress of the Ming dynasty and some of the modern haute couture, the latter may turn out to be more extravagant and colourful. With the interiors, Bill's sitting room is also much more comfortable for the inhabitant. Cardiff Castle is beautiful, but it has single glazing windows and chimney heating. And Cardiff is not like LA in the winter.
2) For architecture, the headline theory is more or less correct: we are living in an era of a technological regress. We would not be able to build most of these landmarks even if we tried. I live near a nice Victorian bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammersmith_Bridge built in 1880s for around £80k. The standard Bank of England inflation measure gives inflation on a broad basket of about x110 from there to now, so the construction would have cost be around £9m in today money. Now, the bridge is still standing but needs repairs. It is not clear if the repairs can be done for less then £150m. The last time this city built a bridge over the same river, it was a much smaller pedestrian only bridge which cost £18m and then another £5m to repair just a few years later. The last time they tried to build a proper large bridge, they spent £60m on thinking about it, realised it will cost over a £1bn and abandoned the project.
3) and art may be a different story from clothing and architecture. Signalling novelty is an important feature of high end art. It has to become harder with time as more and more things stop being novel, so, I guess, this puts harder and harder constraints on artists.
Bill Gates lives more comfortably than the super-rich of the Gilded Age, who were always having to dress for dinner in tuxedos and the like. Gates wears polo shirts, but the very finest available.
Bill Gates is a high functioning autistic, and I would bet $1000 that he has sensory input issues, that lead him to have very strong opinions as to what fabrics he allows to touch his skin and the weights he allows to hang off his body. (So do I, for roughly the same reason.)
Baumol's Cost Disease and concepts of comparative advantage are critical in here. And you can tell, because actually we _are_ still building, or re-building, a few of these -- there was active renovation on Notre Dame (which went horribly wrong with an accidental fire), and Sagrada Familia is actively under construction. But the cost to employ skilled masons to produce that kind of ornamental stonework has gone up _drastically_ relative to the baseline of what laborers broadly earn. It used to be that if you were a lower class person with the aptitude for engineering, "mason" was probably your best career choice. And you could still choose that! But you also could be any of a dozen other flavors of engineer, and many of those choices would carry considerably less risk of bodily harm, plus many of them have the "bits versus atoms" leverage, such that your work can ultimately produce much more marginal revenue per hour of labor. The fact that the kind of person who might decide to become a mason has that kind of life choice available feeds back into what it costs to hire a mason.
If for a given pile of money, we can either build one beautiful art deco skyscraper, or twenty featureless cubes, then the people who have capital to allocate to buy office space are probably going to buy the featureless cubes.
Honestly, for _any_ question of the form "why is our modern socioeconomic landscape like this?" there is a decent chance that Baumol's Cost Disease is part of the answer. :-D
On architecture I think you have to talk about cars. CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS
Forgetting individual buildings for a moment, the overall built environment feels less friendly because we took away space for greenery and humans and gave it over to dangerous, loud, polluting steel boxes being flung around at inhuman speeds.
I think they're linked - a lot harder to get people to focus on beauty of buildings when they're going to be embedded in parking lots and surrounded by highways. For all of the "bad" buildings you showed, and none of the "good" ones, there's ugly car infrastructure in the picture.
Focusing on cars has the added benefit of being something you can affect a lot better than "architectural elites should suck less." Tell your local government to replace parking spots with outdoor dining and trees! It's way better! But of course people want to complain about architecture elites, not do something that might solve some of the problem but reduce their own personal convenience.
- there are some things that have gone in the opposite direction. The big one that comes to mind is food. Realistically, back in the day, people ate some staples and whatever fruit/vegetables were in season. Today it's much more accessible for the average person to go to a nice restaurant and buy food that's not just more varied, but more aesthetically pleasing in terms of its presentation, than what came before.
- for the clothes I think there's a gendered element. Clothing for women is still colorful, maybe an individual outfit is less colorful as in the past, but I bet women are able to own a lot more clothing today than in the past, where (I imagine) you might have like one really nice outfit.
- if you went back to the 1880s, what would people back then say about the receiving room in Cardiff Castle vs Bill Gates's house? They might not find it plain, but be blown away by it, and find our idea that it's worse today to be totally incomprehensible! Big ol' windows, massive fur carpet, big screen TV, climate control...and again stuff that's way more accessible for the average person.
Bill Gates' receiving room was the only case where I didn't think it looked convincingly less appealing than the older alternative. Yes, the one in Cardiff Castle is more ostentatiously fancy, but I thought Bill Gates' room looked compellingly elegant. When it comes to the styles of the rich and powerful, I do think there's a significant element of it being considered distasteful now to flaunt it to the same degree. Seeing those pictures, I couldn't help thinking "Wow, if a rich person designed a receiving room to look like that now, people would think they were a *huge* asshole."
I think it may be a mistake to assign all these aesthetic trends in different media to the same underlying cause. Trends may run in different directions in different fields or media for different reasons, but if they run in the same direction in multiple fields, we may mistakenly assume it's for the same underlying cause. If the changes in architecture are for the same underlying reason as the changes in men's fashion, why is it that men's formalwear has remained in largely the same style it had back in the Art Deco period? I think it's likely that changes in architecture, in art and fashion, and likely for other media, have taken place for different reasons, and it's likely a mistake to ascribe them all to a single cause or movement just because we find them distasteful in similar ways.
I don't think we're disagreeing on not treating them to one cause. Like I said I think a big part of the architecture thing is cars, fashion has a big gender element, and I didn't say this before but the room comparison is partly because I think you can show your wealth with function, as opposed to look, more easily now because there's simply more functional shit to have. And then there are places where it trends in the opposite direction like food, IMO because more varied food is more widely available (and maybe because people can afford fancy new kitchen appliances).
Consider the side effects of relying on the horse as the main form of transportation. Old cities may have been easier on the eyes, but they were harder in the nose.
Isn't it a little bit of a Knoll's Law at play? You can write up the dynamics at play in FDA in your https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible so I would imagine something like that institutionally is at play when there's decision on architecture style of new building.
It’s not a conspiracy, postmodernists are quite open about concepts like beauty being social constructs. So those with power define beauty in ways that advantage themselves (all the reasons that you write). I don’t think people (even the powerful) knew they could do that in the past, and instead were bound to absolute concepts of beauty, and their power to simply make the most beautiful things - things that could not be duplicated by non powerful - contrasts with the current ability to make non beautiful things beautiful - things that cannot even be recognized by the non powerful.
Perhaps both the upper classes and lower classes have done the same thing, abandoning 'universal' esthetics for faux esthetics meant primarily to advertise in-group identity.
This makes me wonder about the dynamics behind Trump's Feb 2020 executive order titled "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" and the resistance to it:
Trump had also appointed Justin Shebow to lead the US Commission of Fine Arts, which has review authority over new construction. Shubow is against the modernist trend in architecture, stating that "our federal architecture has been dismal for decades, and has been designed in modernist styles that do not represent what ordinary Americans actually want."
Apparently, the Biden administration was very concerned with removing these ideas from the CFA. In May 2021, Biden took the unprecedented step of removing Shubow from the committee. This was the first time a commissioner had been removed by the president in the 110 year history of the committee.
This has all got me wondering if artistic sensibilities are also caught up in our widening cultural divide. Trump's own aesthetics seem more at place in an earlier, gilded age. They've long been the subject of derision by the rest of the New York elite.
If we're going to bring in Trump, I'd point out that he (pre-Presidency) is an offender in this regard. Look at what the Grand Hyatt in NYC near Grand Central looked like before Trump bought it, and after - before it was a classic old-school beautiful prewar New York City building. Trump bought it in 1980 and covered it in opaque glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hyatt_New_York
Absolutely agree, and I should have clarified that as far as Trump goes personally I was thinking more of the penchant for gold in his interior design. I thought it was interesting in contrast to the example of Bill Gates' interior in the article. Trump flaunts his wealth in a way that is no longer common.
Shubow is really the main advocate for using the classical style for civic buildings. He heads a 501c3 called the National Civic Art Society with a mission to bring this style back in to practice. I suspect Trump was persuaded by his arguments.
After reading a few articles by architects opposed to the executive order, I was surprised at the amount of passion against the style.
I saw an example of a redesign under Trump's order. The offending proposed building was a typical oddly-proportioned, asymmetrical brick-and-glass tower. The "improved" design was identical, just replacing the brick with marble. Very Trump - imitating the superficial aspects of "great" architecture without any effort put into understanding why it worked.
Wow - while I travelled down this rabbit hole, I'd gone looking for examples of projects commenced under the order but struck out. Do you happen to have a link or a rough idea of what the proposed building was?
1. There's a huge difference between well-done modern architecture and crappy modern architecture and there is just umpteen bajillion examples of crappy modern architecture for every good piece. There's a real discontinuity wherein you don't have a lot of just ok or passable examples. It's either crap or good.
2. Classical styles (at least many Western types) have easy(ish)-to-follow rules enabling common practitioners to create passable examples. Thus there is a lot more examples of stuff that is pleasant to see.
3. Speaking as someone who has been involved in designing and developing real estate: the crappy examples of modern architecture are *really cheap to build*.
Architects tend to do what their clients want. For any real estate with equity investors, my expectation would be there are strong financial considerations for design choices. Commercial real estate will want to maximize rent/sqft and residential will want to maximize resale value based on what consumers at that price point prefer.
None of that explains the shift in tastes of the other domains.
In some sense you’re asking what makes art art or what drives aesthetics. That’s a really big question. Is there a smaller, intermediate question you could tackle to get to the bigger one?
One of the largest causes, as stated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, Monet and other important early modernists themselves was the collision with minimalist Japanese culture/Zen philosophy in the late 1800's. Frank Lloyd Wright and other early modernist architects were heavily indebted to Japanese architecture (see https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-and-japan/). Minimalist poetry descended from the haiku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Station_of_the_Metro).
So minimalist modernism in the West may actually owe more to curiosity about Japan following the Meiji Restoration than to internal factors. As the rare person who actually enjoys (some) modernist buildings and art, I think this cultural appropriation was probably a good thing.
The ugliest buildings to me nowadays are probably McMansions. They try to imitate traditional 19th century or earlier building styles, but fail heavily, partially because Baumol's cost disease means less easy access to the heavy manual labor those styles required.
I agree that "McMansions" are usually terrible- but it seems like the most common mistakes they make aren't particularly about the lack of labor, but just raw incompetence. If you browse McMansionHell, you'll see tons of houses with like 6 different window shapes, horrible roof design, inexplicable interior moulding, ugly chandeliers, lights that point in the wrong direction, gigantic boxy garage in front of the house, fake doors in the wrong place, and so on.
Modern menswear arose about 200 years ago, a few generations before the general elite change toward modernist tastes at the beginning of the 20th Century.
The change from wealth and power being in the hands of the aristocrats to wealth and power being in the hands of the bourgeois had consequences. Aristocrats were supposed to show off their wealth visually in how they dressed, while commercial burghers were supposed to dress sedately.
A couple of centuries ago, clotheshorse Beau Brummell introduced to English high society the massively influential dandy look in men's wear: garb in sedate bourgeois colors, especially black, but subtly superb. The Prince Regent took after his friend Brummell, and Brummell's Mr. Darcy look has been influential ever since.
I've heard Eric Raymond talk about men's clothing getting a lot simpler after the French Revolution.
There's some history of pleasure being mistrusted in art. I think a lot of people these days can't tell the difference between being surprised and being pleased.
I'm always a little surprised that William Blake and Emily Dickenson are considered to be classic poets. But...but.. isn't that doggerel?
"Poetry has entered the same failure mode that architecture is also stuck in and that is also at the core of the many problems of the humanities. Participants in these fields aren’t being judged by outsiders (the public), but by other insiders. So they optimize for what other participants like, not for what the public likes.
This is a rational result of their pursuit of economic success, since by far the most likely path to long-term financial stability in these fields is a position in academia, preferably with tenure. These positions are given out based on the assessment of their peers, so that is who they optimize their work to please. This creates a dynamic that explains everything about why poetry, architecture and the humanities are in such a terrible state these days."
It's the same thing as Taleb's argument (https://twitter.com/shaarsh2/status/1324730934147588098) that fields fall to pieces when its insiders only create things for other insiders instead of the public. I personally find it a very plausible argument after seeing an online community (the Mount & Blade subreddit) degenerate into insanity as the users increasingly tailored their memes to each other instead of casual normies like me. Baffling inside jokes layered upon baffling inside jokes - none of it made any sense, because all the sensible jokes ("BANNERLORD WHEN?!" and 'release date') had already been beaten to death and the memes had turned incestous in a desperate attempt to come up with something new and shocking. People joked about rolling around in their own feces just to find some new boundary to transgress, new material to work with, and if the delays had kept coming I wouldn't be surprised if someone had eventually done it. There was simply nothing else to do but repeat the exact same jokes to each other over and over again until someone came up with something new, by any means necessary.
Work that appeals to the public - by contrast - is that same old stuff, just shown to fresh eyes every time. As Orwell put it to explain Kipling's appeal, it's "good bad poetry", and a good bad poem is "a graceful monument to the obvious". It's beautiful because you've only seen it less than a million times every day, because you're not the guys locked into a box in XKCD #915 (https://xkcd.com/915/).
From my own reading the best theory I've seen is that we lost the language of beauty. It's a bit like trying to revive Latin. For any but the most genius artists to make beautiful things, you need centuries to build up a corpus of techniques, habits, useful misunderstandings, etc, so to raise the general level.
This level itself seems to be many things. Firstly technical, we literally don't have enough stone carvers, people don't understand the value of it, and economics compounds things in losing economies of scale.
Secondly cultural, surely you need a period of time for the taste of the audience to be both discovered and formed by art, and this in a coherent cultural context. Globalisation might kill art by removing context, as if you were to paint a painting without a canvas.
Thirdly there's freedom to follow patterns that lead towards beauty, paradoxically because we preach too much freedom. I personally suspect our lapse from making beautiful things has sewed ways of thinking that prevent any but the most extreme free thinkers from reconstituting the foundations for beauty, which is not the same skillset as an artist. I'm personally interested in rediscovering how buildings were ornamented, and managed to read an entire book that said nothing useful at all. A good example of a pattern in ornament that we'd struggle with today is that ornament isn't meant to overwhelm, it's decoration, it should develop and harmonise with building form. Today the artist is told to show their vision, but this harms them if they leave the canvas. Their idea of freedom prevents them from appreciating the nature of their restraints, and the new freedom that creates.
So I'm personally unsurprised that we're struggling to make beauty today, though it's a mystery how we got here in the first place. My best idea is high modernist mass construction undermined the economics of art long enough to break continuity of knowledge between generations, but his isn't a sufficient theory.
What I recall about European architecture and painting 1400-? (too big a category) is that much of the awesome stuff was financed by aristocrats who kept stables of artists the way wealthy people today have garages full of cars. Then those artists and architects had one job - make their employer look good - which might include glorifying God. So they went after it cooperatively and with immense budget. The combination of skill, time, community and financing. Today you get fashion houses or maybe film studios that do this to an extent and the 1000 animators in the credits.
Another thing, producing those things takes attention span and so does appreciating it. Blank walls are canvas for the projection of the mind. Beauty and creativity - all those gargoyles are different! - call out a response.
This is definitely part of the story, art seems to have survived where modes of patronage have continuity. I would add to patronage also the formation of the city, as the aristocracy of Florence was possible because of Florence herself. You need centres and access to those centres. I'm in Melbourne, and from knowing a few artists who didn't make it, it's hard not to notice they and everyone they know are being dispersed by extreme housing value into a wider and wider ring about the city, less and less able to collaborate. There's a physicality to the problem.
This reminds me of Carol Reynolds' (art historian) comment that composers in 1764 would say, "I composed this piece because there was going to be a ceremony for Duke so-and-so's official installation at the Cathedral and they needed a piece that would work using 12 strings. It was very practical."
It's a funny world! And I wonder if this is really so bad a thing, if you remove the larger context. Having a patron to serve could actually be helpful in giving a direction for talent. Is painting and finding good subjects for painting the same skill?
The language of beauty isn't necessarily lost; instead, it has moved on to other media. For example, consider video games. Yes, the majority of games produced today are crap (because the majority of everything is crap); but for every 50 *FIFA N+1* there's an *Ico*, or a *Zone of the Enders*, or even a *Cultist Simulator*. But the trick is that one cannot appreciate the beauty in these works just by looking at the visuals, or listening to the music, or reading the dialogue; instead, one must appreciate them *as games*, interactively. It's an entirely new medium, and when it fades (which is probably happening as we speak, unfortunately), something else will replace it.
I certainly don't mean to say beauty is all lost, there are still beautiful buildings made occasionally, but I am claiming the systemic roots are largely torn up, and great art in almost all forms today are the product of rare genius. Games are a great lens as there's a claim to be made that game developers have managed to overcome the obstacles I was mentioning, which is encouraging.
Though I'm not much of a gamer these days, I would add that the good and the beautiful are different things. Advances in the art of video games haven't necessarily reconstituted what is missing in other fields, the which we've been calling beauty. We might call great game design "beautiful", as we might call great sportsmanship "beautiful", but this is in a different sense from the sophistication of aesthetic principles we see is lacking in architecture.
As I said, I agree that game design is beautiful in a different way that paintings are beautiful -- but then, so is music, or architecture, or literature. I don't think it's possible for e.g. music to "econstitute what is missing in other fields" such as art; they're just different media.
I don't agree on this point, I think media can be beautiful in the same sense across forms, revival in one is transferable to the other, and it's wholly a matter of context what differentiates them. There are overriding concepts that cover all of them. Yet there's even more to say, as the relative importance of those concepts differs. In this sense, I think there is a particular sense of "beauty" which aims at something general, and it is as true of games as other media, but games are just as much a sport and show of prowess, and so beauty occupies a different place in the heirarchy of qualities than other media.
> I think there is a particular sense of "beauty" which aims at something general
This is, IMO, one of those statements that sounds intuitively true at first, but becomes increasingly more difficult to justify once you start thinking about it in more detail. I don't know how I would define a principle that unifies the beauty in e.g. music with beauty in art; admittedly, I personally am not much of a music fan.
I'll happily own that I'm beginning from phenomenology, it's self evident to me that there's a common thread in beauty across mediums. Robustness of definition is secondary, as this is a matter of hearts rather than heads, so to speak. I think it's beyond our scope to really dig in and find the limits of rationalising beauty, but it could be done.
Agreed, but admiring a still screenshot of a landscape in a video game is IMO kind of like admiring the brushwork on some specific cherub in a classical painting. There's nothing wrong with that, and it might be worthy of admiration -- but there's a bigger picture into which it is supposed to fit.
There definitely exists good examples of modern architecture; a good place to see a bunch of them is walking down the High Line in NYC. (I recently traveled to Boston and then NYC, and it was really striking how much better NYC is than Boston at building interesting and pretty new buildings - in Boston, if a building is interesting it's because it's old, and the new buildings are boring and unaesthetic, but in NYC even all the new glass skyscrapers are all different shapes from each other and form a very cool-looking skyline in aggregate, and along the High Line in particular there's a bunch of stuff that actually looks quite different from each other.) It's admittedly still less ornate than many medieval cathedrals, but at least to my eye it's great to look at. (For ornateness in modern-day art I'd go to those aesthetic-Tumblr posts showcasing unreasonably detailed art in an unexpected medium. Or to Pixar movies, tbh.)
Right, I think it pays to make a distinction between "modern architecture" as in "boxy mass-produced office building"; and "modern architecture" as in "Disney Concert Hall". They are not the same thing.
One thing to keep in mind is that during the Age of Coal, grand old buildings got really dirty and dingy. This helped inspire a taste for new, clean steel-and-glass buildings that could be kept clean by window washers. But in 1963, DeGaulle's culture minister, novelist Andre Malraux, had the soot blasted off Notre Dame cathedral with high pressure hoses, and over the ensuing decades, appreciation for the great buildings of the past increased.
I might be off the mark a little here, but do we (the West, broadly) even make giant expensive monuments at all anymore? It seems like spending money on anything that doesn't have a financial return has become hopelessly taboo. The person who ordered the construction of the Taj Mahal didn't think gosh, I'll be getting a great return on this investment! If you believe the stories, they weren't even thinking gosh the construction of this monument will really cement and increase my power as a ruler! He wanted to build a beautiful monument to his deceased wife, and he has the power/wealth to do so so he did.
Don't have hobbies - have side hustles! Don't spend - invest! Don't relax - work harder! I see that ethos reflected in the buildings as much as the clothes. Even the art.
I think it is just a matter of "wasteful" things like that being viewed as gauche. Or at least, people are always of being viewed as gauche and wasteful. If you build something expensive nowadays, people will complain about what else that money could have gone to.
The things that these two buildings have in common are:
- Built by very low-wage South Asian laborers (maybe the economic explanations really do matter?)
- Religious and nationalist goals (thus designed to express/elicit popular not elite sentiments?)
I'm sure there are other examples as well, but these were the first two that came to mind. Both are very very impressive IRL! In particular, the pietra dura work on the Sheikh Zayed mosque is very similar in both style and quality to that of the Taj Mahal.
1) How many people would prefer to live or work in a modern building as opposed to a beautiful old fashioned one? Did those wonderful old buildings have air conditioning, electrical outlets, fire exits, sound proofing or elevators? What was the lighting like? How easy were they to reconfigure? I know old buildings can be retrofitted and updated, but if you want office or living space, go for office or living space and focus on the office or living part.
2) Architectural ornament is much cheaper than it used to be, so it is less important. There was a big boom in statues and curlicues in the late 19th century and into the early 20th, but a lot of it was about new techniques for sculpting forms in stone or metal. All those charming buildings in NYC's Chelsea were the result of the falling cost of cast iron fixings. Sure, adorn your office or apartment building with colonnades and six dozen statues of Audrey Munsen and see if you impress anyone.
3) Personally, I like a lot of modern architecture, particularly the kind that doesn't try to impress me with fancy this and that or, worse, to send a message. I loved the old World Trade Center because it was two god damned big boxes. A moron like me could figure it out. It wasn't trying to scream anything except "OFFICE SPACE". It was like Levittown, the bete noire of social critics, which screamed "HOUSING". People loved Building 20 at MIT because all it screamed was "LAB SPACE", no fancy message. It takes a lot of confidence in one's powers to simply dominate and conquer without a lot of fuss and pageantry. It's the tin pots who have to bang tin pots.
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I'll recommend Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" for an interesting take. He points out that the last thing you want is a modern building that won an award. An architectural award usually meant all sorts of problems: leaks, bad ventilation, awkward layout, power issues and so on. He says that the people who tend to get it right are the space planners. I had never even heard of space planners when I read the book, but they are the people who understand that buildings are about doing things, and, ideally, being able to learn to do new things. I like buildings that can do things.
In business, there is something called the "edifice complex". A surprising number of companies build new headquarters, usually impressive ones, just prior to collapsing. Some argue that it is cause and effect with executive attention on the new building and not on the business. Look at Boeing's new HQ in Chicago with its gold plated faucets followed by the 787 and 737-MAX disasters. People are still watching Apple with its flying saucer and rightly so.
1) Of course we want air conditioning and so forth. But there's no reason a building with those features has to look boring.
2) Yes, ornament is no longer a show of wealth. All the more reason to have ornament! We could have a utopia where nobody has to live in an ugly building!
3) Do you also enjoy bland food with plain water? It's not trying to be anything but food!
Fun random fact: every year, I take the same country road to look at some wildflowers, in the middle of nowhere. One year, an ugly McMansion popped up on the side of the road, complete with fake balconies and everything. The next year, there was an ultralight helicopter parked in front of it (with a collapsible rotor, natch). I really should've taken a picture (I was too scared of getting the hounds released on me at the time), because the juxtaposition was striking. The helicopter looked like an alien artifact from an enlightened spacefaring culture. It didn't have any unnecessary decorations, just elegant lines that seemed to flow together. The McMansion looked like, well, the total opposite of that.
Those are good points. I've just stayed at too many pretty hotels that are horribly uncomfortable, visited with too many friends living in lovely houses that are nearly unlivable and worked in too many cleverly designed offices that are unpleasant and awkward. Maybe I associate message architecture with bad experiences, and it is possible to have an interesting looking building that is also a nice place to be in.
When you say that a house is "nearly unlivable" what do you mean? When I hear "nearly unlivable" I think of the houses I've visited that meet that description: houses where the floorboards have jagged holes in them, dry rot has caused the roof to sag alarmingly, and the windows don't seal so its cold and mildewy. I definitely wouldn't call any of them lovely: sun bleached and derelict would be better words for them. So what do you mean when you say "unlivable?" I can't picture it.
When I used "nearly unlivable" there, I was definitely exaggerating for rhetorical effect. It's not that the house doesn't meet basic standards, but that living in it can be unpleasant and problematic. A friend of mine once rented a lovely architect designed house that had zero closet space. They had to improvise places to hang their clothes, store food and so on. A realtor once showed me a house with a lovely view, but 7' ceilings. I'm 5'10", but the low ceiling was oppressive. Some houses can't be kept warm or cool or ventilated. Some have transparent doors on the bathrooms. Some have no built in lighting. Some have windows that absorb heat but can't be opened.
I think you already had a partial explanation in your Signaling/Counter Signaling essay. Within culture, there are numerous sways between opposing values.
Imagine that social technology is actually better, so trends and tastes and mores move faster. Imagine there's *lots* of room for subcultures, but they *are* properly ghettoed... until or unless they spread like wildfire through the population.
In opposition to the subcultures, it is now possible to have a very universal standard thing, and it will have to absorb all the sways.
Everything you put in the classical bucket is *very distinct*. Would any of it universalize? No. Not every child likes antipasti, or guo bao rou. But every child, indeed perhaps every honest human, likes McDonalds fries.
The beautiful monuments of the past are non-universal in that each culture produced different ones. But they are universal in their appeal. They attract tourists from all over the world.
I recently read a book by an Englishman who explored the Mayan ruins in the early 19th century. He had certainly never seen a photograph of Mayan art or architecture, and I doubt he had seen drawings of them. But, even though it was alien to him, he very much appreciated the artistry.
Modern architecture, on the other hand, is almost universal in its lack of appeal.
You've added this to the original essay, but say it doesn't explain why this trend is seen across all media, but I don't think that's right.
What modern production method does NOT favor the absence of non-repeating and detailed decoration? Almost everything has gone from being made by hand to some form of mass production, and once you do that the cost of adding decorations that are not mass produced becomes much much greater compared to the cost of a mass produced item.
Look at the clothes worn by the most powerful man in China. Using the same quality material, of course the one full of ornate and non-repeating decorations costs far more to make than a mono-color suit.
And I think its important to acknowledge that the cost factor is often HUGE. This is not just the matter of paying slightly more. We are talking about a taking an item with a primarily functional purpose, and increasing its cost ten fold. That fundamentally changes the nature of the purchase, from functional to artistic. Such purchases are not fungible. They are fundamentally different.
I'm not rich, but I have pajamas as ornate as the old Chinese clothes in the picture. If it were fashionable, we could easily have entire nations dressed like that. It is most definitely not a matter of the modern world not being able to afford stuff that used to be considered fancy.
I actually have a similarly ornate Chinese blanket from my in-laws. It cost easily 20 times what normal blankets made from nice materials cost here (yet it was manufactured in China).
I think we see different things when we look at the Chinese outfit. I see an outfit that was embroidered by hand. It is clearly possible to make long rolls of cloth with detailed prints and manufacture clothing at a reasonable price. But up close, they would be obviously different things.
It is not super weird to see detailed or ornate prints on relatively simple cloths (t-shirts, curtains, bedsheets). Are there technical limitations in putting ornate prints on the kind of cloth that good men's suits are made of?
"A weaker version of this might be the difference between a very sugary soda and a fine wine. Most ordinary people would prefer the sugary soda, but the fine wine has some kind of artistic value."
My immediate gut reaction to this was "there's no way that's true" - am I more out of touch than I think? I can't imagine most normal people find the overwhelming sweetness of the sugary soda pleasant, and although a cultivated appreciation for "fine wine" is rare, I think most people enjoy wine in general.
I don't drink either for health reasons. I've never drank wine, and quit soda a few years back. With the caveat that I've never tried the wine, I would still sooner go back to drinking soda than ever try wine, though I intend to do neither.
"Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Wine estimated at US$326.6 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$434.6 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 4.2% over the analysis period 2020-2027"
"Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Soft Drinks estimated at US$994.7 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$1.3 Trillion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 4.9% over the analysis period."
Sugary sodas are way more popular, and that's not even adjusting for the big difference in unit price (these numbers would be even more skewed in terms of bottles or liters or something).
inb4 "but diet coke" - Yes, the soft drinks number includes diet drinks. But I can assure you that most diet soda drinkers also like real soda, just choose not to drink it. So in terms of popularity, still a sugary soda win.
I'm surprised this post makes next to no mention of the old SSC post about a cellular automata model of fashion. Seems like that model [moving very slowly] could explain a lot of the observations here.
Scott does hint at related ideas in this current post but doesn't quite pull out the old model, which I would have liked to see - curious how he thinks it helps or doesn't.
As the fashion for ugly modern art trickles down to the middle class, maybe elites will return to supporting genuinely beautiful art to signal how not-middle-class they are.
So, is it just me or is the Tartaria conspiracy theory… blatantly obviously correct? Like, our modern society has all the trappings of that sort of “twilight of the gods” fiction. We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel), a culture of pessimism and trying to hold on to what we have over producing anything new, a decadent and onanistic upper class, a drugged-into-complacency lower class. Like, there’s nuttiness which I don’t accept, but this seems so abundantly obviously true-in-substance that I feel like it just barely counts as a “conspiracy theory”. Just scratch out the references to "Tartarian Empire" and replace it with "Interwar America" and it seems like a fairly accurate description of history.
Data on skyscrapers by year of construction is proving difficult to find, so consider that point conceded until good data can be found. If anyone has a handy source on average newly-constructed building height or ratio of skyscrapers (for some reasonable definition thereof) built in the US before WWII versus after, I'd appreciate it.
NASA plans to do a lot of things, but the fact that they're planning on recreating LosTech from the 1960's and that's supposed to be an argument in their favor kinda makes my point for me. If our standards are that low, then something has gone wrong. Just for historical comparison, that's like saying in the 1960's "NASA is planning on launching a heavier-than-air flying machine which can stay aloft for a whole minute!" (The distance between the moon landing and now is roughly the same as that between the moon landing and first flight.)
No, it's not true in substance at all. The elite conspiracy to control our reality is an absolutely key part of conspiracy theories like this one. If you take out the nutty bit about a secret apocalypse, you're left with something entirely different.
And technology is, in most ways, far better than it was fifty years ago. We've just abandoned a few big projects, some of which were honestly kind of pointless to begin with. Modern satellites are infinitely more useful than a moon rocket.
It's true that the modern day has a sort of decadent and decaying vibe, culturally. And that vibe is rooted in some real problems. But lost technology is very thin on the ground and there was never a real golden age.
Okay, I agree that the elite conspiracy is both vital to the Tartaria conspiracy and completely insane.
That said, technology is, in many ways, far worse than it was 50 years ago, as well. It's, in many ways, vastly worse than it was 100 years ago. Not in the sense that we have literal Battletech-style lost technology, but that our civilizational capacity to construct and deploy new technology has regressed. For example, I haven't been able to find exact sources on the production time for the Spanish Flu vaccine, but it seemed to have taken about a year to develop, then was deployed immediately. Contrast that with the COVID vaccines, which were developed in 2 days, and then were stuck in testing hell for a year. Or public access airports, which being closed faster than they open, such that the number of public access airports has fallen over the last 30 years. Or nuclear power plants, of which a grand total of 1 has come online since 1996.
If you just look at new shiny things which have had prototypes shown off at conventions or published about in academic journals, then sure, things look good. If you look at the turnaround time and expense from those first prototypes to actual commercial availability and being put to work making peoples' lives better, then the picture looks a lot worse. If you exclude the (admittedly genuinely impressive) innovations happening in electrons and just focus on innovations in atom-space, then the picture looks downright terrible.
And, again, this isn't coming from a place of my thinking that we have literally lost the knowledge of how to build those things (though I have nuclear engineer friends saying a lot of institutional implicit knowledge about operations-level nuclear engineering is being lost as the engineers trained in the 1970's and 80's die or retire without a new generation to replace them). It's a matter of, to quote Josh Hall, "let[ting] complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering 'It can’t be done' predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering 'It won’t be done' prescriptions today". From a functional standpoint, this is basically identical to a Foundation-style civilizational collapse. The knowledge may still be there, in theory, in books, but the new things aren't. So, for people who want 0-emissions energy too cheap to meter, it's cold comfort that some professor somewhere still understands the design principles of nuclear reactors which will never be built at scale until something major changes to unstick things.
The "there was never a real golden age" is true in the sense that the age which should have been golden was marred by racism, sexism, and other non-technological social ills, which I despise and wouldn't want to bring back under any circumstances. But comparing wikipedia's list "Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)" to "Timeline of United States inventions (after 1991)", the latter is clearly shorter (a glance seems to indicate that the latter list is shorter than 2/3 of the former list, to compensate for the shorter time frame of the latter, but I haven't counted and checked). What's more, the things invented since 1991 are less impactful, have had slower "invention announced to first commercial application" turnaround times, and several items on the latter list were scientific advancements, not technological inventions (I didn't carefully check the former list, but I didn't check the latter list either, so take this with a small grain of salt).
Even if, for whatever reason, you don't count the interwar period as a golden age, I don't see how you can deny that, on this one axis, it was vastly better than now.
> We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel)
wut? Are you claiming that we lost ability to build skyscrapers?
In space travel some pointless vanity project were scaled down, but spaceX (despite all Elon dumb Twitter posts) progress magnificently. The tandem landing was amazing - something considered nearly impossible and not worth trying just years before, and has potential to revolutionize space travel. It already brought cost reductions on massive scale.
And nuclear power was strangled by dumb people, see cases of reactor build, finished and newer used. Or dumb quest of German Greens to increase CO2 production by murdering nuclear power there.
The other issue I had explained to me involves the Queen Anne style Victorian. A generation before that kind of detail would have been ruinously expensive. But with new technology they were able to mass produce all those wooden details. For a while poorer (but obviously not poor) people used that to build houses that were above their station. And then the rich had to go in the opposite direction and go much simpler.
Queen Anne style as imitated by Victorians, I think it means. Middle-class Victorians imitated the style of the upper class in Queen Anne's time, so upper-class Victorians reacted by going simpler.
It seems to me that we do discover new timeless aesthetic truths. Perspective (lines converging at a point) in visual art, for instance. My own area is fiction, so I can give some examples there. "Free indirect style" -- the thing where the narrator says something but you know it's actually what the protagonist is thinking -- was invented by Jane Austen, Flaubert or Goethe, depending on who you listen to. There wasn't always such a thing as fiction set in the future. Even the novel itself, long form stories in chapters where the audience understands that it's imaginary, was invented at some definite historical moment (separately by Murasaki Shikibu and Cervantes, maybe?) For a 20th century example, I'd suggest deliberate "defamiliarization", like in dada or surrealism. Stream-of-consciousness (in novels, at least) is also a modern invention.
Some of these may seem like mere technical innovations, but once they're out in the world, they don't go away. Once you've seen a painting with well-executed perspective, earlier paintings are always going to look kind of childish. Painting without perspective is now a definite choice, which has a different meaning now than it did before perspective's invention, whether anybody likes it or not.
I don't think it explains all of the phenomena of aesthetic modernism. But it seems quite likely to me that architecture and fashion discovered new timeless aesthetic truths, and now there's no going back to the way things were. That definitely happened to fiction. If you write like George Eliot or Tolstoy now, it means something because you're not writing like David Foster Wallace or Virginia Woolf or Donald Barthelme. (I'm thinking of Zadie Smith, Amor Towles, Kristin Hannah, etc.)
Could survival/selection bias be impacting our perception here?
As a statistical matter, the vast majority of classical buildings, clothes, poetry, and visual art are gone and/or forgotten. I have no idea to what degree my perception of "normal" classical buildings aligns with "how buildings were built in this time" vs "the buildings that are most memorable from that time" vs "what happened to survive". Ditto for most artistic fields.
To flip it around: maybe the superhero movies will be the key thing remembered from our era, and some still survive as iconic and eventually be "high" art the same way opera transformed over time. I mean, I hope not... But it doesn't seem implausible.
"if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling": this is more or less where Tom Wolfe places the blame for modern architecture in From Bauhaus To Our House. Architects realized they could live in artists' compounds, which he describes this an exciting innovation in architecture, which could suddenly be about pure expressions of social and political taste. He claims the star architects of the day we busy theorizing at each other, disconnected from the rest of society, and fell into weird signalling loops.
It's an entertaining and opinionated book, but I think it leaves out the massive need for postwar rebuilding in Europe, which made the spare, "non-bourgeois" international style appealing on a practical level.
One example strikes me as odd: The pyramids. Yes, they're large, but they're nothing more than an orderly stone dump. We could build them right now with much more usable space and, in turn, people from back then would probably be way more impressed to see us building a large cube with straight walls. It's just that this was the best they could do.
Compare that to Bill Gates entrance: The TV alone is technology that people would dream about just a century ago. He does not need to build something large to show off, he can do so extremely understated - which in itself is just another power statement.
Overall, it's possible that the way you need to show off simply moved. Anyone can build a garden full of great statues now, you simply no longer get bragging rights for that.
I'd like to second that: What we now consider hellenic style, e.g. the White House, is only what remained of the original view after centuries. See for example the pictures at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antike_Polychromie
As others have noted, you are to a degree replicating Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House," which postulated a sort of conspiracy whereby modern architects - the kind who design buildings that look like the boxes that other buildings came in, as some wit put it - have bamboozled clients into ordering buildings that the clients hate, that everybody hates, but that they're somehow persuaded are what they ought to have.
There's a book by John Carey, "The Intellectuals and the Masses," postulating that modernist literature, and modernist art in general, was invented around 1900 by elitist intellectuals trying to keep on top of the newly educated masses by creating something those masses still couldn't understand. And Carey was an English professor at Oxford.
Whether these conspiracies are the explanation or not, it's true that all the arts took a turn towards this stark and ugly style in the early to mid 20C. The kindest explanation I've seen is that it was an understandable overreaction to the opulent excesses of the late 19C.
But what interests me is the recent - last 40 years or so - reaction against this. Mid-20C artists who refused to accept the prevailing styles, and who were mocked and ignored by critics at the time, are being rediscovered and feted. (In classical music, the prime example is Jean Sibelius: admired in the 1920s and 30s, between about 1940-70 he was despised and belittled by the critical establishment, but now he's considered one of the greats.) And newer artists, who come out of the modernist movement but rebel against its strictures, and consequently are scorned by it, achieve notable popularity. (In classical music, the minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich; also check out the popular reception of Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" against the slam it's gotten from critics like Jim Sveja.)
Why is this written like it's trying to understand some alien civilization or obscure natural phenomenon? Modern artists and architects are nothing if not verbose about their thought processes, and their writings are easy to find. For instance, the essay "Ornament and Crime" by modernist architect Adolf Loos is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime . Robert Hughes' /The Shock of the New/ is a very accessible overview of modern art and the forces that drove it. You can observe directly how modern artists thought, not try to infer some underlying cause (although I guess there is room for both approaches).
This might clear up some mystery. Eg you say: "Partly because art is nice and we should want more beautiful things or at least try to understand where our beautiful things come from."
Modern artists by and large did not view their job as producing beautiful or nice things. They viewed their work as trying to respond to a world that was industrializing and otherwise changing. The world was becoming less beautiful, less organic, and more mechanical, alienating, and horrific, and the art had to change to match.
Maybe this was a bad way to think (it was very much linked to leftist politics) and the world would be better off if the artists had focused on beauty and niceness, but that's not what happened.
But why do difficult times demand difficult art? That didn't use to be the case. Beethoven wrote his sumptuously beautiful Emperor Concerto while Napoleon was besieging Vienna, and Beethoven was spending most of his time in the basement with pillows over his ears, trying to protect the remains of his hearing from the sound of cannon.
It's not that the early 20th century was "difficult", it's that it was undergoing technological. economic, and social change at an unprecedented rate.
The Napoleonic era also had some modernizing changes, but at a much less advanced stage. The Napoleonic wars were bigger but not all that fundamentally different than past wars, WWI was a mechanized hellscape that basically broke an entire generation.
This is very standard stuff; but you can't understand modern art without understanding the social context it was part of.
You should tell that to the polemicists who favor modern art, because they don't believe it's the modernization of WW1 & 2 which causes difficult art, but the terror and slaughter. But terror and slaughter aren't new.
Why are Google headquarters' buildings non-descript?
One of Parkinson's Laws is "a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done."
I doubt if Apple is about to collapse, but its recent $5 billion headquarters building sure looks like Apple's glory days died with Steve Jobs.
Scott also seems to have happened upon a particularly unflattering angle of the Google HQ. That looks like a closeup of the northwest corner of the main HQ campus, which features a pair of utilitarian short boxy towers presumably designed to squeeze in a bit more office space into the site footprint subject to the constraints of Mountain Views restrictions on building height.
The rest of the main campus is still in a relatively austere style compared to "Tatarian" architecture, but is quite a bit prettier than the picture used in the article. It's more aesthetic on the side facing Amphitheater Parkway where most people would approach it from the outside. It's also quite a bit better looking from the inner courtyard.
One point you didn't address anywhere was usability - did any of these architectural or stylistic changes have *practical* benefits? Like, big glass-walled skyscrapers let in lots of natural light, which is something people like to have. Vaulted, gothic ceilings are nice for churches, but in other settings they're kind of a waste of space and more expensive to heat and cool. Courtly dress made with ten billion layers of fabric is hot as hell and hard to move around in - would *you* want to wear one on formal occasions?
I expect this would affect public buildings the most, because elected officials would have to answer questions about whether it's really worth X million dollars to make the local library look like a Renaissance cathedral.
(Although I've also read that architecture is not actually that big a part of the building's cost - the town of Columbus, Indiana actually has an endowment from some millionaire for the purpose of getting famous architects to design public buildings... although it's modernist architecture, because that's what the millionaire liked. Some people just like that style, I guess.)
Agree with others that the pursuit of novelty is what’s driving a lot of this. When you’re completely immersed in any pursuit what you crave more than anything is the new. And it’s how you show skill. It’s not too different from science — replicating a study to confirm a result is considered less impressive than finding something new, even if the result you’re confirming is more scientifically important. This comment isn’t going to help my case against the people who say this is all about class signaling, but when I spent several months in Europe my attitude towards neoclassical and neogothic churches went from admiration to indifference to resentment. I’m just not going to feel anything towards the 36th of anything I see.
Maybe this helps explain a little why the elite-masses taste disparity seems widest with architecture, at least in the US. Those famous neoclassical / neogothic buildings are pretty rare here and are associated with Europe, so they seem novel and exotic as well as beautiful.
Generally I don’t think the elite-masses taste disparity in art is a social problem though. It’s not as though the “traditional,” more popular stuff is scarce or not around anymore, and people can go seek out what they like. With buildings and public art though, I’m very sympathetic, because 1) these are capital-intensive projects and 2) they are imposed on the local community.
The "beauty is just too easy" argument is very consistent with what modern artists would say e.g. in manifestos. I often think of what Kandinsky proclaimed: "We can't paint anymore the naked asses of Venuses, or the green meat of the gardens".
You could maybe charitably consider the following: the beauty of the ass of a Venus is a solved problem. The beauty of a naked piece of concrete is far from a solved problem. Yet, it might be quite an important problem, as the naked pieces of concrete are not going away, and can't really be hidden.
Should've fact-checked before quoting, actually it's from Boris Groys talking about Malevich, not sure if he's actually quoting or not. Anyway, they all despise this obvious, boring pretty stuff
1) What about photography as a cause? Ornate things don't photograph as well (particularly fashion). The unforgiving lens favors clean lines.
2) Cars? We see things at a higher speed and from farther away. A clean, geometric building looks striking from afar. Ornate details are only appreciated slow and up close.
3) Maintenance? It's really hard to keep ornate stuff clean and in good repair.
4) Clean designs make quality of components and labor a lot more obvious. In Bill Gate's living room, any damage or flaws would be readily apparent. A solid suit leaves nowhere to hide for poor fit, bad tailoring, cheap fabric, or hasty machine stitching. On the other hand, the riotous design of an ornate cathedral can hide a lot of flaws (cracks, lumpy walls, stone carvings or painted figures that look good in a group but individually are kind of amateurish).
An interesting and thought-provoking article, as always. But all I can think about is Scott not enjoying fine wine. How is that possible? Obviously it is. But for a cerebral aesthete interested in hedonic experiences… how? Scott, please give it another try. There is as much cultural, social, historical, and various other -als in wine as there are in food or art. And if Scott, or really any of you, are in Seattle I am happy to give a quick tour of the wine world.
He might not have the taste buds for it. Take me, for instance, I can't stand the taste of alcohol. It's just the worst. Super bitter, and not in a good way. I looked into it and turns out some people just have the right (wrong?) genes for tasting phenylthiocarbamide as intensely bitter. Kind of like how there's a gene that determines whether you think cilantro is delicious or tastes of soap.
It kind of seems that of all aesthetic experiences taste may be the most dependent on taste.
I might be committing Typical Mind Fallacy (TMF) here, but I don't find this phenomenon mysterious, because I like the modern stuff more than the older stuff.
Look at the high status Chinese dress, 1700s, and the high status Chinese dress 2000s. You win some eccentric lottery, and you get to have one of these two dresses for free. Which do you pick? The 1700s is kind of cool to look at if I were to display it in a museum or something (I don't own a museum), but if I'm picking something I might actually wear some time, I'd pick the 2000s one.
Look at the Milan Cathedral and the Luigi Bocconi University. "Winning" either of these in a lottery would probably be a maintenance nightmare, so let's say instead you got a job at a company that has offices in two buildings, and you get to choose which building you'll have to spend 8 hours a day in, 5 days a week. Which one do you pick? I'd pick the University one.
Look at the Receiving Room in Cardiff's Castle, and the receiving room in Bill Gate's mansion. You won a lottery which involves an interior decorator and architect and whoever else is necessary to give you your dream house, as long as your dream house is one of two options. Which do you pick? I'd pick the one that looks like Bill Gate's mansion.
The only one where my thought experiment fails is with the statues example. I have to admit, if I won a free statue to display in my yard (I don't own a yard, but hypothetically), I'd pick the Trevi Fountain one.
So am I TMFing and I'm the only one who would pick the modern choice most of the time? Or would most people pick the modern one, and therefore it's no longer mysterious why people who are rich enough to actually have the choice, also pick the modern one?
I'll agree about living in the mansion and the statues. Disagree on the clothes and work place. Well, assuming I can actually get into the traditional clothes unassisted. I *really* hate modern suits, to the point that I would never wear them if I had the option, whereas I could at least see myself dressing up in the traditional outfit to see what it's like (I suspect the shoes at least are pretty comfortable). And I'd much rather work in a historic cathedral where I can wander around during my breaks and see some breathtaking sights than in just another college campus. Or at least, the things that would draw me towards the campus have nothing to do with its architecture.
Considering that Hemingway was a Castro sympathizer and Orwell was a socialist, I'm not sure this theory has much going in favor of it. I believe in fact it was the Soviets who promoted simple, realistic art and literature in opposition to the decadent modern art of the West, whereas the CIA promoted, in the form of funding, more abstract art, precisely because it was perceived as being more Western.
Recently I heard that the CIA "wrote" The Scorpion's hit song "Winds of Change" about the fall of the Berlin Wall. So they eventually supported a simpler art style, I suppose.
You mention a theory that the CIA supported a "plain" writing style via writing workshops. I'm not saying you are wrong. I don't know anything for a fact; I'm trying to make an educated guess based upon the evidence.
Is there evidence that a more "plain" style emerged after the CIA supported these workshops? It seems to me that late 20th century writing became all the more complex, with writers like Pynchon, Didion, Eco, Barth, Barthelme, David Foster Wallace...
Now you can argue the CIA failed in that mission. But if you agree they failed, why bring it up? If they had no effect, it doesn't explain anything.
I'm not trying to be rude or argumentative for the sake of it. I'm genuinely interested in the question.
I don't know if this is necessarily true. Yes, I have also heard the argument that modern art evolved to be abstract and non-representational due to the invention of photography, videography, and other means of reproducing the natural world cheaply and easily.
On the other hand, as Scott points out, today I can press a button and step into a world of breathtaking beauty, inhabited by gods, demons, or merely men (*) -- and all it would cost me is about $60 and a decent gaming PC. So, clearly there's some demand for painstakingly rendered representational art; it's just not called "art".
(*) e.g. https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/ghost-of-tsushima/
My point is not merely that representational video games exist; but rather, that beautiful, elegant, and emotionally moving representational video games exist. Are they in the majority ? No, of course not; but then, very few buildings looked like the Notre Dame back in 1700s, either.
Frank Gehry's best buildings are inspired by his love of sailboats. His Disney Concert Hall in L.A. is basically a standard box building with a giant shiny abstract sculpture that has a clear sailboat-look placed around it.
It's hard to go too wrong with sails as an artistic inspiration.
This is random and not productive to the overall conversation, but where does the phrase "Whither [X]?" originate from? My boss used it recently and I didn't get it and felt bad about myself.
"Whither" is a somewhat archaic word generally meaning "towards where." It's kind of the opposite of "whence," which is a somewhat archaic word meaning "from where."
That's assuming you're asking about the literal definition and not the memetics connotation, haha. That I don't know, but my guess is that it comes from the same direction as "whomst".
... I'm now wondering why what and that are pronounced differently while the other pairs rhyme, and which one is the "correct" pronunciation
What and that are from the same paired cognates in latin, but e.g. in norse they are from either specific ( sá, sé, þat) or inspecific (er, which can mean what, which, or when) demonstrative pronouns, and the interogative prnoun hverr is a completely different word altogether. IIRC anglo saxon is similar, although the word hvat ( pronounced "what") is an interjection in AS.
Cool thanks for the info
Dont forget "and yon" hither, hence, whither, thence, thither, thence are from English's germanic roots where words were careful to distinguish between motion and stasis, and in the case of those pairs, direction as to or from.
This is implicit in your post, but I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that "from whence" (e.g. "return to the X from whence you came") is as redundant as, say, "ATM machine."
And the silly part is, that it *is* logical: it's additive, not multiplicative. Ain't no one gonna take my intensifiers away, no way no how.
Just refer to it as an ATMG. ;D
Redundant but fun... cf 'Ursula Le Guin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_of_the_Night or The Illuminati Phalanx 'let them ooze back to the primordial slime whence they came.'
What's redundant in that quote...?
Should be "let them ooze to the primordial slime whence they came" since the "back" is covered in whence. It would be like saying "let them ooze back back to where they came from"
I think I disagree here. "Back" is functioning as an adverb, not a preposition. It indicates something about the manner of their return; one could replace it with "quickly" or "triumphantly" or "slimily." The fact that the adverb and the object refer to the same place doesn't make the sentence redundant or grammatically incorrect. You wouldn't blink an eye at someone who said "I'm going back to my hometown," for example.
The combination of _where_ and _from_ is the modern equivalent to _whence_, so if one _back_ is okay with the former, it should be with the latter.
Maybe I should let this three-year-old conversation rest back whence it came.
Yeah, who said language was better with less redundancy.
There's an eeriness to whence and wither. Words witches would use.
Like
Even better is Adelaide's line from Guys and Dolls:
"Take back your mink, to from whence it came . . ."
NIC card?
I see that first episode of Monty Python was called "Whither Canada"; I consider it a joke about pretentious journalism.
Thanks.
"Whither X" served as a parody of old fashioned self-serious foreign affairs journalism: e.g., "Whither Indonesia?" In other words, the implication is that the newspaper's expensive Indonesian correspondent doesn't have any headline news about Indonesia, but he has some thoughts about its future that he's going to share.
Not sure this was pretentious; recall that the well-educated Victorian had a vocabulary of upwards of 300,000 words.
That's not possible. Source for that?
Lol
My guess is that it must have been a fairly common flourish in the nineteenth century, maybe cemented by Trotsky's book "Whither England?" I definitely first encountered it in Monty Python's "Whither Canada?" To be perfectly honest, I still don't know if it means "where, in an abstract sense, is country X going?" or "how do we get to the idealized, perfected version of country X?"
“Whither thou goest I will goest I will go” is from the Book of Ruth. These things usually start with the Bible or Shakespeare.
Surely "Whither thou goest, I will go"? Or am I missing something?
You are right. That was just sloppy typing on my phone.
Leonard Cohen does Whither thou goest
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0heq4hsFmkE
John 13:36. In Latin this question reads "Quo Vadis?" which you might have encountered in art. The New Testament verse may well refer back to Book of Ruth, but I'm positive that most citation links go through the New Testament.
‘ Part of a longer promise of fidelity, spoken by Ruth to Naomi, her mother-in-law. The longer text reads: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”’
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/whither-thou-goest--i-will-go
https://www.cathedralatl.org/customer-content/www/cms/files/ruth.pdf
I’m not claiming expertise here. It’s just what a web search returned.
The verse from Ruth is not a question ("Whither X?") but a statement, whereas the original question was about the question "Whither X".
Good point.
i think you might be ignoring the role of novelty here. like, if youre the sort of person who is very interested in a given art form (say, designing buildings), youre gonna study them a lot, and then get bored of the types of buildings that already exist, and want to see and create new weird buildings. i mean, i agree that its weird and maybe bad that weird artsy buildings have become a thing for government buildings, but i dont think its surprising that the architecture world is interested in buildings that the average person isnt, because the average person doesnt want an interesting or novel building, they just want a good building (a reasonable desire!). its like stravinsky's atonal music. it sounds worse, like, aesthetically, but its very clearly weird and novel, and if you think about music all the time, (maybe) you want that.
but yeah, thats where i think the modern art communities' tendency toward weird unappealing stuff comes from. all the appealing-to-normies stuff got discovered already, and now people are trying to find weird new ways to work in the form
I don't think modern buildings look more different from one another than traditional buildings do. I just saw the Sagrada Familia today, which seems interestingly different from every other building but still clearly ornate and more in the "traditional" than "modern" camp.
Do other people think modern buildings are more varied?
i dont think the version of modern architecture that ends up in like, corporate buildings is particularly diverse, but i think the most famous and esteemed architecture of the last 50 years is *extremely* diverse. frank gehry vs frank lloyd wright vs moshe safdie vs zaha hadid look like they come from different planets.
The divergence correlates with mass media, so your theory makes sense. In the 1800s, an elite person had probably only seen a few dozens magnificent buildings in their life. Today, every architect has seen (pictures of) nearly every magnificent building on Earth. So as the pool of comparable buildings has exponentially expanded (from dozens to thousands), novelty has become much more prized.
Prestige within a creative field is so tightly bound with novelty that it’s pretty much inevitable that ambitious new works must abandon older forms, even when many of the artists and elites may prefer them.
Personally, I think the greatest music ever written was from the Romantic era, specifically Beethoven’s symphonies. Plenty of music critics (classical ones, at least) would agree. And yet, nobody writes in that style anymore, and nobody seems to think anybody should be writing in that style. Romantic music is done, like it or not (I don’t).
If I discovered an unknown symphony by Beethoven, as brilliant as any of his others, and I passed it off as my own work, would I get any traction? I think the same critics that lionize Beethoven would dismiss my symphony as some kind of silly, Beethoven impression. Maybe they would concede that it’s a particularly well-executed impression, beautiful and clever and all that, but nothing that advances art form.
I think it’s interesting that there may be an exception here, albeit a middle brow one. If you want to write Romantic music, make it a film score. You won’t get the same level of elite respect, but everybody will love you (see Williams, John).
People do write music in that style. It's just that one can't make a living just writing in that style. Of course, a symphony requires a big commitment in time and energy, but getting one's symphony performed by a decent amateur orchestra is often a personal high point and money be damned.
The only composer I can think of who has had the ego to compose directly in the style of Beethoven is Carmine Coppola, father of Frances Ford Coppola, such as in this scene in "Black Stallion."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdYiJgwzumg
There's Louise Farrenc. Her music is wonderful and very much inspired by Beethoven, but she's only a little later than Beethoven-- respectable music hadn't turned ugly in her time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv3LXXlmwNs
I had forgotten about dramatic composers who write music for movies, video and live productions. They don't produce symphonies, but they'll use a lot of the same emotional mechanisms and musical mechanics.
How about Alma Deutscher?
There’s an interesting extension in there — parody gets close to this. I enjoy P.D.Q. Bach for the music just as much as I do for the weird musical jokes that require at least serious band geek background if not full on Bach historian reference material. Similarly, some of the stuff from people like Bo Burnam is only good for the humor, but some of it is legit catchy and fun in its own right (note the massive spread of tiktok memes based on the recent Netflix special.)
Parody works best when the person behind it really knows what they’re doing. I sang some serious choral pieces composed by Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach back in college. The piece about Mary Queen of Scots from his “Three Meditations” was one of my favorites.
I think you are a reactionary.
What on earth is the point of writing music in the “style of Beethoven” only to be overshadowed by Beethoven himself?
He is not lost, just gone before and you can listen to him anytime you want - even different versions of him.
It’s marvelous.
But we must seek new forms mustn’t we?
No, we mustn't. We may. If we wish to. Or if it was at least as pretty/as good as what came before (or better, though 'better' gets a bit complicated in arts).
But exalting rubbish just because it's novel? What's the point? And, if it takes years of training to see that something that looks/feels/sounds rubbish isn't actually rubbish - well, that's a technical accomplishment, sure but an artistic one? I have my doubts...
Hence my point about fine artists circle jerking.
"I think you are a reactionary."
Maybe reading too much into things, but something bothers me about this as an argument. Surely being a reactionary is bad if the new development you are reacting against is good, but being a reactionary is good if the new development you are reacting against is bad. Using the word to dismiss someone like this *presupposes* that the modern development is better than what came before. Which may well be true, but it would need to be argued for. And I am not sure that it is all that obvious that modern music surpasses Beethoven.
The people I knew writing in that style considered it a way to understand the music better. It wasn't about more or better, it was about understanding what was under the hood, so to speak. It was a way of appreciating it. I had a friend who wrote her thesis on using AI to generate fugues in the style of Bach. It was her way of appreciating how good Bach's fugues were.
Personally, I don't "get" music, but I know a lot of people do.
Even metal bands like 3 Inches of Blood suffered from this, with music critics unable to comprehend they weren't writing heavy metal in the 00's *unironically*.
Are you familiar with Alma Deutscher? You might enjoy her music.
Just giving her a listen now. Good recommendation. Chopin- like…at least the piece I’m listening to now.
Are you familiar with Ludovico Einaudi?
And even better, imo, Carter Burwell.
Better than Williams I ment.
I think if you can accept that Beethoven wrote as well in the style of Beethoven as it's possible to write, then a modern imitator could only write *as well* as him, and not better. And since Beethoven's music came first and is heavy with mythology, the modern stuff would never catch on.
However, there are plenty of times when a composer has essentially copied someone else's style, and because the imitator did it better than the original, it's the imitator that we remember. (E.g. J. S. Bach imitating Buxtehude, or Mozart imitating J. C. Bach.)
Like they say:
Good artists borrow, great artists steal
Fully agree. I don't think anybody should be trying to sound like Beethoven specifically. I do think there's space for new masterpieces within a Romantic-type style.
And "Romantic" shouldn't be used dogmatically either; if someone wants to add a didgeridoo, go for it.
Before the Romantic Era, imitating and even shamelessly ripping others off were considered compliments.
you may find my interview with the neo-romantic composer corentin boissier interesting: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/interview-with-corentin-boissier-romanticism-modernism-composition/
> CORENTIN: Always wanting to experiment further, to move forward, is part of human nature. The use of new chords and more and more complex rhythms in order to express as closely as possible the spirit of the new times has led to the dissolution of tonality. As long as it remained natural, this evolution produced masterworks in which tradition and novelty coexist in infinitely variable percentages. The dosage was sometimes explosive, sometimes tousling, but often successful.
>
> Today, I’m more convinced than ever that there is no natural border between styles. The schools may be opposed but not the styles, which should complement each other. But in the 1960s, suddenly it was all about serialism and electro-acoustic music; there was the quasi-institutional obligation to wipe out the past, and the subsidies only went to what has been called “contemporary music” (the word “contemporary” being abusively linked to a style instead of just meaning “of our time”). Without this political, ideological, and basically non-artistic doctrine, there would have been a natural complementarity between tradition and innovation, in music as in all other arts.
>
> [...]
>
> ERICH: I know some great American composers, like Arnold Rosner and Harold Shapero, have spoken of having felt alienated in American music departments, due to the dogmatic serialism there. In your experience, have the conservatoires of Paris been more accepting of 19th-century idioms?
>
> CORENTIN: Absolutely not – quite the contrary! Western Europe, and France in particular, has spearheaded this systematic destruction of all artistic tradition, of any style that could be related to the past. The conservatories have been forced to practice a clean slate policy. This undermining action, well supervised by the institutions and the media, has had the disastrous result that, for several decades, composition – in the original sense of the word – is no longer taught in the conservatories. I did all my musical courses at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) of Paris. I obtained five Prizes … but I was not able to attempt the “Composition” Prize since this Prize is only for composers of so-called “contemporary” music, that is to say “experimental”.
Thank you. Very interesting and right on topic!
On the other hand, there goes my Saturday. Now I have to read the rest of your blog!
Reminds me of Fritz Kreisler, who did the opposite...
> Some of Kreisler's compositions were pastiches ostensibly in the style of other composers. They were originally ascribed to earlier composers, such as Gaetano Pugnani, Giuseppe Tartini and Antonio Vivaldi, and then, in 1935, Kreisler revealed that it was he who wrote the pieces. When critics complained, Kreisler replied that they had already deemed the compositions worthy: "The name changes, the value remains", he said.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Kreisler
In the 1800s, elite people went on tours of Europe specifically to see the magnificent buildings and works of art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
Some of them even came back and made pastiches of them. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stourhead#Gardens_and_monuments
Obviously there’s no right answer, but FWIW Gaudi is generally considered a modernist icon, and that seems very right to me. Sagrada Familia to me seems far closer to something in the 20th century than e.g. Notre Dame, the U.K. parliament.
Gaudi was a unique representative of the general trend in later 19th Century taste toward Art Nouveau, which was a decorative style based on flowers and other living things.
Art Nouveau was succeeded by Art Deco (e.g., the Chrysler Building), which is similar but based on rectilinear shapes without as many biological references.
Both were beautiful but expensive. Art Deco took a hit with the stock market crash of 1929, which accelerated the trend toward streamlining. The small number of buildings put up in the 1930s, such as the Rockefeller Center, are quite elegant.
But WWII changed elite tastes in favor of cheap-looking buildings in the name of egalitarianism and a general we-don't-deserve-beautiful-buildings self-loathing. On college campuses, for example, the good old buildings are generally from the affluent and tasteful 1920s, then the really ugly buildings are from c. 1950-1980. After that, many colleges tended to try to put up buildings that look rather like the old buildings that everybody likes, often just with bigger windows.
That last part must be an American thing, possibly because the people who donate buildings to colleges are the sorts of people who like that sort of thing.
In my country where nobody donates money to universities, new university buildings look like new office buildings, which means a bunch of glass in a more or less interesting shape. They give the impression of a slow and incomplete recovery from the awful-in-every-way buildings of the 1950s-70s.
Architects like to distinguish themselves professionally by developing a new look. For example, the New York Times just raved about Swiss architect Valerio Ogliati's "Architecture that Makes the Case for Discomfort." Ogliati builds houses out of concrete that look like opened cardboard boxes that you would need to stomp flat to fit it in the recycling bin.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-architecture-that-makes-the-case-for-discomfort/
Lots of architects have built ugly concrete houses before, but Ogliati has come up with a way to make them more expensive. So Kanye West is hiring him to build an underground artist's colony for him in Wyoming.
In contrast, until about 2000, even though I follow architecture a little, I never even heard of the man who had been Architect to the Stars in my hometown of Los Angeles in the 1950s, a black architect named Paul Revere Williams. Creative people like Frank Sinatra would call him up and tell him he wanted a house in, say, Japanese modern-style with world class acoustics for his hi-fi.
But despite this great back story of a black man making it to the peak of the home architecture pyramid in postwar Hollywood, I never heard Williams talked about by architecture critics because he didn't propound a new look or a new theory. He was dismissed because he designed homes in whatever style Lucy & Desi or his dozens of other famous clients wanted.
That man should be institutionalized, not employed.
On Ogliati --
> Ours, he believes, is a globally mashed-up era with no meaningful shared references or objective truth. And so buildings, he says, must stand on their own. … takes his own inspiration, for example, from the monolithic rock pile structures of the Aztecs, for which historians cannot find an antecedent.
Art is the refuge for philosophers who can't stomach rebuttals, so I'll just say we seem to have different worldviews.
Paul R. Williams sounded familiar, he should be more famous, I heard about him from 99pi:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-architect-of-hollywood/
Much respect for the artist who can work in any style. I think in F is for Fake they talk about the forger often having phenomenal technical skill, because they can fabricate or source the equipment and mimic the stroke style of many other great artists from different periods. Yet if properly attributed, their works are often worth nothing.
Make sure you see Parc Guell, impressed me far more than the Sagrada Familia. The Dali museum in Figueres is also a really extraordinary experience - it's not a museum so much as a single giant work of art.
you're writing blogposts during your holiday to Barcelona? egad man, take a break!!!
Would you tell Gaudi to take a break from drawing buildings because he was on vacation? What's wrong with you?
To the extent that new building methods have arisen (and living in New York City) I think architecture has really taken a turn. But like any other human endeavor it has cycles.
I think it is important to remember how many buildings people put up that fell down immediately because they didn’t really have a clue about what keep, building up. Flying buttresses were an engineering necessity before they became an aesthetic fetish.
That number was virtually zero. People might not have had as much theoretical knowledge about what keeps buildings up as they do now, but they knew what kinds of structures were sound.
That number was not zero at all. People learned what kinds of structures were sound just like we learned everything else, the hard way.
I am reminded of the Code of Hammurabi: "If a builder has built a house for a man, and has not made his work sound, and the house he built has fallen, and caused the death of its owner, that builder shall be put to death."
That wouldn't need to be in there if there wasn't at least the perception that badly-designed buildings that collapse on their occupants were a problem worth legislating against.
Something can be common enough to be worth legislating against whilst still being very uncommon. Modern countries all have building codes, but it would be false to suggest that modern buildings keep collapsing because nobody knows how to make them structurally sound.
The legislation is probably necessary not because builders didn't know how to build good buildings, but that you can make a lot of money by building a deficient one and charging the client for a good one.
The client often can't tell the difference, so you make the builder liable for failures.
I can do a design of anchors in concrete, but there's very little chance you'd know if I did it wrong--not because you couldn't understand it, but because ACI 318 Chapter 17 is a pain in the dick and few people who don't design anchors for their job will put in the effort. (Indeed, even if it *is* your job, you'll learn to do it, then use software provided by manufacturers thereafter.)
And if I specify adhesive anchors, those are *very* sensitive to proper installation. But it's cheaper for the contractor to do it wrong, because one major requirement is doing a good job cleaning the hole after its been drilled. (Dust left in there will dramatically reduce strength.) It's very unlikely you would catch a contractor who did it wrong, and once the epoxy hardens you have no way to tell if it was done wrong other than pull testing, which is very expensive--it can hold well enough to survive casual effort, but still be too weak for the design-basis load.
While this exact example is modern, the dynamic it describes hasn't changed in the past 3,000 years, hence Hammurabi's dictum putting the onus on the builder.
Exactly.
https://weburbanist.com/2014/04/16/ancient-engineering-fail-12-historic-structural-disasters/
https://weburbanist.com/2014/04/16/ancient-engineering-fail-12-historic-structural-disasters/
There's a Chinese robber problem going on here. Given the vast number of buildings constructed throughout history, it's easy to find examples of ones that collapsed. That doesn't mean that the percentage of buildings which collapsed was a particularly high one.
It doesn’t have to be common. It just Hass to be. It was when people tried to build buildings higher that they ran into trouble. Minarets and such. It took trial and error
If you look specifically at *famous old Japanese temples and shrines*, a very specific reference class, *all of them* fell down and were rebuilt, usually several times. And those were ones that people put an unusually high amount of work and expense into, the cathedrals of their day. Admittedly, this is due to fires and earthquakes, but those are things that modern engineering is much better at preventing as well.
I just came across this and it made me laugh. I thought it somewhat relevant to this Conversation.
https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiMWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJiYy5jb20vbmV3cy93b3JsZC11cy1jYW5hZGEtNTg2ODMwMDLSATVodHRwczovL3d3dy5iYmMuY29tL25ld3Mvd29ybGQtdXMtY2FuYWRhLTU4NjgzMDAyLmFtcA?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Alternatively, _To Engineer Is Human_ by Petrowski. The theory is that new ideas in engineering are built much stronger than necessary. As time goes on, the reserves of strength are pared back until there's a disaster. Things are then built more carefully. Lather, rinse, repeat.
FWIW, I would have put the Sagrada Familia in the modern camp. But modern as in the Gaudi/neo gothic/art deco ways of the 1920s. EDIT: just checked Wiki. "Antoni Gaudí i Cornet (/ˈɡaʊdi/; Catalan: [ənˈtɔni ɣəwˈði]; 25 June 1852 – 10 June 1926) was a Catalan architect known as the greatest exponent of Catalan Modernism."
So definitely "modern".
I think Summer is on to something. Personally, that's why I dislike almost all paintings/fine art post the impressionists/art deco/1920s. It gets to be rubbish very fast, mostly because (imho) fine artists are just jerking each others off.
Bassed on some reading I did related to this post, I think Gaudi doesn't actually count as "modern" in the contemporary usage of the term. "Catalan Modernism" basically corresponds to Art Nouveau, which comes earlier than what's called "Modernism" in other contexts ("Art Deco" comes between the two.)
I'm surprised you don't think of Sagrada Familia as the perfect example of a "beautiful building with modern technology". I thought it was more beautiful than any of the old cathedrals I've seen, Haga Sophia, Notre Dam and the likes included.
I mean, just the sheer amount of detail in every corner and the almost-pattern present everywhere, not quite symmetrical but still satisfying, meant to keep your gaze slowly moving.
It was genuinely psychedelic, it's a building, it's static, but I could swear it was moving and "breathing" while looking at it.
It's fantastic. But visiting it does tend to both provoke and immediately answer the question of "Why don't we build things like this any more, with the exception of this one actual thing?" Because it took 150 years to build and it's not finished yet.
I remembered this comment from nine months ago, so I came and found it to say that it has stuck in my mind and that has to say something good about it.
The Sagrada Familia is an outlier. It is plausibly the weirdest large religious building in over 2000 years of Christian history.
It's also one of my all-time favorite religious buildings (alongside the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia). Gaudi, in his strange and very individual way, was an absolute genius. And until his architecture became a symbol of Catalan nationalism, it was absolutely loathed by much of the contemporary public.
So I have no idea how Gaudi fits into a discussion of popular versus elite taste.
In some cities they totally are (think Singapore, Abu Dhabi, even Chicago has some pretty unique buildings). One aspect that drives some of the lack of purely ornate architecture (I'm guess) is the shift from noble wealth to commercial wealth. Google needs to continue to be profitable which constrains the amount they are willing to spend on a new building (and how long they are willing to wait for it) while the King can just jack up taxes or the Pope can sell indulgences and steal all of the marble in the Colosseum.
And even Google has built some pretty complex shaped buildings, e.g. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/googles-new-bjarke-ingels-thomas-heatherwick-designed-hq-future-office-spaces
I guess there's a risk with equating modern with minimalist. Whereas minimalist, suggest reducing to a simple (single) form, there's no such limit on modernism. Considering the variables: colors, materials, shapes, structures, etc. there are infinite possibilities for exciting/inspiring modern design. Perhaps we're just in the mud hut period of modern design and it hasn't yet evolved.
Sagrada Familia IS a modern building, at least as Cathedrals go
I think modern architects try very hard to be varied, and if you score them on their own terms they contain diverse shapes, visible surfaces, historical references, etc.
But that type of score-keeping may not make much of an impression on somebody who thinks modern buildings are all ugly, leaky, and built to be torn down as soon as the 39 year depreciation schedule has run.
This is how I interpret really out-there fashion shows, too. But, at the end of the day, the fashion industry has to sell clothes at Target, so all the designs have to be reinterpreted back down to reality.
Great line about this in the movie (and I guess the book) “The Devil Wears Prada”. Paraphrasing here but Streep’s character says to the young assistant who doesn’t understand the subtle differences in sweater color tones something along the lines of “You know how many years of research, trail & error went into that particular shade of green that you randomly snatched from an isle at JC Penny? Many fucking years!”
The trouble with that is if it was a randomly chosen shade of green, or just the same green as they sold back in '78, it would also be fine and everyone would be just as happy.
Sorry, that justification has always bothered me.
The Anna Wintour-character in The Devil Wears Prada has total recall of every change of fashion of the last half-century and a strong knack for discerning whether the world is ready or not to bring a particular old look back into fashion.
The real Anna Wintour got to where she is because she really has that kind of brain.
If you want an uber-nerdy analysis of the role of novelty-seeking in the arts, there's a book by Colin Martindale called The Clockwork Muse that tries to fit equations of novelty to poetry, paintings, etc. I don't think it's really baked (too many parameters given the data), but it is a very interesting cut at the issue.
https://www.amazon.com/Clockwork-Muse-Colin-Martindale/dp/0465011861
Review by someone interested enough to take it seriously, but ultimately not sold:
https://awritingguide.com/2016/06/14/review-the-clockwork-muse-by-colin-martindale-1990/
This is my interpretation of free jazz. "Why bother with rhythm or melody" sounds bad/weird to normal people but if you've spent your childhood and professional life playing highly structured music, maybe it's more appealing.
I've often thought of a notion of stylistic saturation, that once an art form has more (premium and varied) content than any human being could experience in a lifetime, the drive within the field for further development largely ceases. While no one writes like Beethoven, as a cellist I can say that many many musicians still play his music, and many audiences still appreciate it.
I think novelty is an important explanation in another way. Since modern style buildings are common and classical style buildings are rare and prestigious, many people think the classical style is better just due to novelty. But if we started building that kind of building en masse, people would quickly get tired of them.
In fact, we can kind of see this in the fact that it is *very specific* old buildings that people think are pretty. Modern imitations are just considered gauche.
> Maybe our civilization is still on probation after a multi-decade-long mass murder spree and we need buildings that carefully avoid inflaming our emotions. I don’t think anyone has ever claimed this seriously, but it makes a certain kind of moral sense.
people have ABSOLUTELY claimed this seriously, so so much postwar art is exactly about this, clearly and explicitly. please read some midcentury criticism or like any art history or theory
I dare you to read this: https://www.amazon.com/Art-Culture-Critical-Clement-Greenberg/dp/0807066818
Theodore Adorno famously said "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz."
Adorno later revised and took back his opposition to poetry after Auschwitz (mainly because of Paul Celan‘s poems about the Holocaust).
With all due respect to Jews, that's bullshit. If it wasn't barbaric to write poetry after the destruction of Troy by the Achaeans, after Athenians subsequently to the famous dialog had killed every male Melian and sold their women and children into slavery, after Romans had utterly destroyed her sworn ally Carthage and sown her fields with salt, after Temuchin's coalition defeated the Tartars and killed every single male taller than a wain's wheel hub etc. etc., then it's not barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, and vice-versa.
Nothing boils my blood more than seeing an author stifle the flow of his own post to express epistemic humility i.e.
> I am sure you will link me to great resources about this in the comments. Until then, some speculative responses that one might give...
Only for comments like yours to then chastise the author for a lack of deep reading. Suggesting a book that sheds light on the subject of the post makes sense, but your tone is unnecessarily dismissive. The author's hedging statements are specifically for people like you, and given that I find those statements slightly kill the experience as a reader, I would hope that their target audience would take them seriously.
lack of deep reading is not a big problem unless your entire point is that people within a system are thinking wrong but then you make it clear you have no idea what they’re thinking
if you’re going to be reactionary and contrarian, you’re gonna get different responses to flagrant ignorance than otherwise
I agree that deeper reading would shed light on much of this post, however I want to know, from a strategic perspective, do you think that using an uncharitable tone to deliver that message to the author is better than a charitable one?
you sure are making a lot of assumptions about what I’d like to accomplish here
Yeah it was inappropriate of sscer to mindread your comment as attempting to be helpful, in retrospect this is obviously dumb.
What are you trying to accomplish, aka?
so we're not allowed to speculate on something unless we're expert on the topic? Damn, I'm going to have to shut up... :)
Given that this was just a casual remark that wasn't part of any argument being made in the piece the "please read some..." manages to come across as an attempt to deligitimize any criticism or suggestion that maybe modern art isn't special and valuable made by anyone who hasn't proved they agree with you by wasting (insofar as they don't enjoy it) a bunch of time learning about 20th century art.
Im sure you didn't intend this but it comes across like an astrologer saying: how dare you question astrology when you don't even know what it means when Venus is retrograde and Jupiter is in Leo or whatever.
the whole “argument” is a weird combination of speculative narrative detached from reality/the historical record, and half-baked aesthetic theory about what’s valuable in art and why people like the things they do. I mean imagine using a single uninterrogated figure from a suggestive survey question to ground your opinion that this is all bullshit and spending the rest of your time trying to figure out why the elites could be so wrong. also zero awareness of practical considerations like resource constraints, relevant events in economic history, engineering, etc. it’s fine to critique it on the grounds that it’s wrong and un-rigorous by pointing to an especially egregious example of obliviousness.
the book that I recommended was written by a major defender/popularizer of jackson pollock so, you know, relevant evidence
if you’re gonna try to explain why people who listen to astrologers behave as they do and the way that that might have changed over time, you better have some knowledge of what astrologers actually say and what people behaving according to their advice take them to mean
Nice, the most reactionary post on this blog in a while, and yet it probably won't anger anyone.
I'd say the apocalypse did happen - we know it better as WWI, WWII, the New Deal/progressive governance, and the rise of the Soviet Union and the Third World.
What does the 20th century look like to you?
>the most reactionary post on this blog in a while
Or: the clearest example in a while where reactionaries happen to share the correct opinion? I mean it's unlikely that reactionaries are wrong about _everything_. They must get _some_ things right.
IMO the architecture thing is somewhere where (as elsewhere) reactionaries have correctly identified a problem but don't get at the core issue, instead hazily blaming a perceived group of "elites".
The big issue is cars. We destroyed a great deal of our cities to make way for cars and the resulting infrastructure is bleak and ugly, and so now our cities are bleak and ugly. The most encouraging recent trend for beauty in our built environment is cities that are reducing the amount of space that is given over to cars, and making room for mass transit, pedestrians, and greenery (COVID-related outdoor dining is a part of it but the trend was happening before). A kinda plain building on an inviting street with people and trees is way better than a super-awesomely-ornate building surrounded by parking lots and highways where it feels dangerous to walk around.
The gap in reasoning is from "modern buildings aren't as pretty" to "we should abolish modern society in its entirety".
It's hardly just reactionaries who dislike modern architecture. Here are some socialists making the same case:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture
Honest question: what makes this article reactionary?
I didn't get right-wing vibes from it, or left-wing for that matter, which was refreshing.
I'm sure people with different political ideas could agree on the same points given by the article.
I mean no offence, but maybe we need to be careful not calling someone a reactionist because he likes old architecture.
Agreed. I think the more entertaining conspiracy form of this is the idea there was an apocalypse in the 300-600ya range that has been covered up.
That sounds fun to read about. Any recommended article/link?
My go-to for Tartarian History (though I've never seen him use the term) is AgarthanSchwab, on Twitter. Unfortunately, he's deleted many of his most relevant threads for this topic (such as one proposing that the Hindenburg was sabatoged and that the media was in on it), but this is the kind of rationale he uses as to how apocalypses could be collectively forgotten.
https://twitter.com/AgarthanSchwab/status/1438695049726861312
That was interesting. He seems to have it all lined up in his head as a nice theory. It's a good job that all women are primarily concerned with social standing and conformity though, because if they weren't there would be a gaping hole in his suggested compliance mechanism. Still compliance to the norm being what it is explains why I'm typing this in the religious (Church of England naturally) and moralistic society of the modern United Kingdom and not in some secular, tolerant society where women might have the vote and homosexuals be tolerated, or even worse socialists tolerated in polite society.
I prefer the idea that there was a prior civilization on this planet before the Permian extinction (which they obv caused). It's just plausible enough to feel real despite being super unlikely.
One day I'll write a story about them leaving us some records or info...maybe stowed on moon.
Was there ever any doubt that the fash have the best aesthetics? It's the bulk of their appeal, isn't it?
The fash might have better aesthetics than the commies, though there are people who are surprisingly fond of socialist realism.
I think the relatively free world still wins on quantity, quality, and variety.
Nobody is winning on architecture.
Actually, what did fascist architecture look like? There aren't exactly many surviving buildings from that era in modern Germany for me to look at...
Spain has a lot of surviving fascist art. It's basically just neoclassical art. Good example is the Valle de los Caidos (super controversial within Spain, of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Fallen
That gives me art deco vibes.
'Was Franco's Spain fascist?' Is a whole historical debate in itself.
Is it? I've never heard the opposite view. Who regards them as not fascist?
Their whole shtick is to imitate stuff to bring back the great era. So they basically do art to imitate whatever origin myth they feel like they have, with their megalomaniac/overexpressed/righteous twist of course.
I don't know which group of embalmed cadavers voted "Three Dancing Figures" San Francisco's best public art, but they haven't got a clue. The correct answer is obviously the Bay Lights on the Bay Bridge. If you relax the "public" requirement, the Serpent Mother was made here and is on a completely different level than "three dancing figures".
The Serpent Mother was mostly made in Oakland.
Interesting - I thought it was SF due to FLG's association with the Box Shop.
I'm open to correction, but I thought it was largely made at the Crucible rather than the Box Shop.
AFAIK construction costs (specifically contractor prices) and building codes are a huge deal with why all buildings look the way they do today. Even the billionaire's house didn't involve a hundred artisans painstakingly sculpting around all doorways etc and would cost a lot more if it did. Also there's a lot less supply today of construction workers who can do intricate wood carving so even if you wanted to have carved sculpted doorways it'd be hell to source them, so unless you really really care about it you might as well just get nice airy construction filled with natural light.
That makes sense on its own terms but doesn't explain the similar de-ornamentation of clothing, poetry, statues, etc.
Poetry no, but it would explain clothing. The thing about the ornate clothing of past eras s that you generally needed a servant (or two) to help you gets dressed.
I have an outfit that looks a bit like this: http://www.muslimmarriagecenter.com/site/muslim-groom-in-bangalore . It is pretty easy to put on and comfortable, but I never wear it except for costume purposes because people would think I was insane. I cannot think of any labor-related reason why people don't wear outfits like that one anymore.
People certainly wear clothes like that in India, and presumably in other countries too, for special occasions like weddings. I think this must be culture-specific, with American/Western influence slowly making it spread to the east - the image of the Chinese high-status man in a Western suit made me think not of how Chinese men's tastes must have simplified a lot, but of how businessmen in Asia today feel the need to dress in Western clothing, perhaps to appeal to Western business partners (along with colonial influences, etc.).
Perhaps this gives more strength to the Protestantism/Catholicism hypothesis, as something that applies to the West more than the East?
iirc there was also a gender aspect to how Western clothes got so plain. In the industrial era it came to be viewed as foppish and unmanly for men to prettify themselves, so for a long time in the nineteenth century you had this situation where women were still heavily ornamented while men were walking around in plain black all the time. The in the twentieth century, women took on more masculine-looking clothing as a way to reject Victorian sex roles.
Just why ornamentation came to be viewed as unmanly is another issue, but I suspect it had something to do with the shift in power from the aristocrats to the business class.
It was Regency era, not industrial era, and it was literally because of one bitchy guy, Beau Brummel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell
Men's clothing simplified in the Victorian era when England was at the height of its political, military, scientific and industrial power. I know that by mid-century, men's formal wear was getting darker and simpler. Maybe the English decided that they ruled the world, so they didn't need fancy clothes to show off, just the Union Jack a regiment and a battleship or two. I'm guessing Queen Victoria's widow's weeds after Prince Albert died cemented the style.
People copy the rich and powerful. It's the idea of cargo cults and sympathetic magic. When Olga of Kiev converted from paganism to Christianity, she issued commemorative coinage with Allah Akbar in Arabic impressed on it. Why a Muslim religious slogan? Because Islam ruled the Mediterranean in her day. When Japan opened to the west, its leaders adopted Western garb just as their armies adopted Western rifles and cannon and its industries adopted Western technology and processes.
When there is a "forward" power in the world, it becomes culturally powerful and people and nations tend to copy it. That's why modern men's clothing all around the world was borrowed from the Victorians and later the Americans. When China was a rising power in the East, nations like Japan and Korea adopted its symbols, methods and writing. It was similar with Greece and later Rome in the West.
If you want to do the Victorian theory, the short version of it goes, George IV was a flamboyant embarrassment. The new queen's policy of modesty was intentionally reactionary. The rest was mimetic desire.
I'm from Canada, and now live in the UK, but lived in India for a bit in-between. I *loved* getting dressed up formally for weddings etc whilst I lived there - I have never before or since felt so aesthetically beautiful.
Wearing a jacket like that wouldn’t demonstrate anything. Showing up to a meeting at Goldman Sachs in a ratty t-shirt and sweat pants? That’s power.
Nah. There's a considerable difference between signalling that you are dressing differently but have put effort in (generally more acceptable) and signalling laziness (even if you'd actually never normally wear such an outfit).
THE book on this is: On Human Finery by Quentin Bell.
Is it machine washable?
I believe the invention of the electric washing machine was a *huge* revolution in domestic life, and ended up causing similarly large changes in how people dress. Women still have some fancy clothing that isn't machine washable, but not that much.
I'm not sure this is as important as you think.
For guys machine-washability is almost everything. But a lot of women's clothing is not machine washable, either because of delicacy (eg attached rhinestones) or because of the fabric (ie requires dry cleaning).
I think at least part of what's going on is one has to disaggregate what clothes "do".
One job is "show off", and, as I pointed out for St Johns, that mostly now requires subtlety rather than showiness. Creating a garment that *looks* fancy is easy; creating a garment that *has* to be expensive because it involves constructions that few (and very expensive) machines can perform, or is obligate human-manufactured, is now how you show off.
Alternatively the job of the garment is "protect from weather" or "do exercise" or suchlike, and for those we now have vastly superior technology (eg gortex for cold, spandex for many purposes) BUT a side effect of that is that we now want to optimize for functionality.
If the only thing you can wear, no matter what you are doing, is some uncomfortable poorly-fitting woolen thing, maybe you try to compensate via decoration. But if the garment can be improved along functionality dimensions, that begins to be where you put much of your effort, both as manufacturer and as consumer.
And so women might buy $15 amusing sneakers with rhinestones on them, in the expectation that they are for wearing on weekends while doing errands, and will last a year then fall apart; but if they are hikers they will also buy serious walking boots which are optimized to the heck for walking -- and with no fripperies like rhinestones.
As I've said, I think we also have this with private homes.
Busy decoration is cheap (we all have that grandmother or aunt whose house is overflowing with knicknacks and collectibles) and is no signal of anything.
Meanwhile those who have owned a home for a while realize the joy of optimizing the home for functionality. Busy decorations built into a wall are nothing but a magnet for dust and form a space that cannot be modified as desires change. Whereas a turntable in the garage, or a heated pool, or very quiet variable speed AC system, continue to delight day after day, decade after decade.
In a way this is the triumph of Le Corbusier "a house is a machine for living" but (when you look at it) optimized along the dimensions people care about.
ie I don't think there's a question here of "why do the commoners choose the clothes and homes they do"; it's almost ALL in
- why do the artists and architects reward and judge as they do?, plus
- why do (some fraction of) the rest of us accept this in (some) architecture as we do?
Yes, this sounds very right.
If the explanation were "creating a garment that *has* to be expensive because it involves constructions that few (and very expensive) machines can perform, or is obligate human-manufactured, is now how you show off," then rich people would walk around in garments crocheted from fine silk thread, since crochet is easily distinguishable from any other form of cloth-making, and has not yet been automated. Nalbinding would be an even more extreme version of this and would have the advantage of making the garment more durable instead of less. But as far as I can see, crochet and nalbinding have essentially zero presence in high fashion or even business suits. A Brooks Brothers suit might cost US$1500 but it's machine-woven and machine-sewn.
I did wear a Muslim shirt at work one time (I work in IT), quand people did think I was crazy. They thought it looked ugly and told me as such. To my Muslim relatives, this was on the contrary a very niece piece of clothing. The difference in appreciation was striking.
I have this pink sunset silkscreen dragon shirt I wear to martial arts practice sometimes. It gets about 50/50 "that's awesome/that's horrible" reactions.
Haute couture / art fashion is extremely ornamented - in fact, the more common criticism of art fashion is that it's /too/ over the top. Some high status people do wear such ridiculously over-ornamented art clothing, as eg the Met Gala red carpet demonstrates, but the types of people you've chosen as emblematic of high-status aren't them. The average political leader or business person just doesn't wear high fashion clothing, they wear sensible, well made, expensive but essentially normal clothing.
I think an interesting part of this is the gender divide - most men wore simple black and white suits to the Met Gala, as well.
Why is a Western suit "sensible"?
Outside of British-type climates it is completely ridiculous and nonsensible.
Yet they wear it in Thailand and Indonesia and Japan and the American South and.....
....then just swelter or rely on massive amounts of air conditioning.
Only when it's made out of the wrong materials.
An off the rack suit made from spun woven plastic is all of ridiculous and nonsensible. A property structured bespoke suit made out of the right foundations and the right weight of wool or linen always looks good ("it makes fat men stout, and skinny men imposing"), plus pockets, all the useful pockets.
And very very rich men and powerful statemen like them because the jacket foundation can be thin armor plate.
I think that if you look at how much less there was to do or read or whatnot, how many fewer things there were to buy or invest in, etc, then you see that the opportunity costs of the time and labor that go into good poetry and good statues are much higher today than they were say 500 years ago or even 150 years ago.
The common denominator between all of these examples is that they're labor-intensive and labor becomes more expensive over time. We're materially more wealthy than earlier civilizations for mass-producible goods, but not for hand-made, for Baumol effect reasons.
Ornate clothing could be mass-produced. A formal suit in an interesting color could certainly be mass-produced. Ornaments on buildings could be mass-produced, unless you insist on each ornament being unique.
Yes, and Menard's sells a white plastic Federalist doorway. Federalism for Dummies, a brick box with some white kinda-Greek pillars and a doorframe stuck on, works great for one through maybe three story buildings. Smart people can make a real Federalist Style work a little beyond that, but you look at the White House and it's stretching things. If the damn thing was twice as tall everyone would laugh. What can you do with a twenty-floor skyscraper? It's too far off the human scale. You might as well just make it a glass box, the Yale Box if you can afford it, and shrug.
I like arching walkways though. Maybe something could be done.
Poetry on the other hand got swamped by all the students taking and retaking Bonehead English over and over. No really good poetry can be taught to people who just can't read well, so they might as well do whatever fad is 'teachable'. And once women started getting real jobs outside teaching, the quality of teachers tanked.
Ornate clothing IS mass produced. We just don't think of it as "ornate" for cultural reasons. For example quite a lot of outdoors-wear has a billion stringy tie-pulls, pockets, hoods, hoods that roll up into more pockets, layers of unobtanium to keep you cool in summer and warm in winter, etc. We don't perceive this as ornate-ness because it is justified with practical value, but if you took it back to the 11th century they'd assume it was some symbolic artistic display of wealth.
Another example: t-shirts often have very ornate and unique designs on them. We don't think of t-shirts as ornate clothing because the underlying fabric is designed for practicality and mass production, but people find lots of ways to express all kinds of complex artistic sentiment with them.
This is a good point - I get shirts from threadless.com, and they are often very beautiful and ornate designs. Which is interesting that this only finds a market on low-status clothing (t-shirts).
I think it matters that nearly all modern clothing has an important design feature of being machine-washable.
Interesting colors can easily be mass-produced. But I believe that for buildings, that isn't exactly true. My understanding is that if you're making a building out of hand-carved stone blocks, then hand-carving them into ornate patterns isn't that much more work than hand-carving them into a flat block. But if you're making it out of drywall and a wooden or steel frame, then making that drywall or frame ornate is going to take a lot more labor than making it flat (even if both are much less than the labor involved in making flat hand-carved stone blocks).
Lace is an interesting example. For a while, it looked as though people had an insatiable and possibly innate desire for lace. After it could be mass-produced, it was used less and less, except for vestigial amounts on women's underwear. And now even that seems to have pretty much faded out. Not gone completely, but not the most common thing.
I don't think lace does well in washing machines, and now that we have washing machines, convincing someone to wear something that isn't machine-washable has a much higher bar to meet.
It probably depends on the type of lace-- there are types of lace which stand up to machine washing.
It machine washes pretty well, if you have a front loader washing machine, andor can trust everyone doing your laundry to use a washing bag. I'm seeing more and more lace again on young women, mostly on dresses they buy from or sourced from Taobao. Taoboa merchants care about what people want to buy, and care zero about what the "high fashion" industry wants to sell this season.
I think higher ratio of cost-of-labor to other costs and lower amount available of specialized artisan labor explains at least a lot of the consumer goods side (like for example making clothes with lots of sequins and patterns industrially is harder, and making a nice taylored suit is still ~hours of work by a taylor while earlier ornamental clothing was much more labor intensive). This doesn't explain poetry, but can explain statues.
To mass produce a brocade 17th jacket for $199 would be fairly easy. But when any Tom Dick and Harry can wear a fancy jacket - the real power players wear a hoodie.
When making things “fancy” becomes cheap the rich got for simple. There is also a status game - yes I’ve come to this meeting in my pajamas. You got a problem with that?
This is probably true and also infuriating. Beauty no longer serves a signaling purpose, so now everything has to look like shit.
You think those clothes make him look like shit?
https://images.wsj.net/im-195104?width=1280&size=1
The other status marker is wearing things that only look good when you have a personal trainer and a personal chef.
His clothes are bland in both style and color, and the zipper on the sleeve clashes with the rest of the jacket. (And my own wardrobe is no better.)
We (=the First World collectively) are the richest society in the whole of human history, if people in ancient Rome or the middle ages -- or heck, even the 19th century -- could afford to build beautiful buildings, we certainly can.
Also, it's just false to suppose that nice-looking buildings have to be ornate and expensive. I've seen plenty of attractive buildings made almost entirely of plain bricks.
I've been thinking about this point too.
If the minimum wage today is 10x some sort of bare subsistence level, then someone with a given level of wealth in the past could have gotten labor 10x cheaper. But we surely have more than 10x the wealth of the past.
Maybe it's a question of relative rather than absolute prices? Whatever you were trying to do with ornamentation in the past (signal something, make yourself happier to be in a space) there are cheaper ways to do it now, since labor is the good whose price has decreased the least?
Instead of getting ornamentation on your mansion (which, if you are going to do it tastefully may actually require you to train a bunch of people or to hire out the only 2 or 3 people in the country/world that are experts in what you are looking to do, I dunno), you could start a space travel company.
Right, but we're trying to explain why there are only 3 people in the country who can do that now when *everyone* in Florence or wherever could.
Also, I think there's a spectrum of build-able buildings and we don't seem to be maxing out at the more traditional side of it.
There are only 3 people in the country because there is more opportunity in other fields/pursuits and because, with the set of possible goods to choose from being much more vast than in the past, people prefer computers, cars, appliances, etc to fine arts.
These 3 people are the few obsessives who became fascinated with some niche skill and also had the business/entrepreneurial ability to be able to provide for themselves. Most people don't obsess over a trade when they could instead make a much easier living or an easy enough living in some other industry.
I knew a guy who travelled all over the country just restoring historic Spanish tile. Living like a high end corporate lawyer jsut being "nation's leading Spanish tile guy".
In a hypothetical world in which we are as wealthy as we are now but in which communication is slower and markets aren't able to operate well over large geographical spaces, couldn't one imagine that there would be more people willing to try out making a space travel company? Having the most ornate mansion in the surrounding 100 miles in that counterfactual world means something, whereas having the best space travel company in the surrounding 100 miles is fairly meaningless in our world.
Architecture has run into diminishing marginal returns. Over the last 10,000 years, most of the potential good building styles have been tried, so most of what is left for an ambitious architect who wants to come up with a novel look are bad building styles.
Isn't this just Baumol's cost disease again? The productivity of factory workers went up a zillion times, while the productivity of Florentine woodworkers stayed constant because they're carving stuff by hand (and if you did find a way to mass produce it out would be considered tacky instead of fancy), and the result is that Florentine woodworkers become massively more expensive relative to a factory worker's output.
It's because back in Florence, society was mostly divided into peasants (with no money) and rich elites (with tons of money). If you wanted to make it big, financially, you had to cater to the elites.
In the modern world, society is dominated by the middle class. Catering to rich elites can still earn you some nice cash, but you will never make it rich that way. As I said above, it's the difference between making the Emperor's coronation dress for $1M, and running a T-Shirt factory that makes $1M per day. Thus, virtually all of the modern artisans are trained to optimize mass-production, not to create bespoke decorations.
Let me see if I understand you correctly - in Florence, buying power in the economy was dominated by rich elites so the things that got made and to a lesser extent the things which became popular were things that satisfied them. In now, buying power in the economy is dominated by the middle class, so the things which are made and become popular are things which satisfy them. Ornate decorations and monuments satisfy rich elites, space flight companies satisfy the middle class? That seems like it still leaves us back at the original question of why we get the kind of buildings the (current) middle class claims not to prefer doesn't it?
Mansions, business buildings, and public buildings are three separate spaces with different incentives. When it comes to mansions, you can absolutely see ornamentation side by side with (very expensive, but plain looking) special wall finishes. Look at any wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood!
In that space two issues are
- you don’t want to look TOO a different from every else bcs resale value, and the neighbors will complain (probably always true), and
- there are different things to spend money on. That mansion with fancy ornamentation has terrible insulation (temperature and sound), imperfectly straight lines (still hard to get right, especially high up) and lousy plumbing. Today I can spend that money on a three-head shower and a hot water
recirculator pump and have a much nicer house.
Seriously, I suspect in the private space this is most of what is going on — “better” things to spend the money on.
Now commercial and public buildings, that’s a different dynamic.
I'm sure there is a cost desease effect going on, which would explain why your average building is much less intricately ornamented than Sagrada Familia. Still, at the high end, there should be intricately ornamented mansions.
Behold Donald Trump's apartment in Trump Tower:
https://preview.redd.it/y5owp0astdy41.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=39be7d0ee67b7d181dec8e5f96e94bcf20112b80
This stuff definitely still does exist, it's just rare. Much as I agree with Donald Trump on many things, I don't think I'd want to live in his apartment, I would genuinely prefer a simpler and cleaner approach to interior design.
Agreed, some of people who are rich enough to pay for it, actually choose to decorate their homes this way (although this particular example will strike most as extremely tacky).
Now, most heavily ornamented places (even the ones I find beautiful) tend produce in me a sensory overload effect, that makes me not want to have my house decorated that way. I wonder whether that is just a product of a culture that doesn't reward heavily ornamented places, or a more fundamental cognitive/psychological effect.
I look at that and I say "New York City". And I mean it, whenever I've stayed in a NYC hotel or visited someone in a nicer NYC condo or townhome, there is a certain heavy baroque ornateness to everything that I would see *only* in NYC.
That's true, but the forms themselves aren't too bad - it's the monomaniacal obsession on gold that ruins it. The Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi has a similar issue, at least in the public areas I got to gawk at. Lots of gold and marble, but it's so monotone it gives everything this offputting air. If they'd done more contrasting designs it might've been better. A gold and white monotone isn't it.
Many labor-intensive art forms like Persian rugs are dying because people have better opportunities now, even in a country with a basket-case economy like Iran’s wrecked by incompetence, corruption and international sanctions. Also time horizons have changed, no one is willing to wait a century for a new cathedral to be built.
But our wealth is much higher exactly because of mass production and standardization. It's not because we got physically 10x faster at carving wood with a knife. The only reason we feel richer is because there are factories churning out mostly standardized components like concrete, steel girders, large glass windows that are then quickly assembled using more standardized machines and processes.
Don't underestimate the impact of better glass. If you can't make windows bigger than a postage stamp then filling the outside walls with griffins makes sense. If you can make your walls entirely of glass then basically everyone will pick natural light over the griffins.
That's why I agree with the top of this thread: modern buildings look samey and boring because when everything is done by hand and every window is tiny due to limits in glass manufacturing, the cost of adding fiddly bits to the outside isn't that large compared to the overall cost of building. But when an entire skyscraper is expected to be built in 24 months from scratch, the architect is limited to what can be done within the toolkits society provides him with.
<i>Don't underestimate the impact of better glass. If you can't make windows bigger than a postage stamp then filling the outside walls with griffins makes sense. If you can make your walls entirely of glass then basically everyone will pick natural light over the griffins.</i>
New housing (one of the few types of building where architects have to actually pay attention to what average people want) aren't made entirely of glass. Not to mention, buildings made of glass are generally very expensive to keep liveable -- you need lots of heating and air-conditioning, else anybody living inside is going to freeze during the winter and roast during the summer.
Fancy housing does usually have pretty big windows. But again, if you're making a house out of hand-carved blocks, then hand-carving the blocks into an interesting pattern is not much additional work. Whereas drywall and 2x4's are extremely cheap compared to the plainest hand-carved block, and there's no easy way to make drywall and 2x4's ornate without getting back up to the hand-carved expense level.
Modern machine tools probably do give a 10x or more speedup in woodcarving.
I was thinking about this recently with respect to "Clickspring"'s playing-card press: https://youtu.be/3PwAQZNLy0I. Evidently it took him six months to make, using a lot of modern machinery and high artisan skill. So if he had commissioned another artisan to make it for him, rather than making it himself, he might have had to pay US$50k. Which seems pretty expensive, but still within a Bill-Gates-mansion kind of budget.
You need to consider opportunity cost!
And accountability! If you're a dictator king or a servant of God himself then spending a century building a giant cathedral by effectively "taxing" the peasants is no big deal. You can do what you want, you're the king!
If you're a functionary in a democratic government then your options are much more limited. If you blow half your budget on stone sculptures put so high up hardly anyone can see them then heads will roll.
Democratic and republican states had no problem building beautiful buildings until half-way through the last century.
Recently an actual property developer happened to get some power and as a result, issued an executive order switching federal government preferences to more traditionally styled buildings. (https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/what-trumps-executive-order-on-architecture-really-means)
And then his lifetime politician successor entered office and promptly reversed the order as one of his first official acts. (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/biden-revokes-trump-classical-architectural-mandate-1947351)
Make of that what you will.
I think it was half DJT trolling his enemies into falling over themselves to loudly exclaim in public why they loved ugly things.
Most new buildings in Manhattan are intended to look attractive. A general criticism is that they look like perfume bottles: shiny, unique shapes that don't blend in with other buildings near them.
On the other hand, some misanthropic starchitects such as Thom Mayne go out of their way to build hateful buildings.
I think we can afford to build as many beautiful buildings as the people of antiquity or the medieval period did, and we probably do. It's just that we can *also* afford ten times as many plain buildings. Whereas for them, a plain building would cost nearly as much as a beautiful one, so they just didn't bother.
Also, the plain buildings back then were wooden shacks that got torn down.
As someone who recently had a small house built, and who thinks that old fashioned architecture looks nice, I feel compelled to point out that something as simple as a brick wall is massively more expensive than standard construction techniques - neither bricks nor bricklayers are cheap, and not all bricklayers are good at their job.
(I actually wanted a stone wall for one of the walls, but got told that was impossible at any price due to overly restrictive building regulations; and that stone was terrible for thermal insulation, besides)
Where do you come from, and what are "standard construction techniques" there? Here in the UK, building new houses out of bricks is very much the standard.
Yeah, as a small-time developer my biggest obstacles to ornament are not matters of taste, but of cost and availability: Adding any kind of intricate ornamentation to the homes I build would add *enormous* cost - far out of proportion to any marginal increase in value - and there simple are not many craftsmen who can do it. Bit of a chicken and egg situation - if no one is building highly ornamented architecture, no one will learn how to do it, then you can't find anyone to do it, so no one builds it...
Have you read the Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist? He ambitiously (some would say over-ambitiously) takes this question on, as well many others, by examining brain hemisphere differences. His thesis is basically that left hemisphere dominance has caused an increasing reliance on the abstract (vs the experienced) , the right-angle (vs the “organic” shape), the interchangeable (versus the unique), etc. in art, communication, relationships, work, etc.
I’m not going to do it justice since I’m on mobile right now, but he has an interesting background: English Literature PhD at Oxford, before moving to neuroscience, brain imaging at Johns Hopkins, clinical practice at a London psychiatric hospital. So he brings a pretty unique (unique to me at least) approach to neuroscience, philosophy, and the arts.
Even if his literal claim about brain lateralization is weak, it’s an incredibly useful metaphor by which to view the world (and don’t get that guy started on metaphors), so it’s worth checking out.
That left-brain, right-brain stuff has been debunked too many times to be taken seriously.
You and McGhilcrist would agree on this point. I haven't read the entire book, but the introduction and first two chapters rattle through a litany of popular misconceptions regarding left brain / right brain differences, arguing most of them are false. I will say, I'm not fully onboard with all his conclusions, but some of the insights he draws from reviewing studies of stroke victims who suffer damage to only one half of their brain seem compelling.
IMO you’d be disabused of that notion if you read some other books or articles about other claimed and contradictory brain lateralization ideas and note that the claims have similarly supporting studies. One of the big things I’ve seen from this blog is “science is an idiot sometimes” - even Real Science regularly gets things badly wrong, and more so in softer areas like neuroscience and psych - and that pop science books will just either openly lie or terribly misrepresent evidence and ideas to prove a point.
He has a new book out in November, too.https://channelmcgilchrist.com/
I’d absolutely bet a grand that a 3/4ths majority of his brain lateralization ideas are entirely and completely wrong. Even if he claims “the popular ones are wrong but my new ones are correct”. And “even if it’s literally wrong it’s still a good metaphor” is IMO suspect to the point of actively harmful in the context of neuroscience
I’m not trying to be combative here, I genuinely want to know so that I understand where you’re coming from: have you read the book?
I agree that making literal claims about the brain that turn out to be metaphorical can be harmful for neuroscience. My claim is that those are useful metaphors for philosophy and ways of coming to terms with the world. And if that’s the case, if our phenomenology aligns with these deep metaphors he develops, then - regardless of how you think the brain relates to the mind - there must be some neurological basis to these ways of coming to terms with the world.
every single time I have heard of a “claim made about the brain” that’s used to inform or explain that isn’t literally true, it’s metaphorical implications end up being between laughable and ridiculous, and most aren’t literally true. And already in this thread the other guy who liked it used it to make some false and seriously misleading claims. The enlightenment and rationalism and industrialism and technics blah blah have seriously shaped everything we do nowadays! The world clearly has more of that or something. But trying to intermediate that with “brain region” seems to me actively harmful. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve gone into a lot of different other claims about hemispheric division to be rather confident that it only detracts from the existing wide ranging debate about the enlightenment and machines and such
oh yeah
> And if that’s the case, if our phenomenology aligns with these deep metaphors he develops, then - regardless of how you think the brain relates to the mind - there must be some neurological basis to these ways of coming to terms with the world.
no? What’s the neurological basis in water for vortices or fish swimming? What’s the neurological basis in a computer CPU for being able to run Quake or a black hole code? There isn’t necessarily a “detail process” and an “abstract process”, or a detail region and an abstract reason - just like water doesn’t have a “vortex part” and a “laminar part” somewhere within each molecule or in the individual particles equations
I.e. the statements and inferences that are implied by your “neurological basis to these ways” are false, even though “for all X: X has some basis and explanation” is tautologically rationalismly true
So, actually you should read the book, because you and McGilchrist would see eye to eye on this stuff. I, too, have read too many pop-science neuro books to be familiar with all of the reductionist simplifications and pitfalls. But as I said at the outset, the Master and His Emissary is very different.
I'll take the bet, happily: he's enormously erudite and serious. Reading 'The Master & His Emissary' on a Kindle is slowed by checking the (thousands) of references linked. It feels like the most demanding sustained reading work I've done pretty much since the harder stuff (e.g. 2 and a half D perception, etc.) I occasionallly had to read at Oxford ('Experimental Psychology, Philosophy & Statistics'). The new book is even more weighty. He's more than earned the right to be considered seriously.
Ignoring the correctness of the brain bit, I'm very bad at noticing those details which I don't consider relevant. I also prefer all the modern examples to the older ones, other than the statues which just look dumb.
Those two tendencies (not easily noticing what isn’t considered relevant - really a narrowing of what “is relevant” - and a tendency toward the modern/post-modern aesthetic) fit completely into his thesis of left-hemisphere dominance (which can be a short hand for a series of phenomenological and cognitive traits that correlate to one another, if you want to set aside the brain stuff. Though the brain stuff is reasonably persuasive.)
This book was discussed hereabouts before, tangent to the Julian Jaynes book. That got me to read it. I thought it was poorly written - too difficult to understand and very repetitive. With a better editor it could have been 1/3 the length and easier to read. The content struck me as plausible, it agrees with my perception of my consciousness. But beware of typical mind fallacy.
I like all of the modern pictures more, except maybe the last one. I really, really do. Completely instinctively. So much so that I'm finding it impossible to wrap my head around the idea that I'm in a small minority, or that people might think I'm faking it for status. I have no artistic/humanities background of any kind. So...just...what? I'm so confused.
For what it's worth my attitude is generally, "they both look nice and variety is good."
Oh yes, I definitely agree that variety is good!
As a child I disliked highly ornate things. Now I’m indifferent.
I prefer modern buildings too. Guess I'm part of that 30%. Shining towers of glass rising into the sky, gleaming in the sun. Elevators that pairs every trip to your cubicle with a breathtaking view. Floods of natural light during the day, beacons of light (=warmth, safety, progress) during the night. Oh, and preferably with a nice water feature at the bottom to cool everyone off in summer, please.
That said, the sort of modern buildings that are just plain concrete boxes with no attempt to even hide the seams - puke. Only public sector buildings seem to go in for that though. You wouldn't catch Goldman Sachs building something like the Milan university.
BTW the image of the Google HQ is misleading. I've worked there. The HQ is a sprawling campus where most of the buildings were bought from other companies with more normal levels of wealth, but the centrepiece of the HQ is a public park surrounded by the old SGI buildings, and it looks like this:
https://mapio.net/images-p/20266748.jpg
Much more interesting.
The headquarters of the richest company in the world looks like a construction site for a Toys r Us.
Could you specify which company you are talking about? I presume google, but Alphabet is not the most valuable company in the world. Apple is, currently, ,and there HQ would not be characterized as a construction site for a Toys r Us
Wait `til you see the inside. It looks like a mashup of Romper Room and Logan's Run.
Also, the new buildings they're building are giant domes with glass panels.
And so much easier to get lost in. I've visited that building. My host got lost walking back from the entry desk to her own desk.
That's not the only time I've had that experience. I've visited the Menlo Park Facebook campus designed by Frank Gehry, and my host got lost walking from his desk to the receiving desk, and then got lost again walking to our assigned conference room.
And then there is the Frank Gehry pile of glass trash that is the MIT Stata Center. I was at a tech meetup programming unconference there, and we eventually had to keep three volunteers running to find the people who kept getting lost just walking back from the washrooms. Which was to be expected, because despite having turn by turn directions, a MIT CS grad student got lost trying to guide us to our meeting space, despite that being the building she spent most of her time in.
Fuck Gehry.
I've read a little about hospitals which are optimized for humans, and being easy to navigate is one of the features.
I agree. Hospitals, even huge sprawling ones (I think of my experience doing daywalks around the interlinked buildings of the Mayo Clinic complex) generally don't have the "get lost in" problem.
As a counterpoint to my experiences in the Google, Facebook, and MIT complexes, Amazon building that the company built for itself also have the "you don't get lost in them" nature. If you gave me the location code of an arbitrary desk or conference room in a building built by the company, I would instantly know which airport to fly to, and then once inside the building probably could walk to the desk with my glasses off.
You're in a small minority.
Boring economic answer: labor is massively more expensive.
All of the highly ornate clothing and buildings require a lot of labor to both create and maintain You can't actually dress yourself in the elaborate formal attire of previous eras and the intricate details of classical architecture requires a lot of painstaking labor to create and maintain. Some people are wealthy enough to afford an army of servants now but the number of such people is relatively few so the style is less elaborate. I think it was Agatha Christie who said "I never thought I would be so rich that I could afford a car or so poor that I couldn't afford a servant."
I'm not sure it explains modern painting though.
I think this explains why the default new building is a grey rectangle.
I don't think this explains why award-winning new sculptures and buildings paid for by billionaires are comparatively simple and unornamented.
Yeah, sculpture doesn't really fit in, but I think it would explain somewhat why billionaires don't build elaborate mansions (or at least mansions that don't look particularly elaborate from the outside). It looks too weird and out of place to build something like the Cardiff Castle now even if you could afford it. At some point in the past there were a lot of people who could afford to build a castle so rich people competed to build the most ornate, magnificent castle possible. But now there are many fewer people who can afford that so it would seem weird to do it.
One other thing that occurred to me reading your response is that I think simple is not an accurate description. They are less ornate to look at but much fancier inside. Maybe part of it is that when it is not possible to differentiate the interior of a house (with appliances and computers and other technologically sophisticated gadgetry) you pour your money into ornate decorations.
The default new building isn't really a grey rectangle though it's one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-plus-five
I prefer the term American Khrushchyovka
Hello, police? I would like to report a crime.
Plenty of informal clothes (t-shirts etc.) have fairly elaborate patterns (not to mention bedsheets, curtains, and other fabric items), so I don't think it's cost that prevents formal clothing from being patterned as well.
And as I said in reply to another comment, beautiful buildings don't have to be elaborate and ornate. Many old buildings are beautiful because of the harmony and symmetry of their parts, not because they're festooned in sculptures.
I'd also about relative costs. All clothing used to be extremely expensive (like a year's salary). Expensive clothing still exists, but it's a niche. Everyone has switched to cheap clothing.
More: https://twitter.com/lingerie_addict/status/996037540380626944
Look at something like St Johns dresses or suits. These are gorgeous, expensive, and technically very sophisticated (in ways you only appreciate if you know something about textiles).
But the cost is being spent on subtle displays of difficulty, not in your face ornamentation. That’s the question. And I think, in fashion, the answer is simple — you need to know a lot to know just why it’s so difficult to make such a dress.
Or to put it differently, it’s easy to fake rhinestones; it’s not easy to fake a full print design (wider than the average machine) or a flared knit… There’s a proof of work there.
I’d hazard a guess that photography explains modern painting.
I would like to find more things that are straightforwardly pleasing to an unsophisticated consumer. Are there any good sources of content recommendations that filter based on the judgment of thoughtful but not high-status individuals? Especially interested in the cases where the content is also undervalued by the market, and e.g. you can buy cheap art that also looks fantastic.
This problem seems mostly solved in music, where there are tons of ways to discover new things and explore popular content. But in art, clothing, furniture, poetry, architecture, etc., it seems much harder. Would love recommendations!
Browse through DeviantArt. I often bought art from there when I was younger. Lots of really skilled artists doing stuff in a realistic, non-post-modernist way, but still very creative.
Mubi has a selection of independent movies for the price of a Netflix subscription.
Scruton on why beauty matters: https://vimeo.com/128428182
"Beside ... St. Peter’s Basilica ... dwell savages in mud huts."
I think that an unexamined possibility here is that 99% of humanity was living in mud huts when St. Peter's Basilica was built, and that they don't exist any more, so we only remember the buildings of the richest members of those societies. Maybe we have successfully reduced inequality, to the point where those buildings are no longer worth it to build, but now no one lives in mud huts. (note that e.g. Brutalism is explicitly about this; the building of non-ornate civic buildings is to signal that the building serves the public, not the ruling class.) Obviously this doesn't explain everything, but it's worth considering as a factor.
"I think that an unexamined possibility here is that 99% of humanity was living in mud huts when St. Peter's Basilica was built, and that they don't exist any more, so we only remember the buildings of the richest members of those societies."
I'm guessing you must be an American, because in Europe, there are plenty of quaint, non-elite historic streets, picturesque villages, old cottages, and the like, which are widely considered beautiful in their own right.
"Brutalism is explicitly about this; the building of non-ornate civic buildings is to signal that the building serves the public, not the ruling class."
Except, of course, that it's the ruling class which supports brutalism, whereas the public consistently prefers traditional buildings by an overwhelming margin. So in reality, brutalism is about pretending to serve the public whilst actually forcing them to submit to elite desires -- like 99% of modern politics and culture, in other words.
Even in Europe, the beautiful house of the past that survived were owned by wealthy people (poor people's house tend to degrade quicker and were not maintained enough to survive even 50 year). And those house of rich merchant/farmer looks more a Google HQ than a mini Versaille.
The local almshouses look very picturesque. And they were definitionaly poor peoples' houses.
Houses inhabited by poor people, sure. But not designed, built or owned by them.
Even old warehouses, like these ones at riverfront in Porvoo, Finland, may well be widely considered picturesque: https://www.visitporvoo.fi/assets/porvoo/images/background.png
Plenty of villages have old cottages, which weren't rich people's homes (the local rich guy would be living in the big manor house on the outskirts of the village).
> Even in Europe, the beautiful house of the past that survived were owned by wealthy people (poor people's house tend to degrade quicker and were not maintained enough to survive even 50 year).
That is false. Many people in France live in 200/300 years old houses, some of which were old barns that were transformed. Farmhouses were not rich people's home.
Survivorship bias. All the ugly cheap stuff built 500 years ago burned down 25-50 years after it was built.
Citation needed.
The public like the ones that were paid for by previous generations. They like the ones they're being asked to cough up for today a lot less.
The Romans didn't live in mud huts, and their descendants didn't either. St. Peters was built by a rising power. Western Europe was emerging from its post-Roman setbacks and the increasingly wealthy popes wanted to show off by building something impressive. They even moved an Egyptian obelisk into the middle of it. The Vatican has preserved the various proposals for moving it including the winning entry by Fontana. Getting it from Egypt to Rome was no big deal for a Roman emperor, but it took serious engineering funded by a wealthy pope to move it a few hundred feet. By the time NYC got its obelisk, it was all steam power and rail. Nowadays, it would be a pain in the ass because it wouldn't fit in a 40' container so breakbulk rates would apply.
St. Peter's was so expensive that its financing by the sale of indulgences set off the Protestant Reformation.
I think it's not so much wealth per say, but rather people don't tear down and make efforts to preserve the prettiest things (with prettiness of course correlated with wealth)
Yeah there's a selection bias issue. Old buildings are great because the ugly ones were knocked down, and the badly made ones fell down
This argument denies the existence of aesthetic trends.
It's plenty clear to me that lower classes embrace ugliness as well. Rap music and everything related to hip hop culture being the prime example. Altogether, there seems to be a diminished capacity for feeling disgust.
Is there any way to distinguish what you are saying from "I dislike art from genres I'm not interested in" other than the reflexive disdain for it being low status? If you saw people wearing traditional Mongolian clothes and throat singing and didn't like it, you would naturally assume it's because of differing tastes. But low status members of your own culture are just inherently wrong?
It’s an aesthetic judgement but literally all statements about architecture are such, and “a cancerous lump on a face is bad” or “that smells bad” is an aesthetic judgement too, so aesthetic judgements can’t all be bad. I love some blues music, but have nothing but revulsion for rap - you’re assuming that disliking rap comes from disliking the minority popes and that is not true.
Smells bad is not purely asthetic. Certain smells (rotting food, human waste etc) are pretty much universally accepted as bad smells, presumably for evolutionary reasons. Humans quite probably have similar reactions to cancerous growths and the like, although I suspect a more asthetic element kicks in here with the ever-mutable ideal of human beauty/perfection.
So you can't justify your dislike of rap by comparison to a bad smell, because all that shows is that you've categorised rap as equally unpleasant as things humans tend to avoid, without actually justifying your asthetic choice (it's also frankly insulting to people like me who like some rap). Rather there's a different class of asthetic experiences where we have much less automatic human tendencies to react and therefore our engagement is purely asthetic: whilst you can still dislike rap because for some reason you find it repugnant, it might be polite to realise that this is a personal reaction, and perhaps to seek to indicate what causes this reaction.
Incidentally, I would suggest rap is another area where in the US there seems to a cubic-building tendency in action, with the stuff that is played on radio often lacking the skill and ornamentation of older songs. Although I could just be getting old...
Aesthetic isn’t a synonym for “not universal”. I don’t see why the senses of beauty people agree and disagree on are categorically different at all. Someone who has their smell receptors knocked out wouldn’t see an Olympic pool worth of pig feces (used to hold it near industrial animal farms, and quite unpleasant), and I don’t see how that’s any less aesthetic than disputed fine fragrances. One finds a beautiful woman beautiful in similar ways for agreed and disagreed elements. One with a hearing disability might not distinguish between a metronome and Mozart, does that diminish the difference to the shahid of aesthetics?
Aesthetics are innate and innate ness can be aesthetic? Just as people may differ in their judgements and those differences mah be important. Of course it isn’t justified, although I’d offer as justification the complexity in voice tone and variance and the longer scale of patterns and emotions across classical music VS rap constraining itself to much less complex stuff - that’s kinda obvious and not important but you did ask. How is the human reaction to cancerous growth and different from that to Mozart?
I can't say about the cancerous growth for certain, although no doubt the research exists. My supposition is that a growth that is obviously unhealthy would likely trigger an instinctive disgust, akin to the bad smells. It's probably relevant that these smells are actually produced by things generally regarded as visually unpleasant as well: feces, mouldy food, corpses (less so skeletons, which are less dangerous to us). Whilst these can be used for visual asthetic purposes, all of these things are still normally transgressive in their use. I'm going to take some convincing that universal reactions and clearly-recognisable transgressive areas are not of a different class of asthetic preference to Mozart versus Public Enemy.
On which subject, when did Mozart become more complex than rap music? Different complexities sure, since Mozart was working in a radically different set of media to any rapper whose work I've encountered, but each has its own asthetics. You can appreciate both, one or the other or neither, but actually stating one is better than the other is frankly just an opinion. For what it's worth I think on average Mozart is better than rap, but would prefer to listen to the best rap than Mozart, but that's just my asthetics now. It's not something I can expect anyone else to agree with though, because their asthetics might be different.
It’s also just an opinion that modern PCs are better than 8080s.
> Certain smells (rotting food, human waste etc) are pretty much universally accepted as bad smells
food that smells like human waste = stinky tofu in Taiwan and much of China. It smells like someone wiped poo on the bowl. But they LOVE IT!
Plenty of foods smell pretty rotten/rancid, etc, various cheeses like Limburgur (smells like cat shit to me) or even blue cheese which to cultures that don't eat it smells horrid but if you "learned to like it" it suddenly smells delicious.
I know for me the smell of shrimp paste when first added to the pan in south east asian cooking really stinks but I love it because I know it means the delicious things are coming soon.
Also note that rotting fish has been used in sauces for a long time.
> you’re assuming that disliking rap comes from disliking the minority popes and that is not true.
I didn't make that connection you did.
"...the reflexive disdain for it being low status?"
I've expressed no such disdain. I was simply pointing out that ugliness is embraced by both upper and lower classes.
And you don't think its possible that your perception of what is "ugly" is at all influenced by cultural factors? Given art and fashion are the archtypal examples of culturally determined things?
"And you don't think its possible that your perception of what is 'ugly' is at all influenced by cultural factors?"
Not only do I not think this, but I kinda thought that that was the main topic of discussion.
I think that’s generally true of rich and poofs nowadays, not in the past. Folk music isn’t usually disgusting and ugly in the way you indicate
"Folk music isn’t usually disgusting and ugly in the way you indicate"
I didn't indicate that it was.
I didn’t mean that, I meant “folk music isn’t usually ugly in the way you indicated rap usually is”
I would say clothing and personal hygiene is the prime example of how the „lower classes“ in America have embraced ugliness. Not that lower classes in Europe are that much better, but overweight, ugly tattoos, wearing camo cargo shorts, a black t shirt with an aggressive ugly message and a baseball cap is still a mark of American distinction. The Eastern European track suit and jewelry look is brutal but not as sloppy.
Being overweight isn't a fashion choice. Being weirdly overmuscled or (sometimes) being extremely thin are fashion choices.
This belongs in the other thread, but IMO the tech adjacent rich upper class being conspicuously rarely overweight is actually a fashion choice
I agree.
Would you be prepared to consider that fans of hip-hop simply hold a conflicting ideal of beauty to you? I am a bit self-interested here, as I prefer what I see as good hip-hop to classical, and I'm not adverse to films that might well induce disgust.
Also, I suspect the strongest opposition to these things are also found in the lower classes (whatever you mean by that). The upper classes tend to be more tolerant of differences in opinion even if they can still use these as social markers.
"Would you be prepared to consider that fans of hip-hop simply hold a conflicting ideal of beauty to you?"
No: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-think-rap-music-is-horrible/answer/Jamie-Bechtel-%E0%A4%9C%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%80-%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%9F%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B2%E0%A5%8D
"...I'm not adverse to films that might well induce disgust."
Sure, eg. Eraserhead is one of my favorite movies. But that's because it still manages to be a work of art. I would say that the ability to embrace something devoid of esthetic value might result from a lack of disgust. But that by itself doesn't place disgust and art in opposition.
"...I suspect the strongest opposition to these things are also found in the lower classes..."
Possibly, but the point was that embracing ugliness is seen in both upper and lower classes.
And when someone pretends that there's a meaningful difference between bad and 'good' rap, I too question their general esthetic opinions.
Man its almost like aesthetics are subjective. Which rather undermines your claim to objectively determine certain subcultures fashion and music to be bad
I was responding in kind to ksdale. However, this discussion is about a change in esthetics, away from a 'universal,' towards something cruder and/or something that people pretend to prefer. *Given* the premise of this discussion, then yes, rap definitely fits the pattern: a 'musical' genre that manages to do just fine without *melody.*
The idea that people are pretending to make meaningful distinctions between good and bad rap music is pretty easy to test.
For example: In 1987, The Ramones bassist Dee Dee Ramone was so taken with the new genre, that he decided to make a rap album himself. You can Google "Dee Dee Ramone Funky Man" to see the result of that decision. The year of 1987 was also the year that Eric B and Rakim released their debut album "Paid in Full." Most people who know rap music would regard him as one of greatest, if not the greatest, rappers of all time and acknowledge him as one of the originators of the technique that almost all rappers use today.
I can believe that you just won't like Eric B and Rakim. But if I played you both Dee Dee Ramone's "Funky Man" and the title track from "Paid in Full" and offered you $1,000 to tell me which is considered one of the genre's seminal tracks and which is a failed novelty record, I have some confidence that you could win the money.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe you are wealthy enough that $1,000 is insufficient motivation or maybe you really cannot tell the difference. Hard to make a case with an N=1. So, we could increase the pool of listeners and increase the sample of music.
There are plenty of examples of non-rapper celebrities who have recorded rap songs either because of the novelty or because they really wanted to be rappers. What would the result be if I randomly played both well-regarded rap songs and novelty attempts to a large enough sample of people? My guess is that we would find that people could successfully discern the two categories at a high enough rate that it would statistically rule out lucky guessing.
Oh I'm perfectly willing to grant that a horse turd tastes *better* than a dog turd, but that hardly implies that either is *good.* An objective indication of rap's vacuousness would be the fact that young children, with no real training, can become accomplished rappers. Heck, even someone with an IQ in the 60-70 range can be an accomplished rapper...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laz-D
"Rap" was called "Beat Poetry" when whypepo did earlier. Rap improved on it by adding more interesting articulation and more interesting complex rhythms.
I don't like the *content* of 90% of rap, but I am first to say it's more musical and more pleasing to listen to the sounds of it than 90% of the flat thin soup that is "Modern Jazz".
Wow. I seem to have touched a nerve there. Half a dozen posts, with no content other than "I don' like it, so it's intrinsically badness". I will just use this whole exchange as an example of why having sumptuary laws for the arts is generally a bad idea, because someone like you will worm your way onto the committee.
"I seem to have touched a nerve there."
Not at all. I just really, really, *really* dislike rap.
"...no content other than 'I don' like it, so it's intrinsically badness'."
Yeah, except that I didn't say that. I do claim that it is devoid of artistic merit, and as usual, see no real attempt at defending it.
"...someone like you..."
Yup. Excluding 'people like me' is the way to go.
(There was another precursor to rap, that was a bit like scat, but I don't remember what it was called.)
And yet even with the accompaniment of a few musical instruments, beat poetry didn't really pretend to be music. That would have been *dumb.* The 'improvement' that you see seems to me nothing more than a *strident* expression of ghetto attitude, a grunting leaning-into the (bad) poetry, that's then passed off as rather monotonous 'music.'
I like some jazz. But not even the worst jazz comes close to offending my ears the way that rap does.
You mean you don't like Eminem? Without Me is rather catchy and introduced me to the artist.
I'm always baffled by these "but did you ever hear X" challenges. A bit like telling someone say that you don't like menudo, and they respond by suggesting that you try swimming in a pool of menudo. X always turns out to be something absolutely *awful,* and I end up all the more certain that there's *nothing* of value to be found in the entire genre. Yes, I've (attempted to) listen to Eminem before. He's been suggested to me several times. I'd rather have a nail hammered into my eardrum than listen to more than 30 seconds of his stuff.
It's not a challenge per se, rather a query to your breadth of experience.
So, as always, De gustibus non est disputandum – there can be no argument about taste.
Your point about academics getting caught in loops of talking to each other is interesting. For a while in the field of international relations it's been "low status" to do work that engages with things happening in the policy world. This has in part led to the scholars who engage with politicians being somewhat more crackpot-y than we'd like.
Can you explain what it means to be in international relations and not engage with policy?
Lots of pretending to be philosophers (internal debates about realism vs structural realism vs offensive realism vs liberalism vs neoliberalism vs constructivism vs everything else) + intentionally obscuring everything you say to the point where you and your RAs are the only ones who know what you're talking about.
I should be more clear — this was my experience at UChicago, which is particularly known in that space for being cursed in this sort of arcane/ivory tower academia way.
I read a post from (I believe) Anatoly Karlin on the theme of "There are tons of politicians and businessmen in Russia who would love to understand more about how modern China works for good political/business reasons, and they are all frustrated by the state of Sinology in Russia, in which any question you put to an expert on China receives an answer beginning in the time of the (mythical) Yellow Emperor".
Yes, here it is: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russian-sinology/
<i>On the other hand, business and bureaucrats aren’t too satisfied with the academic Sinologist community either. “There is no practical benefit from communicating with them. You ask them a simple question, and they start their answer from the time of the Yellow Emperor, and don’t end up clarifying anything. Typical professors,” says one federal bureaucrat.</i>
Hah - I read this comment with increasing horror of my repressed memories of undergrad, and of course, you’re from UofC too
So kinda like the opposite of Marx's "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
Though it's not obvious to me why not making a difference would be high status and making a difference low status. The only think i can think of is that there are some academics who don't make a difference, who policymakers ignore, and who are secretly jealous of colleagues who do make a difference. Consequently these people affect not to care about making a difference.
The idea is that if you're "making a difference" then you've clearly dumbed down your stuff enough for the politicians and policymakers to understand it, which means you aren't a real academic.
The people who push these views do in fact wish they were philosophers and that people would climb the mountaintop to hear them proselytize or whatever.
This is the stated reason but my gut feeling is that the true reason is that to make a difference you have to actually say "we should do X" and then if X turns out to be a disaster you're screwed. If you only ever say "a constructivist analysis of X shows that under neoliberal capitalism blah blah blah" you can never be the person who got X wrong.
Seems like at least some of this can be traced to the popularization (among some elites) of utilitarianism and more analytical, "scientific" approaches to things?
You can certainly see that with architecture, which, in addition to being aesthetically pleasing, now also have to be energy efficient, cost effective, not fall over in an earthquake, etc.
And per Wikipedia, the modern men's suit was popularized by Beau Brummel, who was apparently inspired by military designs. As to why military outfits became simpler around Brummel's time, that's pretty well known. Officers dressed more extravagantly than other soldiers are more likely to be shot by snipers.
Huh! That last sentence is really interesting - do you have a source?
Not exactly a source but https://youtu.be/VPCLe55LBjo?t=795
It was something mentioned by the commanding officers when I was in ROTC. Possibly apocryphal.
There's a line in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Army_officer_rank_insignia about British officers removing officer's insignia on their cuffs because of snipers during WW1, but there's plenty of simplification prior to that that's not explained.
Yea I heard this as a JO as well. I think it’s probably apocryphal / common sense / traditions in need of a data point.
If I remember right, I think this is something Grant helped popularize. He was a little more scruffy than Lee or McClellan, and I believe that carried over with guys like Pershing and Eisenhower (with notable exceptions.)
He was a *lot* more scruffy.
From “A Few Good Men” set in Guantanamo
Kaffee - Played by Tom Cruise wearing Navy officer dress whites
Barnes - Played by Kiefer Sutherland wearing Marine cammo
===============================================
Barnes: [in Barnes'humvee] I've got some camouflage jackets in the Jeep, sirs, I suggest you both put them on.
Kaffee: Camouflage jackets?
Barnes: Yes sir, we'll be riding pretty close to the fence line. The Cubans see an officer wearing white, they think it might be someone they'd wanna take a shot at.
Kaffee: [sarcastically] Good call, Sam.
My go-to source for such things is The Cut of Men's Clothes 1600-1900 by Norah Waugh. I don't have a copy handy to confirm, but I think I remember it confirming something close to Andrew's statements.
Specifically, Beau Brummel was one of the pioneers or popularizers of the Frock Coat look, which had more in common with early 19th century military uniforms than it did with the previous generation of civilian formal wear. It's a generation or two of fashion remove from modern business suits, which are more directly derived from 19th century sack suits (a middle/working-class style that was considerably simpler and more amenable to mass production than a well-tailored frock coat).
The Revolutionary-Napoleonic era of 1789-1815 generally popularized military styles, which you can hear in Beethoven's music, for example. Marie Antoinette's painter Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun looked back fondly on the Ancien Regime as one more culturally feminine than the ensuing age.
So, a jacket in the style of a military officer's field tunic (with the lapels folded back) was in touch with the times.
It is not a reference per se, but there is something like that in Cyrano de Bergerac: de Guiche has dropped his white scarf to avoid being shot at, Cyrano has picked it up and promises to wear it later during the assault.
This was my thought as well. Nietzche was on to something more with the whole God is dead. Moving to an evidence based scientific culture and society seemed to generally mark the broad death of romanticism, fantasy, mysticism, religion, etc. I think a lot of the art and buildings of classic tradition served a purpose of expressing and emphasizing effectively fantasy. Not only am I richer than you, my entire world and being is of a different level. Or in other cases, I and the family are literally gods, hence thr grandeur in outfits, jewelry, etc. But today, our culture embraces that we are all just humans. And very serious and evidence based ones as that, tying in to your utilitarian comment. Houses, art, clothing should roughly be broadly human (it can be too out there or you don't fit in) and anything alluding to mysticism or romanticism or anything of that ilk just isn't well liked anymore. One thing that has held up against this trend? Mormanism and their insane huge eye catching temples.
As a Mormon myself, I was thinking about mentioning that. But you'll notice a very clear distinction between the temples and our regular meetinghouses (or even office buildings), which are very bland in comparison. The temple has a symbolic purpose and is meant, in part, to evoke something of heaven on earth. Even the weirder ones have a symbolism, like the Provo Temple, which is meant to represent the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke.
Your point about the symbology of Mormon temples influencing their architecture is very well taken. Coming from an Orthodox Christian perspective, all of our church buildings are considered to have the same function of representing heaven on earth -- and also to be a microcosm of the universe, which is why you'll sometimes see stars painted on the ceiling of well-ornamented Orthodox churches. Orthodox Christians also sometimes call the normal church building a "temple": we don't have the distinction between temples and meetinghouses as the LDS church does.
For the record, I've been impressed by the Mormon temples, especially the Salt Lake City temple, and I agree with LRG that Mormonism has held up quite well against the trend towards modern architecture. It has always intrigued me, though, that the regular LDS meetinghouses I've seen are not highly ornamented; to my eyes they're less decorated than even many of the low-church evangelical buildings I've seen. As someone in the faith, could you explain why they're decorated so differently from the temples?
Much of older high-status European men's fashion was also inspired by military outfits. For example, the Renaissance-era Doublet and Hose look is based on what knights a generation or three earlier would have worn under a suit of armor: the Doublet in particular started out as a civilian outerwear variant of a Gambeson or Arming Jacket, a padded jacket you'd wear underneath armor to prevent chafing and to cushion the force of impacts.
Similarly, 18th century knee britches we're based on cavalry pants: calvalrymen would wear high boots to protect their legs, and would wear only stockings underneath the boots. The pants would start just below the knee, which would be a bit below the cuff of the boot. The civilian version kept the knee-length britches and the stockings, but traded the boots for low shoes.
Ha! So it's the early equivalent of dressing in camo?
You could look at it like that. Although the similarities seem to be more in the cut of the clothes than color or fabric: for example, arming jackets would typically be buff (natural undyed and unbleached wool or linen) or dyed a uniform utilitarian color, while doublets would be dyed bright colors and often richly decorated with inlays and embroidery.
A more precise modern analogy would be the four-buttoned single-breasted suit jackets that occasionally show up in high fashion, and are much more similar in cut to the tunic of a modern non-combat daily wear uniform (e.g. the US Army's Service Greens) than to more conventional 2-button or 3-button suit jackets.
I don't know how people back then saw the military styling, and whether it seemed silly to some of them.
They might have seen the shape of the clothing as more important than we do.
For government buildings in the West and in Communist/Post-Communist regimes, egalitarianism seems as good a reason as any for the drawdown in splendor (brutalism's popularity in the former Soviet Union surely mattered a bunch as well). People like the aesthetics of old buildings, but the people who lived when they were raised may have been significantly more lukewarm towards the occupants themselves. To the extent that mass revolution/execution of elites is a more live possibility now (post-French/Russian Revolutions, etc.), the overt celebration of elite status/exclusion in government may be a provocation whose risk is not worth the reward. As is stated, there are always other ways to signal status.
This is the equivalent of some anti-vaxxer writing an article about how we used to make great scientific discoveries but not any more because now scientists have to do statistics and show error bars to pass peer review, and hasn’t anyone considered all the ways in which humans are irrational so really scientists are just as biased as the rest of us and 80% of people agree that street smarts are better than book smarts, rationalists must just be playing status games they learned in the school system, which overvalues symbolic intelligence instead of teaching people to be practical and get work done in the real world. We need a renaissance of good manly realistic scientific thinking about things we can see and touch not nonsense alphabet soup protein sequencing whatever
This has a pretty high insulting-sounding-ness to comprehensibility ratio, I request you either sound less insulting or explain your point more clearly.
I’m sorry, I suck at writing and I have to get back to work but you made me mad. I suggested a volume of essays by Greenberg below. I would also recommend some Adorno or something. Just…like, anything from within the ecosystem you’re critiquing because everything you’re talking about is *extensively* discussed among everyone involved
It’s as wrongheaded and empirically wrong and maddening to claim that nobody has claimed a thing that was actually a serious and influential school of thought as it is to claim that scientists aren’t trying to manage uncertainty or rationalists the possibility of bias
I've deleted the claim, which was phrased as "I've never heard anyone claim it" based on that, and I'll see if I can find time to read the essays.
If AKA can't explain at least a sort of quick general overview of what these people are saying, telling you to "just read this" is kind of shitty — who knows if they actually answer any of your questions or not?!
The book will answer any empirical questions re “what are/were these people thinking?” because it *is* literally what those people were thinking. Greenberg arguably made Jackson Pollock.
The difference is that there exist objectively true answers to questions in biology and medicine, while aesthetics is much more subjective. Therefore, the "Disregard the opinion of the uninformed public, just trust the experts" angle is a lot harder to justify when it comes to ugly architecture.
How much of this preference for older styles is just selection bias at work?
Any building from before the modern period that has survived until today is probably not at all a normal building. I would expect the greatest architectural works of their respective ages, the best exemplars of their architectural styles, to be highly overrepresented in this sample.
If you're comparing a selection of the prettiest buildings of the last thousand years to moderately liked buildings today, it's perhaps not that strange that preferences heavily skewer one way. Everyone has heard of Milan cathedral, but I had no idea what their university was called or what it looked like before reading this.
If you compare Milan Cathedral to the Sydney opera house or Fallingwater instead, you might get different answers.
Go wander round an old European country village full of quaint cottages sometime. Those sorts of places are generally considered very beautiful, and were made by and for ordinary people.
No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%). And those old village that survived survived because they were pretty and considered worthy enough to be maintained.
I don't think the single buildings were preserved because they individually were considered pretty. They survived because people lived in them and the buildings grew organically with the needs of their inhabitants. I don't think that owners refrained from altering the buildings when the change fit their needs (until Cultural heritage management stepped in) for aesthethical reasons
Side note: hardly anyone wants or wanted to live in a building like that however pittoreske it may seem:
https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Eh%E2%80%99h%C3%A4usl?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=nui,elem
"No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%)" hasn't been true for hundreds of years at least (at least if we count rooms built out of bricks as well). And as for "those old village that survived survived because they were pretty and considered worthy enough to be maintained" -- yes, even ordinary people's dwellings were considered worthy to be maintained. Do you expect people to maintain an average brutalist building for hundreds of years because they like the look of it?
> No, they were already quite rich if they owned a house with multiple rooms built with stone (probably top 1%).
That's absolutely wrong. There are many farmhouses in the countryside in France that stood a few hundred of years. Are you going to argue that farmers were in the top 1%?
What idiocy is this? If they couldn't afford a multi-room house to themselves, they were far more likely to live in a multi-room house with one or more other families than live in a single-room house.
I'm not going to bother to find evidence for this, but I think you'll find people generally prefer pedestrian-focused spaces, and outside of a few places (the Netherlands, mainly), we've surrendered a ton of spaces to cars. Older places are often people-scaled, which makes them appealing on a non-architectural basis.
I think the beauty of some European villages comes not from each single building having special architectural qualities, it's the assembly of buildings different in form and shape, color, purpose, ornaments that appeals to us, maybe it's because they grew organically ...
The Milan Cathedral has not been all that popular in Milan. It was built in the northern European Gothic pointed style rather than in a look indigenous to Italy, and just as Gothic was starting to go out of fashion. Soon after, Brunelleschi's Florence Cathedral topped it by building the first dome in Italy in almost a millennium.
Technically speaking, the Milan Cathedral is a 20th century building, as it was only completed in 1965.
This is my thought as well. Turn on an oldies radio station and its all the hits. Comparatively, a modern station will sound terrible and full of trash. Same phenomenon in my view. This can be extended to art, literature, etc.
I think this argument would be more convincing if people could point to the great architecture, art, etc., being produced now, and say, "Look, here's the stuff that will (probably) be remembered five hundred years from now when all the other dross if forgotten!"
Fascist regimes love classical styles because it allows them to portray themselves as the natural inheritors of those traditions. Plain architecture signals function over form.
In contrast to old elites, modern commoners and elites both tend to dislike what might vaguely be called dignity, stuffiness, or artifice, seeing it as inauthentic. That's why we have both pop music and "Three Dancing Figures". It also explains Brutalism - if a building has a "bad" purpose (as judged by the popular culture of elites), e.g. offices, it should look bad - trying to make it look more pleasant would be covering up the badness within. This may be related to the change from a culture where people were expected to look up to their betters (and where those betters acknowledge themselves as such) to one of greater egalitarianism, where elites try to pretend not to exist.
Anyway, depending on your tastes, good art survives in TCG card art, and among obscure artists on the Internet (some of them with a loyal Patreon following). I'm not sure what this suggests. Maybe there's a golden mean of audience size, where if it's too small, the art becomes low-effort and idiosyncratic, and if it's too big, the artist appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Are you sure buildings with bad purposes are more brutalist than buildings with good ones? I've seen a lot of brutalist libraries.
So have I, but proportionately I've seen more brutalist offices than brutalist libraries.
There are some brutalist buildings I find sincerely really nice looking. Eg the biotech labs at bakar in Berkeley— stunning.
The ugliest building on campus is often the Department of Architecture.
I thought this was largely the result of cost. Before things were mass produced, individual artisans worked on every element. The expense of ornateness relative to the expense of non-ornateness was modest, because the people involved already had the capability to make things ornate.
Today buildings are produced using strategies that are designed to save money. The people involved do not have the skills (or time or resources) to make individual elements ornate. Even at the architectural level, it is far easier to build a big box than a complicated structure in which each element is slightly or completely different than the others.
There is a simple way to confirm this. Get a quote for a building in the style of Milan Cathedral, and a building in the style of Bocconi University but with equal usable square footage. I'd expect the cathedral to be spectacularly more expensive, even if you were ordering 100 of each and thus able to carefully optimize for building each type of structure.
I think this depends on how close you want the "style" of an old cathedral. An exact reproduction of anything old is always going to be more expensive the more exact it is, whereas something that only tries to follow the spirit of the thing with modern techniques will be cheaper.
At the most extreme end, we can literally project an image of beauty and marvel beyond anything the ancients could build onto a flat wall for practically free.
"My impression is that the more demographic and developed a country"
Is that supposed to be democratic?
You might be interested in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
Perhaps Glass is not quite the best example of what you mean, John Cage might be better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsioM3GaAAY
Speaking of Mozart, true genius can survive even modern opera productions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojbkbyxd8d8
Cage may be less accessible than Glass in general, but his music is still quite difficult to perform. (I'm not sure how to judge the ornateness of pieces composed by random processes.)
Music doesn't really fill the pattern of other arts. Modern music is all over the map in every parameter, but in general the public seems to prefer the simple side of the scale.
Bartók is great for speed fingering exercises for engaged students (guess how I know that), but it sounds like a couple of cats running across the piano in the middle of the night, it's never fun to play, and there is a reason why it's not popular at recitals attended by parents paying for the kids' piano lessons.
I even got to do my Bartók practices on a $100,000 performance grand once. It didn't help. (But the authentic ivory keys did make the fingering easier.)
Except Cage was often making self-consciously weird performance art, making statements about the nature of music and art, instead of trying to have any real aesthetic appeal.
But you're right that plenty of modern classical music is uncontroversial beautiful, even though some of it isn't.
Modern classical music went a long way into "we are making music that isn't for most people", and then pulled back from it, at least to some extent.
Yeah, Glass specifically, and minimalists as a group, just aren't particularly less skillful or complex than Mozart.
And music in general completely buckles the trend Scott is describing. Established academic composers used to make a lot of simplistic stuff that stood on being experimental, up to the 1960s, but ever since sampling and synthesizers became commonplace, those experiments became commonplace also and were simply incorporated into music at large, while gradually increasing in both complexity/sophistication and, for lack of a better word, pleasantness. Modern music in general, including the poppiest of pop, is extremely polished compared to what came before it. I mean, it's still often vacuous, but not for lack of ornamentation.
"I mean, it's still often vacuous, but not for lack of ornamentation."
Rap isn't just devoid of much ornamentation, but is pretty much devoid of melody altogether.
I don't think it's a correct description of the genre as a whole.
And to the extent that it describes particular songs or artists, it serves as a demonstration of my point, experimental music techniques being accepted by and accessible for mainstream listeners. The idea that there's more to music composition than melody is relatively new into western music tradition. It's now also widely accepted all across the respectability strata. As a result, I don't think lack of melody can be equated with lack of ornamentation or polish anymore.
(And I was mainly speaking about pop in that sentence anyway. Pop won't cease being melodic, by definition.)
"I don't think it's a correct description of the genre as a whole."
Sure, I should have said that rap can manage without melody. But when melody is heard, it's usually stolen from elsewhere. And whether or not it's stolen from elsewhere, it's usually just a short, looped snippet.
"The idea that there's more to music composition than melody is relatively new into western music tradition."
I don't see rap *adding* anything to substitute for melody. An emphasis on rhythm is hardly comparable to all that the genre jettisons.
Popular music has osciliated back and forth between how much ornamentation to use since the 1960s at least.
I think glass and minimalist music does kinda have similar breaking and simplifying and mutating past structures tendencies and does kinda fit tbh. idk tho
Opportunity cost (and maybe cost disease, if we ever figure out what the actual causes of it are). When the opportunity cost of labor, or even for semi-skilled labor, is "menial drudgery in a field", the rich can build outrageous receiving rooms and wear labor-intensive textiles. When, as in most of the developed world (and indeed by comparison to the past, most of the developing world), laborers have loads of other alternative pursuits competing for their efforts, making the opportunity cost in "other stuff that could have been made with that same labor" much higher. To some extent capital can substitute for labor, but only to an extent -- carving and especially laying intricate stone or creating a delicate and elaborate costume still takes quite a bit of labor, even with the machinery currently available to aid in this. And the time taken to produce a lot (though not all) of the high end abstract art seems, to this definitely-not-an-artist observer, to likely be far less than the time required to paint something in the style of the Old Masters.
I would happily accept this if everything was simply lowest-cost-with-your-choice-of-color-trim construction. But we also have people going out of their way to build expensive buildings which are uglier. Eg. the MIT Stata Center which is both ugly and which the occupants hate.
My impression of the Stata center was that it was almost explicitly designed to look weird and strange and interesting, not necessarily "good".
I certainly don't think I'd call it ugly though.
On the subject of modern architecture, did you know that Edinburgh has a hotel shaped like a gigantic turd? It even has a twitter account: https://twitter.com/TurdHotel
I almost got to stay in that pile of shit, but it was sold out before I got approval to go to that conference.
I wanted to say that maybe the "traditional style" of architecture is actually really hard to pull off and modern architects just aren't good enough at their craft to create something like that, but... this seems unlikely given that there is still some breathtakingly beautiful contemporary art that I sometimes stumble upon, so the skill seems to be there, just maybe the top people in the field don't have it?
If it's a matter of modern architects not being able to pull of traditional designs, I suppose that raised the question of when and why this decline in competence occurred.
I think part of it is that building in traditional styles is seen as a regression; we *know* how to do that, *anyone* can do that! But to build in an even more extravagant modern style, now that is unique!
And of course, if you simply slap up a copy of some old building, then that isn't much better, because the world has moved on and it is no longer anchored by temporal roots in the time and place. That's how you get the bad McMansions which took classical architectural elements and just jammed them all in together without sense of their original purpose or their design function.
What is needed is somebody like Gaudi, who has a vision, is a genius, and can pull off a traditional-in-future-style building for today. But I don't know where such a person can be found.
Maybe we should reserve the judgement on whether Gaudi can pull it off until the Segrada Famillia is finished. There's what, 13 years left?
I wonder whether that's it: the timeline for building a gothic cathedral is considered unacceptably slow for a modern building.
There's thousands of "traditional style" buildings being built every year, and they're called houses.
Here's a fairly random example of a new house, a somewhat more expensive than average new house in a somewhat more expensive than average suburb in Texas: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/154-Rockwell-Park-Dr_Spring_TX_77389_M97465-23471
It's not particularly beautiful, nor is it particularly ugly. It's built in a style that doesn't look self-consciously modern, but doesn't look like a deliberate retro throwback either. This seems to be the kind of house that most ordinary people will choose to build and buy if they have the money.
It's because in older times, elites had fewer ways to propagandize the masses. Their architecture wasn't JUST architecture, it needed to send a subliminal message to people. Their clothing wasn't JUST clothing - it was designed to have an emotional impact as well.
Nowadays, the vast majority of all propaganda gets spread through media (typically social media) so the old ways of manipulating perceptions have become a lost art. Sad!
The shift from wealth-signaling to taste-signaling began with Matthew Arnold, as I explained a few years ago:
https://icouldbewrong.blogspot.com/2004/04/john-holbo-at-crooked-timber-ridicules.html
Personally, I like the left in all 4 images. However, if somebody built that now, using new processes and materials to avoid it costing a fortune, I'd think it was tacky or even trashy.
My impression is that the recent past was very fancy and ornate so trying to emulate that style when it's unavoidably temporally disconnected from us is just icky.
I missed you comment before posting mine, but I agree with your point.
Yes, you can't just blindly copy the past. But the umpteenth glass-and-steel-and reinforced concrete rectangle is so boring, even the horrors unleashed by 'starchitects' make some sense there - the Gherkin is a weird building and I don't particularly like it, but it is an attempt at something different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_St_Mary_Axe
Unhappily, today the craze seems to be "can we have the technically tallest building in the world?" for large projects, and they are nothing more than dull attempts to beat a silly record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings
The minimalist, stripped-back style can be done well, but it costs a lot to do it well, and if your purpose is "we need some sort of box to house our worker bees", then why spend more than you need? The standard glass box will do just fine.
I blame the rise of ideas like "right-wing authoritarianism" and "the authoritarian personality" and the like. Having a love of order and harmony is nowadays considered (at best) a mark of inflexibility and incapability of dealing with the unexpected, and (at worst) outright fascist. But most beautiful works of art (defined so as to include architecture, clothing, music, etc., as well as paintings and sculptures) get their beauty precisely from the ordered and harmonious arrangements of their parts. It's no wonder that a society which pathologises the qualities required of great art should be incapable of producing any great art itself.
I can't help but put some blame on the pervasive socialism and concomitant opposition to everything that is "bourgeoise" in academic architecture, art, literature, etc.
If it were, it would be. But it isn't, so it isn't.
There's only so many national economies and individual socialist workers cooperatives which can fail miserably, resulting in death, destruction, and ruin, before people begin noticing the pattern and realize it's a terrible idea.
Well, not everyone manages to notice, of course, but enough.
But sure, list out all the wildly successful improvements of the modern socialist countries and how much they improved over their non-socialist competitors by doing socialism the "right way"...
Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.
You would do well to read up on the predictive power of a theory and why that is important.
Eugen Richter.
"If it were, it would be. But it isn't, so it isn't."
I wish I, too, lived in a world completely free of error, where all things are exactly as they ought to be by virtue of their existence alone.
Without getting into the usual set-piece debate over the merits of revolution on a thread not intended for that purpose, I will say that quite a few of humanity's achievements eluded us for a long time, even with correct theories, before we finally nailed them.
Also, I buy some food from 'individual' workers' co-ops. Haven't been laid low or ruined yet by that practice.
Nah. This trend was taking place a little while before Marxism was even a thing. The post said it might have started after the french revolution, and that's more or less what caused the first Marxists (and Marx himself) to start writing about revolutionary theory. If you're going to blame the opposition to wealth for this trend, you should attack it as an opposition inherent in human nature and not socialist writing. Besides, the soviet union had comparatively way more ceremonious looking art than the US did at the time. Something more is going on here.
one problem with that is that plenty of elitist futurists and rich businessmen and insular aesthetes also dressed/painted/built like that. socialism is modern, and there’s some connection probably, but it’s not mainly that
I still lean toward a mass culture explanation.
Architecture is hard to explain through it, I agree, bit fashion? Yes, powerful people dress in nice tailored suits, but check out drag race, where fashion is an EVENT. Like, a kiddie pool in the curve of a dress? A dress made out of cameras?
That is the fashion I love. And so many people talk about it who have a casual interest in fashion.
Most people don't think that a dress made out of cameras is 'beautiful' the way traditional fashion is. Creative and novel, perhaps. But 'dresses made out of cameras' are not a thing because that's what most people think a good dress looks like and nobody is wearing such dresses outside of these kinds of events.
There are some attitudes which are common both in the past and in today; in 1532 Thomas Cromwell started buying up land and property to enlarge his house, which he needed to do both as a result of his increasing status and with the expansion of his household that went along with it.
His neighbours weren't too happy with how he went about it:
"Without pausing to seek permission, Cromwell proceeded to move the fences of his neighbours’ gardens back by twenty-two feet, and offered neither warning nor compensation. ‘This house [i.e. Cromwell’s] being finished, and having some reasonable plot of ground left for a Garden, he caused the pales of the Gardens adioyning to the north parte thereof on a sodain to be taken downe, 22 feet to be measured forth right into the north of every man’s ground, a line there to bee drawen, a trench to bee cast, a foundation laid, and a highe bricke wall to bee builded.’ Even more audaciously, he put the house of Thomas Stow (father of the antiquarian, John) on rollers and moved it, and then started to build a new house for himself on the land that had been thus vacated."
I have no idea why modern taste is as it is, some people honestly do love that concrete Brutalist architecture. Part of it, I suppose, is that classical architecture became over-done, as well as being carried out by second, third and no rate at all builders because your town needs a new courthouse, okay we can slap some Dorinthionic columns out front because that's what you do for buildings like this.
Rococo style went over the top; some German churches ended up looking like chocolate boxes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberammergau#/media/File:Oberammergau_Pfarrkirche_organ.jpg
Making copies of copies of copies of Neo-Classical architecture became wearisome, trite and lowest common denominator. Eventually a reaction was bound to set in, with more austere and restrained styles. Young architects got all excited over theories of stripping off the excess, and when that became the popular and award-winning style, then the modern era of concrete and glass boxes was born.
Then it became the rich who could afford to be Minimalist, you need a lot of money to be able to afford acres of empty space with perhaps one tastefully subdued couch taking up part of the room (as all the rest of your possessions are stored elsewhere).
That still doesn't explain the Three Dancing Figures, but public art is reliably terrible now it's all selected by committee instead of a pope holding a public competition because "I have a treasury stuffed full of money and I want to show off my education, taste, and claim on continuity of Roman history, so build me a magnificent big fountain AND MAKE SURE IT IS SUFFICIENTLY DRAMATIC":
"In 1629, Pope Urban VIII, finding the earlier fountain insufficiently dramatic, asked Gian Lorenzo Bernini to sketch possible renovations, but the project was abandoned when the pope died. ...Competitions had become popular during the Baroque era to design buildings, fountains, as well as the Spanish Steps. In 1730, Pope Clement XII organized a contest in which Nicola Salvi initially lost to Alessandro Galilei – but due to the outcry in Rome over a Florentine having won, Salvi was awarded the commission anyway. Work began in 1732."
You missed form over function. Rich people dumped fancy clothes because they're not very functional in modern settings (aka, climate controlled ones); modern architecture might not please everyone's aesthetics, but it's easy to live with.
I'm given to believe that the signalling gets even more subtle; yes, they dumped fancy clothes and now just turn up in jeans and open-necked shirt - but the jeans and shirt have to be particular designer brands, not any old pair you can buy off the rack.
And materials used are more luxurious - think of all the marketing around "high thread count Egyptian cotton".
So the apparent simplicity is just masking the same sumptuousness as when they wore silk and velvet and furs.
I wouldn't argue clothes aren't about status—once it became possible to make clothes to distinguish the powerful from the masses, that's been the case. But removing ornamentation from clothes makes the most sense to me as thought of in comfort and convenience terms. Not only are fancy clothes often uncomfortable, they often require fittings, which take time. Contemporary rich people are often very busy.
Likewise, contemporary buildings are more comfortable to live in than they were in the past, and changes to what we expect from a living space due to better HVAC means we want changes that wouldn't work with older architecture styles. Baroque and big windows isn't the same.
To me, Scott struck out on this one—he didn't consider a bunch of fairly obvious considerations with a lot of explanatory power, and also universalized American taste. My understanding is that in much of the world "traditional" future really isn't much of a thing. People buy modern minimalist stuff. Americans have much more appetite for "classical" and "traditional" forms.
Can you explain what you mean by climate-controlled settings? Are you saying that fancy clothes were very hot, and now that we have heaters, we don't need them?
Yes. The three piece suit isn't just about being fancy, it's about staying warm in drafty buildings that don't have effective warm air circulation. The trend since then has been less clothes—hats go away, then the vest, then the jacket. Eventually, you get the modern office where the distinction between work and casual wear disappears almost entirely.
The architecture stuff is like that too: How do you build a 50 story office building with flying buttresses and still have lots of windows? If you look at the history of architecture since the invention of the steel-framed building, at first you get decorative buildings like the Carbon and Carbide building in Chicago (utterly gorgeous on the outside and terrible on the inside). Then the modernists come along and realize, hey, we could have more windows. And wouldn't it be cool to get rid of that crappy decoration. There'a reaction to that and people start making more decorative buildings, but it's hard to pull off. However, eventually, computers come into the picture and suddenly buildings take on fantastic shapes. However, typical buildings still suck because it's hard to make a building that doesn't suck when it's surrounded by parking lots.
For what it's worth, the theory that fine art became a niche that goes deeper into nicheness as it becomes less popular makes sense to me, although that's kind of dated—the rise of the poptimist critics and pop art has blurred the lines between fine and popular art almost to the point of non-existence. Hip-hop altered poetry substantially, for example. You'd have to look at "donor" genres to find things that don't have populist appeal (and it's not like your local symphony is likely playing avant guard pieces, either)
Pop art is a pretentious appropriation of popular art to critique the latter. The two have very little in common.
I'm going to wager you have very little knowledge of contemporary art, especially if you think art from 60 years ago represents what's happening today. However, if that's your touchpoint, Warhol remains widely popular among people who don't pay much attention to fine art.
The modern suit coat is a descendent of the sort of thing a gentleman would wear to ride, walk, or go to war. Which is to say, the practical dress of the day. The really ornate stuff you see is courtly clothing, basically a costume you'd wear when showing off your wealth and taste was entirely the point - and doing anything other than stand and bow stiffly was not required. It was also the sort of thing you'd wear while sitting for a portrait, meaning that's what we remember from the period. But day to day, the clothing was not as plain as today - but less far than you might think. A jacket, waistcoat, and breeches with a bit of embroidery is not really that far from the modern business suit.
Nowadays, even the very rich are expected to work - or at least mostly look like the sort of people who work. So they wear stuff more like "practical" than "courtly" dress.
Of course, it's also worth noting that "really ornate" was not a permanent state of affairs. A Roman citizen's most important formal garment was the "toga virilis" - simple white cloth draped on the body. You showed status by how pure white you could afford to make the toga. Senators got a simple purple stripe.
This might be a rather long comment, but I think it's worthwhile to go into some of the points in this post. I happen to be writing a series of articles about architecture, evolution and why modernism has failed in the domain of beauty, which I will start posting soon (still building a backlog).
First of all, because Scott requested it (and for everyone else), I'd recommend reading the book Cognitive Architecture written by Ann Sussman. For my series (which will probably become a book) I've read many books and this one was by far the most informative. In Cognitive Architecture, Sussman explains how our aesthetic preferences were shaped by evolution and what consequences this has for our experience of architecture. She does this by compiling much cutting-edge neurological and psychological research with respect to aesthetics and draws from evolutionary psychology as well. It's very rigorous and a pleasure to read. And that's great because (in my humble opinion) most architectural books are full of bogus and not worth reading. Another book that I'd recommend is From Bauhaus to Our House written by Tom Wolfe. It's a great little book about modernism.
I'm numbering my remarks about this post so that it becomes easier to respond to them. Otherwise the discussion may become chaotic.
1. On the modernist turn as a change from flaunting wealth to hiding it: The degree in which wealth was signalled is not quantifiable and thereby it becomes very difficult to observe a correlation between this and historical events. That said, much evidence does exist to the contrary, such as the many 19th-century Rothschild palaces across Europe and the many lavish townhouses built in this era. This would falsify the purported French Revolution's effect on conspicuous consumption. Moreover, despite the economic crises the world has had to endure, the market for modern means of conspicuous consumption, such as superyachts and supercars, has not disappeared or shrunk significantly.
2. There's a difference between sobriety and ugliness. Amsterdam, historically a protestant city, used to be the richest city in the world from the early 1600s until about the mid-1700s. Nonetheless, although it is not as lavish as Paris, Venice or other Catholic cities, it is not found to be ugly by the millions of tourists that visit it every year. Architectural beauty lies in symmetry, good proportions and ornament, which are mostly independent of prosperity. Even though protestant architecture contains less ornament, it does not violate symmetry or the evolved proportions of classical architecture. Whereas modernist architecture does.
I would therefore not seek an explanation of modernism's ugliness in protestantism. It is also not the case that Catholicism has made way for protestantism, as the hundreds of millions of catholics across the globe attest to.
3. On the concept of new timeless aesthetic truths: Although modern architects love to assert so, there exist no new timeless aesthetic truths. As Sussman wrote in Cognitive Architecture, the experience of beauty is a result of our evolutionary history. It is a feature of our brains that conferred an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors. New aesthetic truths cannot have formed because aesthetics is inherently innate, more or less universal for our species and a matter of evolutionary psychology.
4. We should not rule out the possibility of corruption or failing political systems being behind much modern public art. When politicians' success does not depend on the quality of public art, why would concern themselves with it?
In my series, I provide an explanation for the ugliness of modern architecture. From findings in neurology, (evolutionary) psychology and empirical data we can derive timeless principles for beautiful architecture. It is exactly these that modernism has dismissed (which is what has made modernism unique.
To everyone interested in this topic, feel free to subscribe to medium.com/@casualrealism or send me an email at gijs.kerpestein@hotmail.com and I'll send you my current backlog. To those that can wait: I'll start posting is in a couple weeks.
The 'nonetheless' in point 2 applies of course to Amsterdam being protestant, not the fact that it was wealthy.
Apologies for the spelling and grammar mistakes btw, it's 2 AM here so I'm quite tired.
Yes, taste being based in evolution makes perfect sense, but I don't think this precludes discovery of "new" aesthetic truths. They may have always existed in the platonic realm, but in the past we could have lacked the means to create art pieces that emoby them. For example, rock music was simply impossible before the technology to make the electric guitar became available, and nobody could build skyscrapers before the nineteenth century, ugly or otherwise.
*embody
Yes, that is certainly true. What I am saying is that within what is technically possible to make, some sights are naturally preferred over others. This aesthetic preference (for symmetries, (natural) ornament, curves, spirals is innate. This can be seen from the ubiquity of these phenomena in architecture and more recent empirical research.
To avoid dismissing without reading twice this thread, I gave the libgen of that book a skim. I think the neurological and evolutionary claims it makes are unsupported, and very questionable. The “people naturally stick to walls” seems to retroactively justify patterns of walking in modern cities that probably weren’t true 1kyago, and the eye tracking face stuff seems entirely unable to demonstrate any innate ness to the face nature of buildings. “PtSD made modern architecture” is kind ridiculous. The book does the same thing that every popular conception of neuroscience stuff does: take things that are true, radically change the implications of words while keeping superficial similarity, and use that to argue for dumb shit
> Unmitigated stress and terror alter internal brain structure; horrifying experiences overwhelm the human nervous system’s coping ability and actually rewire the brain, causing “people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past” (van der Kolk 2014: 7). In other words, after trauma, the survivor’s body and brain lose the ability to respond normally because traumatic experience subverts the pathways that enable normal subliminal responses in an effort to survive
> So post-trauma the typical human face-bias, described at length in this book, can turn to face-aversion; the normal attraction to visual complexity, also described in Chapter 4, may diminish, with the traumatized brain actually losing capacity to take it in. This new understanding of human brain architecture and its malleability provides a new vantage point for assessing why ‘modern’ architecture looks so different from that of the past—it represents a direct external expression of the internal brain damage caused by the horror of the trench warfare that preceded it.
This is pretty ridiculous. It uses some somewhat true neuroscience statement to make something about human behavior seem way more significant than it is and ties it to architecture somehow.
It’s a smorgasbord of discredited and ridiculous 20th and 21st century pop psychology touchstones smashed together into a polemic about modern architecture. I haven’t cherry picked at all, in my view
I am afraid you are either cherry picking or the libgen doesn't cover all that is contained in the book. Its most important contents (most rigorously researched and most valuable in this debate) are about our innate preference for symmetries, natural shapes and curves.
And the sticking to walls does stem from an evolutionary advantage that this has conferred to the species we descend from as well as ours.
If you'd read the book, you'd get to view the entire argument.
I mean I literally read the table of contents and first chapter then jumped to random pages and the sections that stood out. I’m not Tyler cowen, I don’t want to read 3 books a day - and his tip for reading is to skip liberally
and I guess there’s not much point in arguing but the “evolutionary benefit of sticking to walls” just feels like the exact sort of psychology mechanical behavior just so story that I’ve seen break down too many times
A possible pieces of the puzzle, specifically about corporate buildings: A traditional building looks nice but it's a bit old-fashioned. A plain cuboid is ugly but modern. Corporations very much want to signal that they are modern, and absolutely not that they are old-fashioned.
A possible piece of the puzzle when it comes to modern buildings that are unique in some way: Individualism among architects. The most famous architects want to signal their own "unique" "artistic" "vision". A traditionalist building may look nice, but it usually isn't particularly unusual and striking. Building an eyesore that looks like a walkie-talkie and scorches the street as a concave mirror (20 Fenchurch Street) will make you more famous.
I don't dispute your point, but your references are a little out of date.
Turns out, the most powerful entities of out time are indeed "chasing after the Taj Mahal."
Case in point : Microsoft's new India offic - https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/features/inspired-by-the-taj-mahal-microsofts-newest-office-is-a-workspace-of-art/
And even then, open office spaces! Awful.
Yes, I agree about the open offices. It's a pastiche and an unappealing mix of "basic new modern architecture with some native elements slapped on top".
Epitome of grass is greener on the other side. I just moved from an open office to closed siloed personal offices, and I hate it ! Open offices are amazing. Especially when there are a decent number of focus rooms and meeting rooms to compensate for it. With hybrid work-from-home, I can just work from home when I need some quiet and privacy.
Your experience is not the norm: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-work-spaces-lower-productivity-employee-morale/
The interior of the actual Taj Mahal looks like this: https://www.lightstock.com/photos/taj-mahal-interior . Microsoft is just an office building with kind of rounded doorways.
Fair enough.
Knowing the history of Taj Mahal, I wonder if such opulence is impossible in an era without outright slavery and proper human rights. Within a capitalistic framework, a public company can only afford such degree of unnecessary spending if the cost addition is miniscule (slaves) or if they have endless cash (monarchs and invaders)
Wow, that looks awful. Like a parody of itself.
I like the interior. (But then again, for building interiors, I like the modern style anyway, mostly for functional reasons.)
The exterior (as far as I can tell by searching for Microsoft Sohini Tech Park) is mostly plain glass cubes.
Looks like an all-inclusive hotel
I've thought about this and my half-baked idea is that it's the rise of the middle/professional classes and the fall of the aristocracies.
For most of history you had basically two groups: the wealthy and the poor. The middle classes existed but they were a small part of society. Aristocracies were usually less than 1% of society. Power was also much more concentrated: the king was the highest political, cultural, financial (insofar as they had any concept of it), and religious authority. At least within the national borders. The capital was like DC, Hollywood, New York, and Rome all combined.
In between you had a few merchants and artisans mostly in cities. These people could get fabulously wealthy. But most of them were merely "much wealthier than peasants, much less wealthy than aristocrats." How did these aristocrats people make their money? By taxing the peasants. Or collecting rents that were pretty indistinguishable from taxes. This means that the aristocrats are highly, highly interested in appearing awesome to the peasants. As in literally awesome, inspiring awe. You want to tell them that God and your blood and the entire order of the universe puts you above them and requires them to give you stuff. Well, God's appointed representative would be pretty awesome right?
How do you awe the peasants? They're poor. They, like most people, want to not be poor. So simply having and displaying very nice things they can't have will impress them. Looking clean, well fed, and dressing in fancy clothes. Having a well bred wife and then cheating on her with a hotter woman. Some merchants could do this too (and sumptuary laws other times prevented it) but it wasn't really a problem. There wasn't enough of them to be a serious challenge.
Starting in the 19th century these land rents became an inferior source of wealth to industrial production. This meant that the merchants and middle class became wealthier and wealthier. Suddenly business owners were wealthier than aristocrats. And they had no need to overawe the peasants. The lower classes worked for them because they paid them.
In a literal sense the flow of money for aristocrats is peasant to aristocrat. The peasant works, the aristocrat taxes. But in industrial economies the flow of money is from company owners to workers. Your boss gives you a paycheck every two weeks (or whatever). So your boss doesn't really care if you find them awesome. You'll do what they say because they pay you and can threaten to just stop doing that. This is the case in capitalism and communism. The remaining aristocrats, the politicians and bureaucrats, legitimized themselves through theoretically egalitarian ideologies meant to appeal to these classes. Kings used to play act at being gods. Presidents play act at being professionals.
This meant art and clothes lost their function as ways to create the cultural capital necessary for extraction. They instead became about signaling between elites rather than between elites and non-elites. This caused a weird spiral into more and more esoteric forms of art. If the average person doesn't like the art that doesn't matter. Art would have to be impressively bad for you to see it and say, "Wow, my boss's painting is so terrible I'm going to quit my job!" What matters for art now is whether it can help you get one over on your wealthy friends.
As evidence: look at people whose power still relies on appearing awesome to their supporters. People who make their money by being famous among a broad swathe of common people. Rappers, megachurch pastors, Trump even back when he was a Democrat. That's where you'll find grand architecture that would rival Versailles and the hot concubines and all that. And for much the same reason the aristocrats used to have it. They still rely on the common person finding them awesome in a way the political and business elites don't.
And looking like that takes a lot of effort. Those clothes are often uncomfortable. Those fancy looking houses are often not all that good a place to actually live. (If you ever go on a tour of Versailles you get a first hand look at how damn uncomfortable it was.) Money is finite and can be used to do something more productive than building a huge status symbol. If you don't need to do it, then why not just have something comfortable and easy? If it becomes the norm to do something uncomfortable you might go with the flow. But because it's uncomfortable to the people both producing and consuming the trend it'll be harder for it to catch on.
To quote from a Chesterton essay of 1908:
"There is another way of flattering important people which has become very common, I notice, among writers in the newspapers and elsewhere. It consists in applying to them the phrases "simple," or "quiet," or "modest," without any sort of meaning or relation to the person to whom they are applied. To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not so sure about being quiet. I am rather inclined to think that really modest people make a great deal of noise. It is quite self-evident that really simple people make a great deal of noise. But simplicity and modesty, at least, are very rare and royal human virtues, not to be lightly talked about. Few human beings, and at rare intervals, have really risen into being modest; not one man in ten or in twenty has by long wars become simple, as an actual old soldier does by long wars become simple. These virtues are not things to fling about as mere flattery; many prophets and righteous men have desired to see these things and have not seen them. But in the description of the births, lives, and deaths of very luxurious men they are used incessantly and quite without thought. If a journalist has to describe a great politician or financier (the things are substantially the same) entering a room or walking down a thoroughfare, he always says, "Mr. Midas was quietly dressed in a black frock coat, a white waistcoat, and light grey trousers, with a plain green tie and simple flower in his button-hole." As if any one would expect him to have a crimson frock coat or spangled trousers. As if any one would expect him to have a burning Catherine wheel in his button-hole."
So there was definitely the beginning of the idea that "Yes, Mr. Richman is hugely, extravagantly wealthy, but he doesn't *gloat* about it, he doesn't *show off*, because that would be vulgar bragging and boasting and thinking he is better than you, The Common Man" (but of course Mr. Richman *did* think he was better than the common man).
There was perhaps some current of "you have a ton of money, you can swim in luxuries, but if you dress and behave 'simply' and 'modestly', this is meritorious; you have self-control, discipline, and are virtuous". And to be virtuous in this sense was indeed a higher status signal than mere wealth, and then along comes the difference between good and bad taste and old money and the nouveaux riches and all the rest of it.
I see a key example as Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle in 1886. A century earlier German princelings had often spent exorbitant sums trying to be a miniature Louis XIV (who, lest we forget, left France in debt). It was understood as a way to assert cultural authority and thus national and international political authority.
That's not what happened with Neuschwanstein Castle. The castle was seen as an extravagant waste. The king's obsession over it was seen as madness since it was so obvious the money had better uses. This was really just a visible example of a cultural shift that had happened because one person didn't get the memo and literally tried to live in the past. (The castles were designed to look like they were from previous centuries.) But it shows the shift pretty well.
As does the trend of 19th century royals using military uniforms in official functions really. Something Tolstoy complained about in his more pacifist works.
This reminds me of Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussion of how the old aristocratic honor code came to look uncool as the aristocracy lost power. Under the old code, a gentleman was expected to care hugely what people thought of him -- hence the duels over what now seem like minor insults. But the rising new elites started to see that as a weakness, and believe that really strong men have enough confidence in themselves that insults don't bother them. I hadn't thought of it before, but you could apply the same idea to conspicuous consumption through clothing and houses -- what had been an assertion of power started to look like insecurity. But of course people still care hugely what other people think of them, so the whole thing continues in this sub rosa way.
All of those, simplicity, modesty, etc. are eminently bourgeois status markers, just as self-control, discipline, and frugality are bourgeois virtues.
The aristocrats of old made the Kardashians look like models of elegance and restraint by comparison. And those aristocrats were many things, but they were not marked by self-control, discipline, frugality, or the like.
At least part of this seems to be a mix of adaption and survivorship bias? E.g. a lot of people nowadays complain about "gentrification architecture" and talk about how much they like brownstones, but you can look up old articles about how we brownstones were the new style people thought they were tacky and ugly.
And fr survivorship bias - presumably there's a lot of old stuff, but the stuff that stuck around (and is still famous) is presumably heavily selected to be whatever has timeless appeal.
This doesn't explain everything - e.g. the Chinese clothing seems separate - but the parts it doesn't explain also seem more subjective (maybe if everyone dressed like a Chinese emperor we'd quickly get bored by it?)
Some old stuff was considered ugly when new and has come into style, but lots more old stuff was considered ugly when new and stayed ugly, and has since been demolished. Eg lots of 1970’s architecture with the energy-efficient low ceilings and cheap, crappy construction, or lots of 1940’s-1950’s post-war tract housing.
Imagine that I was a billionaire and I decided to build my mansion to look like Versailles. Maybe my office park would look like the Kremlin. Would people find them beautiful, or "fake" and "tacky".
I vaguely recall a conversation I had while in grad school. The campus had a very particular style, and we were walking past a new building. The person I was walking with commented on how much she hated the new building, since it was trying to look old.
Tacky. Trump's apartments try to look like Versailles and the sophisticated people made fun of them on Twitter.
I want to get rich so that I can donate a new building to the local b-school, but there's a catch.
Namely, *I* get to pick certain aspects of the architecture, sculpture, etc.. For example:
As you approach the magnificent modern campus, imagine a bronze 18-foot tall bronze statute of Beavis And Butthead, decked out in power suits and wielding briefcases, Butthead jawing fatuously into a cellphone while Beavis picks his nose.
Or, as you open the entryway doors, a vast mural depicting Beavis and Butthead working at BurgerWorld....
Want the donation? You gotta dance to my tune.
I always thought of modern architecture as a result of optimizations. They're everywhere. Art included. Don't waste an inch, grain, electron, bit, bandwidth, energy. E.g. build buildings so cooling them during hot days will spend less energy, as well as heating them during cold days.
The glass siding isn’t optimized around heating, it’s actually a lot worse. I think the big benefit is modularity— if you can resize each rented office to the maximum size they’ll use, you can increase usage of your office and your expected return. It’s a bit “seeing like a state” going on there.
Check out From Our House to Bauhaus and The Painted Word for Tom Wolfe's take.
I see Wolfe has been mentioned numerous times in the comments, but I'll just chime in here. I haven't read these works, but nevertheless reading Scott's essay called to mind another piece from Wolfe's oeuvre: "The Invisible Artist" in Wolfe's collection of essays Hooking Up.
Here is version of that essay:
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000102mag-wolfe24.html
On clothes specifically, I wonder if gender norms play some role here too. Women's formal clothing remains relatively more "ornamented" (and varied) than men's clothing.
Remains? Men's clothing used to be extremely ornamented too. It's only recently we've had the norm that men are less ornamented.
I'd argue it has to do with the concept of authenticity vs. "fakeness". An architect that tried to copy those old school buildings would be seen as doing something cheesy - the buyers would be essentially buying a knock-off rather than the "real thing".
But how did it get this way?
Yes, if nobody else makes ornamented buildings and you're the only person doing so after a hundred-year gap then it's weird. But why did we have a hundred-year gap?
Maybe a fashion cycle? People wore suits in public casual settings in 50's and 60's - and we can all agree they looked dapper - but if I wore a suit to go to the local bar, people would think I was dressed up for a costume party or something.
I've thought about this many times and decided that we were going to end up testing whether people really preferred architectural ornamentation in the near future. Most of the time it architectural decoration is essentially a relatively thin veneer that could be applied over any surface. Soon (or maybe even today, not sure) 3D printing will allow anyone to copy, customize, and scale any design, frieze, relief, etc. from any point or place in history and apply it to any surface for a very modest cost. I see very little evidence of this happening so far. A construction worker building a niche into a wall is cheap. Having Michelangelo carve you a statue to put in there is very expensive. Printing a copy of that statue that's virtually indistinguishable is very cheap. It seems like if people really want decoration, they'll be able to get it.
So I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone suggest aliens.
I vaguely remember from one of my reference texts, that when India was conquered by Alexander/Rome they had a little shift in sculpture to the Western blocky-style before they shifted back. I might be getting details a little wrong, but the point holds, that sometimes you can lose traditional art forms if someone else conquers you/has enough influence. This probably also has happened to a degree with western culture permeating other cultures.
So, maybe aliens with very bland tastes have made contact with our leaders, and we haven’t been told yet, but the elites are still picking up their styles
You're probably thinking of Alexander's conquest of the Indus river valley (then considered part of India, now mostly in Pakistan).
a lot of the original modern, tasteless architecture was referred to as “the international style”. The old beautiful architectural styles look distinct to a region. if you were building a tech office in San Francisco and decorated it like a 1300’s Milan cathedral, it would look like you’re deliberately tying yourself to European people, culture, etc. maybe at the expense of everyone else. You’d look similarly oddly partisan if you styled it after historic yemeni, Chinese, etc styles.
Modern architecture is flavorless, neutral ground. It’s boxy styles let you refit it to adjusting purposes — most old historical buildings are pretty inflexible.
Our airports, because they’re allowed to be tied to a particular local place and purpose built without subsequent modifications intended are often very pretty modern architecture — I love DC’s DCA or Honolulu’s airport. The ugly bits are security, etc, stuff that got added on recently where there wasn’t meant to be space in the original design.
You can also make very ornamental international buildings by blending multiple styles.
A good example of this is Sacre Coeur in Paris, with its Renaissance-Byzantine-Indian style.
https://frenchmoments.eu/top-10-facts-about-the-sacre-coeur-paris/
Bozeman's airport looks great, at least from the inside.
Several disconnected thoughts:
On the subject of fashion, the Great Masculine Renunciation is certainly relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation
I'm sure that James C. Scott would attribute this to the aesthetics of High Modernism: straight lines and right angles, even if they make people's lives worse. Many of the founders of modernist architecture, like Le Corbusier, were also heavily involved with large-scale urban planning. I think that the most egregious of Le Corbusier's buildings is the convent Sainte Marie de La Tourette. Although Le Corbusier was an atheist, he knew that the best way to make a sacred and spiritual environment is using rough concrete squares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte_Marie_de_La_Tourette
Trump issued an executive order banning Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles of architecture in new federal buildings, and establishing an official preference for Classicism. This was met with criticism from elites (and warnings about fascism), even though I suspect that it was popular among the public. Biden has since revoked the order.
https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/editorial/an-executive-order-on-federal-architecture-is-serious-business_o
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2020/feb/05/trump-wants-more-neoclassical-buildings-but-dictating-to-architects-has-a-dark-history
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/biden-revokes-trump-classical-architectural-mandate-1947351
While I see similarities in your examples, I think there are three different stories here for 1) clothing and interiors 2) architecture and 3) art.
1) For clothing, the modern Chinese High Status Person is just sending a very different message than the ancient one. He is not claiming he is a demigod and that shows. Also, his clothes are much more comfortable and practical. If you compare a formal female dress of the Ming dynasty and some of the modern haute couture, the latter may turn out to be more extravagant and colourful. With the interiors, Bill's sitting room is also much more comfortable for the inhabitant. Cardiff Castle is beautiful, but it has single glazing windows and chimney heating. And Cardiff is not like LA in the winter.
2) For architecture, the headline theory is more or less correct: we are living in an era of a technological regress. We would not be able to build most of these landmarks even if we tried. I live near a nice Victorian bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammersmith_Bridge built in 1880s for around £80k. The standard Bank of England inflation measure gives inflation on a broad basket of about x110 from there to now, so the construction would have cost be around £9m in today money. Now, the bridge is still standing but needs repairs. It is not clear if the repairs can be done for less then £150m. The last time this city built a bridge over the same river, it was a much smaller pedestrian only bridge which cost £18m and then another £5m to repair just a few years later. The last time they tried to build a proper large bridge, they spent £60m on thinking about it, realised it will cost over a £1bn and abandoned the project.
3) and art may be a different story from clothing and architecture. Signalling novelty is an important feature of high end art. It has to become harder with time as more and more things stop being novel, so, I guess, this puts harder and harder constraints on artists.
Bill Gates lives more comfortably than the super-rich of the Gilded Age, who were always having to dress for dinner in tuxedos and the like. Gates wears polo shirts, but the very finest available.
Bill Gates is famous for wearing cheapish button-down shirts and a sweater over them.
Bill Gates is a high functioning autistic, and I would bet $1000 that he has sensory input issues, that lead him to have very strong opinions as to what fabrics he allows to touch his skin and the weights he allows to hang off his body. (So do I, for roughly the same reason.)
Baumol's Cost Disease and concepts of comparative advantage are critical in here. And you can tell, because actually we _are_ still building, or re-building, a few of these -- there was active renovation on Notre Dame (which went horribly wrong with an accidental fire), and Sagrada Familia is actively under construction. But the cost to employ skilled masons to produce that kind of ornamental stonework has gone up _drastically_ relative to the baseline of what laborers broadly earn. It used to be that if you were a lower class person with the aptitude for engineering, "mason" was probably your best career choice. And you could still choose that! But you also could be any of a dozen other flavors of engineer, and many of those choices would carry considerably less risk of bodily harm, plus many of them have the "bits versus atoms" leverage, such that your work can ultimately produce much more marginal revenue per hour of labor. The fact that the kind of person who might decide to become a mason has that kind of life choice available feeds back into what it costs to hire a mason.
If for a given pile of money, we can either build one beautiful art deco skyscraper, or twenty featureless cubes, then the people who have capital to allocate to buy office space are probably going to buy the featureless cubes.
Honestly, for _any_ question of the form "why is our modern socioeconomic landscape like this?" there is a decent chance that Baumol's Cost Disease is part of the answer. :-D
On architecture I think you have to talk about cars. CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS CARS
Forgetting individual buildings for a moment, the overall built environment feels less friendly because we took away space for greenery and humans and gave it over to dangerous, loud, polluting steel boxes being flung around at inhuman speeds.
I think they're linked - a lot harder to get people to focus on beauty of buildings when they're going to be embedded in parking lots and surrounded by highways. For all of the "bad" buildings you showed, and none of the "good" ones, there's ugly car infrastructure in the picture.
Focusing on cars has the added benefit of being something you can affect a lot better than "architectural elites should suck less." Tell your local government to replace parking spots with outdoor dining and trees! It's way better! But of course people want to complain about architecture elites, not do something that might solve some of the problem but reduce their own personal convenience.
Also this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/mtsw/status/1440914556025376773
Couple other things:
- there are some things that have gone in the opposite direction. The big one that comes to mind is food. Realistically, back in the day, people ate some staples and whatever fruit/vegetables were in season. Today it's much more accessible for the average person to go to a nice restaurant and buy food that's not just more varied, but more aesthetically pleasing in terms of its presentation, than what came before.
- for the clothes I think there's a gendered element. Clothing for women is still colorful, maybe an individual outfit is less colorful as in the past, but I bet women are able to own a lot more clothing today than in the past, where (I imagine) you might have like one really nice outfit.
- if you went back to the 1880s, what would people back then say about the receiving room in Cardiff Castle vs Bill Gates's house? They might not find it plain, but be blown away by it, and find our idea that it's worse today to be totally incomprehensible! Big ol' windows, massive fur carpet, big screen TV, climate control...and again stuff that's way more accessible for the average person.
Bill Gates' receiving room was the only case where I didn't think it looked convincingly less appealing than the older alternative. Yes, the one in Cardiff Castle is more ostentatiously fancy, but I thought Bill Gates' room looked compellingly elegant. When it comes to the styles of the rich and powerful, I do think there's a significant element of it being considered distasteful now to flaunt it to the same degree. Seeing those pictures, I couldn't help thinking "Wow, if a rich person designed a receiving room to look like that now, people would think they were a *huge* asshole."
I think it may be a mistake to assign all these aesthetic trends in different media to the same underlying cause. Trends may run in different directions in different fields or media for different reasons, but if they run in the same direction in multiple fields, we may mistakenly assume it's for the same underlying cause. If the changes in architecture are for the same underlying reason as the changes in men's fashion, why is it that men's formalwear has remained in largely the same style it had back in the Art Deco period? I think it's likely that changes in architecture, in art and fashion, and likely for other media, have taken place for different reasons, and it's likely a mistake to ascribe them all to a single cause or movement just because we find them distasteful in similar ways.
I don't think we're disagreeing on not treating them to one cause. Like I said I think a big part of the architecture thing is cars, fashion has a big gender element, and I didn't say this before but the room comparison is partly because I think you can show your wealth with function, as opposed to look, more easily now because there's simply more functional shit to have. And then there are places where it trends in the opposite direction like food, IMO because more varied food is more widely available (and maybe because people can afford fancy new kitchen appliances).
Consider the side effects of relying on the horse as the main form of transportation. Old cities may have been easier on the eyes, but they were harder in the nose.
Tangentially, there are in fact pop versions of "So We'll Go No More a Roving" by such luminaries as Leonard Cohen (https://vimeo.com/49645021), Joan Baez (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Gl7tKuag8), and Marianne Faithfull (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soAw5BWQBvA). No garage band versions that I'm aware of, but it wouldn't shock me :).
The words are also partially inspired by a folk song, according to Wikipedia.
Isn't it a little bit of a Knoll's Law at play? You can write up the dynamics at play in FDA in your https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible so I would imagine something like that institutionally is at play when there's decision on architecture style of new building.
plus design by committee - compare inherited Google HQ to new Apple one where there was just mostly 'one' customer.
"It’s the natural evolution of ostentation: the display of wealth precisely by concealing it." https://www.thecommononline.org/delusions-of-grandeur/
It’s not a conspiracy, postmodernists are quite open about concepts like beauty being social constructs. So those with power define beauty in ways that advantage themselves (all the reasons that you write). I don’t think people (even the powerful) knew they could do that in the past, and instead were bound to absolute concepts of beauty, and their power to simply make the most beautiful things - things that could not be duplicated by non powerful - contrasts with the current ability to make non beautiful things beautiful - things that cannot even be recognized by the non powerful.
Perhaps both the upper classes and lower classes have done the same thing, abandoning 'universal' esthetics for faux esthetics meant primarily to advertise in-group identity.
This makes me wonder about the dynamics behind Trump's Feb 2020 executive order titled "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" and the resistance to it:
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/13/805256707/just-plain-ugly-proposed-executive-order-takes-aim-at-modern-arc
Biden reversed it in Feb 2021:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/971312635/president-biden-revokes-trumps-controversial-classical-architecture-order
Trump had also appointed Justin Shebow to lead the US Commission of Fine Arts, which has review authority over new construction. Shubow is against the modernist trend in architecture, stating that "our federal architecture has been dismal for decades, and has been designed in modernist styles that do not represent what ordinary Americans actually want."
Apparently, the Biden administration was very concerned with removing these ideas from the CFA. In May 2021, Biden took the unprecedented step of removing Shubow from the committee. This was the first time a commissioner had been removed by the president in the 110 year history of the committee.
This has all got me wondering if artistic sensibilities are also caught up in our widening cultural divide. Trump's own aesthetics seem more at place in an earlier, gilded age. They've long been the subject of derision by the rest of the New York elite.
If we're going to bring in Trump, I'd point out that he (pre-Presidency) is an offender in this regard. Look at what the Grand Hyatt in NYC near Grand Central looked like before Trump bought it, and after - before it was a classic old-school beautiful prewar New York City building. Trump bought it in 1980 and covered it in opaque glass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hyatt_New_York
Not to mention Trump Tower itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower
The Grand Hyatt, btw, is slated to be taken down and replaced with a new skyscraper. IMO not as nice as the original hotel, but better than what's there now: https://newyorkyimby.com/2021/04/new-renderings-for-soms-175-park-avenue-aka-project-commodore-revealed-in-midtown-east.html
Absolutely agree, and I should have clarified that as far as Trump goes personally I was thinking more of the penchant for gold in his interior design. I thought it was interesting in contrast to the example of Bill Gates' interior in the article. Trump flaunts his wealth in a way that is no longer common.
Shubow is really the main advocate for using the classical style for civic buildings. He heads a 501c3 called the National Civic Art Society with a mission to bring this style back in to practice. I suspect Trump was persuaded by his arguments.
After reading a few articles by architects opposed to the executive order, I was surprised at the amount of passion against the style.
I saw an example of a redesign under Trump's order. The offending proposed building was a typical oddly-proportioned, asymmetrical brick-and-glass tower. The "improved" design was identical, just replacing the brick with marble. Very Trump - imitating the superficial aspects of "great" architecture without any effort put into understanding why it worked.
Wow - while I travelled down this rabbit hole, I'd gone looking for examples of projects commenced under the order but struck out. Do you happen to have a link or a rough idea of what the proposed building was?
Unfortunately I don't, and I have little interest in going down this rabbit hole again.
I laughed so hard at the Trevi/Three Dancing Figures comparison. As conspiracy theories go, this one ranks high on the benign/amusing scale.
Some random thoughts:
1. There's a huge difference between well-done modern architecture and crappy modern architecture and there is just umpteen bajillion examples of crappy modern architecture for every good piece. There's a real discontinuity wherein you don't have a lot of just ok or passable examples. It's either crap or good.
2. Classical styles (at least many Western types) have easy(ish)-to-follow rules enabling common practitioners to create passable examples. Thus there is a lot more examples of stuff that is pleasant to see.
3. Speaking as someone who has been involved in designing and developing real estate: the crappy examples of modern architecture are *really cheap to build*.
Architects tend to do what their clients want. For any real estate with equity investors, my expectation would be there are strong financial considerations for design choices. Commercial real estate will want to maximize rent/sqft and residential will want to maximize resale value based on what consumers at that price point prefer.
None of that explains the shift in tastes of the other domains.
In some sense you’re asking what makes art art or what drives aesthetics. That’s a really big question. Is there a smaller, intermediate question you could tackle to get to the bigger one?
One of the largest causes, as stated by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, Monet and other important early modernists themselves was the collision with minimalist Japanese culture/Zen philosophy in the late 1800's. Frank Lloyd Wright and other early modernist architects were heavily indebted to Japanese architecture (see https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-and-japan/). Minimalist poetry descended from the haiku (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Station_of_the_Metro).
Impressionist art was modelled after wood block prints (https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/influence-of-japanese-art-on-western-artists/).
So minimalist modernism in the West may actually owe more to curiosity about Japan following the Meiji Restoration than to internal factors. As the rare person who actually enjoys (some) modernist buildings and art, I think this cultural appropriation was probably a good thing.
The ugliest buildings to me nowadays are probably McMansions. They try to imitate traditional 19th century or earlier building styles, but fail heavily, partially because Baumol's cost disease means less easy access to the heavy manual labor those styles required.
I agree that "McMansions" are usually terrible- but it seems like the most common mistakes they make aren't particularly about the lack of labor, but just raw incompetence. If you browse McMansionHell, you'll see tons of houses with like 6 different window shapes, horrible roof design, inexplicable interior moulding, ugly chandeliers, lights that point in the wrong direction, gigantic boxy garage in front of the house, fake doors in the wrong place, and so on.
Modern menswear arose about 200 years ago, a few generations before the general elite change toward modernist tastes at the beginning of the 20th Century.
The change from wealth and power being in the hands of the aristocrats to wealth and power being in the hands of the bourgeois had consequences. Aristocrats were supposed to show off their wealth visually in how they dressed, while commercial burghers were supposed to dress sedately.
A couple of centuries ago, clotheshorse Beau Brummell introduced to English high society the massively influential dandy look in men's wear: garb in sedate bourgeois colors, especially black, but subtly superb. The Prince Regent took after his friend Brummell, and Brummell's Mr. Darcy look has been influential ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell
N
Some unrelated points:
I've heard Eric Raymond talk about men's clothing getting a lot simpler after the French Revolution.
There's some history of pleasure being mistrusted in art. I think a lot of people these days can't tell the difference between being surprised and being pleased.
I'm always a little surprised that William Blake and Emily Dickenson are considered to be classic poets. But...but.. isn't that doggerel?
I think you've independently hit upon the thesis of 'Rudyard Kipling and Exactly Why Modern Poetry Systematically Sucks': http://sevensecularsermons.org/rudyard-kipling-and-exactly-why-modern-poetry-systematically-sucks/. As the essay puts it,
"Poetry has entered the same failure mode that architecture is also stuck in and that is also at the core of the many problems of the humanities. Participants in these fields aren’t being judged by outsiders (the public), but by other insiders. So they optimize for what other participants like, not for what the public likes.
This is a rational result of their pursuit of economic success, since by far the most likely path to long-term financial stability in these fields is a position in academia, preferably with tenure. These positions are given out based on the assessment of their peers, so that is who they optimize their work to please. This creates a dynamic that explains everything about why poetry, architecture and the humanities are in such a terrible state these days."
It's the same thing as Taleb's argument (https://twitter.com/shaarsh2/status/1324730934147588098) that fields fall to pieces when its insiders only create things for other insiders instead of the public. I personally find it a very plausible argument after seeing an online community (the Mount & Blade subreddit) degenerate into insanity as the users increasingly tailored their memes to each other instead of casual normies like me. Baffling inside jokes layered upon baffling inside jokes - none of it made any sense, because all the sensible jokes ("BANNERLORD WHEN?!" and 'release date') had already been beaten to death and the memes had turned incestous in a desperate attempt to come up with something new and shocking. People joked about rolling around in their own feces just to find some new boundary to transgress, new material to work with, and if the delays had kept coming I wouldn't be surprised if someone had eventually done it. There was simply nothing else to do but repeat the exact same jokes to each other over and over again until someone came up with something new, by any means necessary.
Work that appeals to the public - by contrast - is that same old stuff, just shown to fresh eyes every time. As Orwell put it to explain Kipling's appeal, it's "good bad poetry", and a good bad poem is "a graceful monument to the obvious". It's beautiful because you've only seen it less than a million times every day, because you're not the guys locked into a box in XKCD #915 (https://xkcd.com/915/).
From my own reading the best theory I've seen is that we lost the language of beauty. It's a bit like trying to revive Latin. For any but the most genius artists to make beautiful things, you need centuries to build up a corpus of techniques, habits, useful misunderstandings, etc, so to raise the general level.
This level itself seems to be many things. Firstly technical, we literally don't have enough stone carvers, people don't understand the value of it, and economics compounds things in losing economies of scale.
Secondly cultural, surely you need a period of time for the taste of the audience to be both discovered and formed by art, and this in a coherent cultural context. Globalisation might kill art by removing context, as if you were to paint a painting without a canvas.
Thirdly there's freedom to follow patterns that lead towards beauty, paradoxically because we preach too much freedom. I personally suspect our lapse from making beautiful things has sewed ways of thinking that prevent any but the most extreme free thinkers from reconstituting the foundations for beauty, which is not the same skillset as an artist. I'm personally interested in rediscovering how buildings were ornamented, and managed to read an entire book that said nothing useful at all. A good example of a pattern in ornament that we'd struggle with today is that ornament isn't meant to overwhelm, it's decoration, it should develop and harmonise with building form. Today the artist is told to show their vision, but this harms them if they leave the canvas. Their idea of freedom prevents them from appreciating the nature of their restraints, and the new freedom that creates.
So I'm personally unsurprised that we're struggling to make beauty today, though it's a mystery how we got here in the first place. My best idea is high modernist mass construction undermined the economics of art long enough to break continuity of knowledge between generations, but his isn't a sufficient theory.
Very interesting.
What I recall about European architecture and painting 1400-? (too big a category) is that much of the awesome stuff was financed by aristocrats who kept stables of artists the way wealthy people today have garages full of cars. Then those artists and architects had one job - make their employer look good - which might include glorifying God. So they went after it cooperatively and with immense budget. The combination of skill, time, community and financing. Today you get fashion houses or maybe film studios that do this to an extent and the 1000 animators in the credits.
Another thing, producing those things takes attention span and so does appreciating it. Blank walls are canvas for the projection of the mind. Beauty and creativity - all those gargoyles are different! - call out a response.
Other genres have/had this model - a record label or publisher for example. Where would the Beats have been without Ferlinghetti. Patronage.
This is definitely part of the story, art seems to have survived where modes of patronage have continuity. I would add to patronage also the formation of the city, as the aristocracy of Florence was possible because of Florence herself. You need centres and access to those centres. I'm in Melbourne, and from knowing a few artists who didn't make it, it's hard not to notice they and everyone they know are being dispersed by extreme housing value into a wider and wider ring about the city, less and less able to collaborate. There's a physicality to the problem.
This reminds me of Carol Reynolds' (art historian) comment that composers in 1764 would say, "I composed this piece because there was going to be a ceremony for Duke so-and-so's official installation at the Cathedral and they needed a piece that would work using 12 strings. It was very practical."
It's a funny world! And I wonder if this is really so bad a thing, if you remove the larger context. Having a patron to serve could actually be helpful in giving a direction for talent. Is painting and finding good subjects for painting the same skill?
The language of beauty isn't necessarily lost; instead, it has moved on to other media. For example, consider video games. Yes, the majority of games produced today are crap (because the majority of everything is crap); but for every 50 *FIFA N+1* there's an *Ico*, or a *Zone of the Enders*, or even a *Cultist Simulator*. But the trick is that one cannot appreciate the beauty in these works just by looking at the visuals, or listening to the music, or reading the dialogue; instead, one must appreciate them *as games*, interactively. It's an entirely new medium, and when it fades (which is probably happening as we speak, unfortunately), something else will replace it.
I certainly don't mean to say beauty is all lost, there are still beautiful buildings made occasionally, but I am claiming the systemic roots are largely torn up, and great art in almost all forms today are the product of rare genius. Games are a great lens as there's a claim to be made that game developers have managed to overcome the obstacles I was mentioning, which is encouraging.
Though I'm not much of a gamer these days, I would add that the good and the beautiful are different things. Advances in the art of video games haven't necessarily reconstituted what is missing in other fields, the which we've been calling beauty. We might call great game design "beautiful", as we might call great sportsmanship "beautiful", but this is in a different sense from the sophistication of aesthetic principles we see is lacking in architecture.
As I said, I agree that game design is beautiful in a different way that paintings are beautiful -- but then, so is music, or architecture, or literature. I don't think it's possible for e.g. music to "econstitute what is missing in other fields" such as art; they're just different media.
I don't agree on this point, I think media can be beautiful in the same sense across forms, revival in one is transferable to the other, and it's wholly a matter of context what differentiates them. There are overriding concepts that cover all of them. Yet there's even more to say, as the relative importance of those concepts differs. In this sense, I think there is a particular sense of "beauty" which aims at something general, and it is as true of games as other media, but games are just as much a sport and show of prowess, and so beauty occupies a different place in the heirarchy of qualities than other media.
> I think there is a particular sense of "beauty" which aims at something general
This is, IMO, one of those statements that sounds intuitively true at first, but becomes increasingly more difficult to justify once you start thinking about it in more detail. I don't know how I would define a principle that unifies the beauty in e.g. music with beauty in art; admittedly, I personally am not much of a music fan.
I'll happily own that I'm beginning from phenomenology, it's self evident to me that there's a common thread in beauty across mediums. Robustness of definition is secondary, as this is a matter of hearts rather than heads, so to speak. I think it's beyond our scope to really dig in and find the limits of rationalising beauty, but it could be done.
I'm not a gamer, but I've been surprised at how beautiful some of the landscapes in games are.
Agreed, but admiring a still screenshot of a landscape in a video game is IMO kind of like admiring the brushwork on some specific cherub in a classical painting. There's nothing wrong with that, and it might be worthy of admiration -- but there's a bigger picture into which it is supposed to fit.
There definitely exists good examples of modern architecture; a good place to see a bunch of them is walking down the High Line in NYC. (I recently traveled to Boston and then NYC, and it was really striking how much better NYC is than Boston at building interesting and pretty new buildings - in Boston, if a building is interesting it's because it's old, and the new buildings are boring and unaesthetic, but in NYC even all the new glass skyscrapers are all different shapes from each other and form a very cool-looking skyline in aggregate, and along the High Line in particular there's a bunch of stuff that actually looks quite different from each other.) It's admittedly still less ornate than many medieval cathedrals, but at least to my eye it's great to look at. (For ornateness in modern-day art I'd go to those aesthetic-Tumblr posts showcasing unreasonably detailed art in an unexpected medium. Or to Pixar movies, tbh.)
Right, I think it pays to make a distinction between "modern architecture" as in "boxy mass-produced office building"; and "modern architecture" as in "Disney Concert Hall". They are not the same thing.
One thing to keep in mind is that during the Age of Coal, grand old buildings got really dirty and dingy. This helped inspire a taste for new, clean steel-and-glass buildings that could be kept clean by window washers. But in 1963, DeGaulle's culture minister, novelist Andre Malraux, had the soot blasted off Notre Dame cathedral with high pressure hoses, and over the ensuing decades, appreciation for the great buildings of the past increased.
I might be off the mark a little here, but do we (the West, broadly) even make giant expensive monuments at all anymore? It seems like spending money on anything that doesn't have a financial return has become hopelessly taboo. The person who ordered the construction of the Taj Mahal didn't think gosh, I'll be getting a great return on this investment! If you believe the stories, they weren't even thinking gosh the construction of this monument will really cement and increase my power as a ruler! He wanted to build a beautiful monument to his deceased wife, and he has the power/wealth to do so so he did.
Don't have hobbies - have side hustles! Don't spend - invest! Don't relax - work harder! I see that ethos reflected in the buildings as much as the clothes. Even the art.
I think it is just a matter of "wasteful" things like that being viewed as gauche. Or at least, people are always of being viewed as gauche and wasteful. If you build something expensive nowadays, people will complain about what else that money could have gone to.
Any theory of this change has to account for buildings like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Zayed_Mosque
And this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminarayan_Akshardham_(New_Delhi)
The things that these two buildings have in common are:
- Built by very low-wage South Asian laborers (maybe the economic explanations really do matter?)
- Religious and nationalist goals (thus designed to express/elicit popular not elite sentiments?)
I'm sure there are other examples as well, but these were the first two that came to mind. Both are very very impressive IRL! In particular, the pietra dura work on the Sheikh Zayed mosque is very similar in both style and quality to that of the Taj Mahal.
1) How many people would prefer to live or work in a modern building as opposed to a beautiful old fashioned one? Did those wonderful old buildings have air conditioning, electrical outlets, fire exits, sound proofing or elevators? What was the lighting like? How easy were they to reconfigure? I know old buildings can be retrofitted and updated, but if you want office or living space, go for office or living space and focus on the office or living part.
2) Architectural ornament is much cheaper than it used to be, so it is less important. There was a big boom in statues and curlicues in the late 19th century and into the early 20th, but a lot of it was about new techniques for sculpting forms in stone or metal. All those charming buildings in NYC's Chelsea were the result of the falling cost of cast iron fixings. Sure, adorn your office or apartment building with colonnades and six dozen statues of Audrey Munsen and see if you impress anyone.
3) Personally, I like a lot of modern architecture, particularly the kind that doesn't try to impress me with fancy this and that or, worse, to send a message. I loved the old World Trade Center because it was two god damned big boxes. A moron like me could figure it out. It wasn't trying to scream anything except "OFFICE SPACE". It was like Levittown, the bete noire of social critics, which screamed "HOUSING". People loved Building 20 at MIT because all it screamed was "LAB SPACE", no fancy message. It takes a lot of confidence in one's powers to simply dominate and conquer without a lot of fuss and pageantry. It's the tin pots who have to bang tin pots.
----
I'll recommend Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" for an interesting take. He points out that the last thing you want is a modern building that won an award. An architectural award usually meant all sorts of problems: leaks, bad ventilation, awkward layout, power issues and so on. He says that the people who tend to get it right are the space planners. I had never even heard of space planners when I read the book, but they are the people who understand that buildings are about doing things, and, ideally, being able to learn to do new things. I like buildings that can do things.
In business, there is something called the "edifice complex". A surprising number of companies build new headquarters, usually impressive ones, just prior to collapsing. Some argue that it is cause and effect with executive attention on the new building and not on the business. Look at Boeing's new HQ in Chicago with its gold plated faucets followed by the 787 and 737-MAX disasters. People are still watching Apple with its flying saucer and rightly so.
1) Of course we want air conditioning and so forth. But there's no reason a building with those features has to look boring.
2) Yes, ornament is no longer a show of wealth. All the more reason to have ornament! We could have a utopia where nobody has to live in an ugly building!
3) Do you also enjoy bland food with plain water? It's not trying to be anything but food!
Ornament?
Like this?
https://i.insider.com/580a6a388d83b4a6018b6194?width=1200&format=jpeg
Fun random fact: every year, I take the same country road to look at some wildflowers, in the middle of nowhere. One year, an ugly McMansion popped up on the side of the road, complete with fake balconies and everything. The next year, there was an ultralight helicopter parked in front of it (with a collapsible rotor, natch). I really should've taken a picture (I was too scared of getting the hounds released on me at the time), because the juxtaposition was striking. The helicopter looked like an alien artifact from an enlightened spacefaring culture. It didn't have any unnecessary decorations, just elegant lines that seemed to flow together. The McMansion looked like, well, the total opposite of that.
At least it's trying to look good. Not everything turns out right.
TBH it still manages to look better than 99% of modernist buildings I've come across.
Those are good points. I've just stayed at too many pretty hotels that are horribly uncomfortable, visited with too many friends living in lovely houses that are nearly unlivable and worked in too many cleverly designed offices that are unpleasant and awkward. Maybe I associate message architecture with bad experiences, and it is possible to have an interesting looking building that is also a nice place to be in.
When you say that a house is "nearly unlivable" what do you mean? When I hear "nearly unlivable" I think of the houses I've visited that meet that description: houses where the floorboards have jagged holes in them, dry rot has caused the roof to sag alarmingly, and the windows don't seal so its cold and mildewy. I definitely wouldn't call any of them lovely: sun bleached and derelict would be better words for them. So what do you mean when you say "unlivable?" I can't picture it.
When I used "nearly unlivable" there, I was definitely exaggerating for rhetorical effect. It's not that the house doesn't meet basic standards, but that living in it can be unpleasant and problematic. A friend of mine once rented a lovely architect designed house that had zero closet space. They had to improvise places to hang their clothes, store food and so on. A realtor once showed me a house with a lovely view, but 7' ceilings. I'm 5'10", but the low ceiling was oppressive. Some houses can't be kept warm or cool or ventilated. Some have transparent doors on the bathrooms. Some have no built in lighting. Some have windows that absorb heat but can't be opened.
I agree. Those are first world problems.
I think you already had a partial explanation in your Signaling/Counter Signaling essay. Within culture, there are numerous sways between opposing values.
Imagine that social technology is actually better, so trends and tastes and mores move faster. Imagine there's *lots* of room for subcultures, but they *are* properly ghettoed... until or unless they spread like wildfire through the population.
In opposition to the subcultures, it is now possible to have a very universal standard thing, and it will have to absorb all the sways.
Everything you put in the classical bucket is *very distinct*. Would any of it universalize? No. Not every child likes antipasti, or guo bao rou. But every child, indeed perhaps every honest human, likes McDonalds fries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaxw4zbULMs
The beautiful monuments of the past are non-universal in that each culture produced different ones. But they are universal in their appeal. They attract tourists from all over the world.
I recently read a book by an Englishman who explored the Mayan ruins in the early 19th century. He had certainly never seen a photograph of Mayan art or architecture, and I doubt he had seen drawings of them. But, even though it was alien to him, he very much appreciated the artistry.
Modern architecture, on the other hand, is almost universal in its lack of appeal.
I still think it is primarily about cost.
You've added this to the original essay, but say it doesn't explain why this trend is seen across all media, but I don't think that's right.
What modern production method does NOT favor the absence of non-repeating and detailed decoration? Almost everything has gone from being made by hand to some form of mass production, and once you do that the cost of adding decorations that are not mass produced becomes much much greater compared to the cost of a mass produced item.
Look at the clothes worn by the most powerful man in China. Using the same quality material, of course the one full of ornate and non-repeating decorations costs far more to make than a mono-color suit.
And I think its important to acknowledge that the cost factor is often HUGE. This is not just the matter of paying slightly more. We are talking about a taking an item with a primarily functional purpose, and increasing its cost ten fold. That fundamentally changes the nature of the purchase, from functional to artistic. Such purchases are not fungible. They are fundamentally different.
I'm not rich, but I have pajamas as ornate as the old Chinese clothes in the picture. If it were fashionable, we could easily have entire nations dressed like that. It is most definitely not a matter of the modern world not being able to afford stuff that used to be considered fancy.
I actually have a similarly ornate Chinese blanket from my in-laws. It cost easily 20 times what normal blankets made from nice materials cost here (yet it was manufactured in China).
I think we see different things when we look at the Chinese outfit. I see an outfit that was embroidered by hand. It is clearly possible to make long rolls of cloth with detailed prints and manufacture clothing at a reasonable price. But up close, they would be obviously different things.
It is not super weird to see detailed or ornate prints on relatively simple cloths (t-shirts, curtains, bedsheets). Are there technical limitations in putting ornate prints on the kind of cloth that good men's suits are made of?
(If you want to emulate what is currently popular in the not-Scandinavian-its-akshually-Nordic-and-made-in-Turkey design, you get your curtains here https://www.vallila.fi/collections/verhot and bedsheets here: https://www.finlayson.fi/collections/pussilakanat-pussilakanasetit . Still paint all of your walls in white, though.)
"A weaker version of this might be the difference between a very sugary soda and a fine wine. Most ordinary people would prefer the sugary soda, but the fine wine has some kind of artistic value."
My immediate gut reaction to this was "there's no way that's true" - am I more out of touch than I think? I can't imagine most normal people find the overwhelming sweetness of the sugary soda pleasant, and although a cultivated appreciation for "fine wine" is rare, I think most people enjoy wine in general.
Sugary soda is hugely popular. Wine of any sort is an acquired taste, except maybe for the sweetest varieties.
I love sugary soda, the more overwhelmingly sweet the better, and I hate how any kind of alcohol tastes.
I too have never acquired a taste for alcohol.
I don't drink either for health reasons. I've never drank wine, and quit soda a few years back. With the caveat that I've never tried the wine, I would still sooner go back to drinking soda than ever try wine, though I intend to do neither.
"Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Wine estimated at US$326.6 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$434.6 Billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 4.2% over the analysis period 2020-2027"
"Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for Soft Drinks estimated at US$994.7 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$1.3 Trillion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 4.9% over the analysis period."
Sugary sodas are way more popular, and that's not even adjusting for the big difference in unit price (these numbers would be even more skewed in terms of bottles or liters or something).
inb4 "but diet coke" - Yes, the soft drinks number includes diet drinks. But I can assure you that most diet soda drinkers also like real soda, just choose not to drink it. So in terms of popularity, still a sugary soda win.
I don't like wine. Taste's of bitter and turpentine. Soda on the other hand is sweet to the tongue, though burns a bit going down.
I'm surprised this post makes next to no mention of the old SSC post about a cellular automata model of fashion. Seems like that model [moving very slowly] could explain a lot of the observations here.
Scott does hint at related ideas in this current post but doesn't quite pull out the old model, which I would have liked to see - curious how he thinks it helps or doesn't.
I was about to post that. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
As the fashion for ugly modern art trickles down to the middle class, maybe elites will return to supporting genuinely beautiful art to signal how not-middle-class they are.
So, is it just me or is the Tartaria conspiracy theory… blatantly obviously correct? Like, our modern society has all the trappings of that sort of “twilight of the gods” fiction. We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel), a culture of pessimism and trying to hold on to what we have over producing anything new, a decadent and onanistic upper class, a drugged-into-complacency lower class. Like, there’s nuttiness which I don’t accept, but this seems so abundantly obviously true-in-substance that I feel like it just barely counts as a “conspiracy theory”. Just scratch out the references to "Tartarian Empire" and replace it with "Interwar America" and it seems like a fairly accurate description of history.
But we still build skyscrapers, and NASA plans to send people to the moon again in 2024.
Data on skyscrapers by year of construction is proving difficult to find, so consider that point conceded until good data can be found. If anyone has a handy source on average newly-constructed building height or ratio of skyscrapers (for some reasonable definition thereof) built in the US before WWII versus after, I'd appreciate it.
NASA plans to do a lot of things, but the fact that they're planning on recreating LosTech from the 1960's and that's supposed to be an argument in their favor kinda makes my point for me. If our standards are that low, then something has gone wrong. Just for historical comparison, that's like saying in the 1960's "NASA is planning on launching a heavier-than-air flying machine which can stay aloft for a whole minute!" (The distance between the moon landing and now is roughly the same as that between the moon landing and first flight.)
No, it's not true in substance at all. The elite conspiracy to control our reality is an absolutely key part of conspiracy theories like this one. If you take out the nutty bit about a secret apocalypse, you're left with something entirely different.
And technology is, in most ways, far better than it was fifty years ago. We've just abandoned a few big projects, some of which were honestly kind of pointless to begin with. Modern satellites are infinitely more useful than a moon rocket.
It's true that the modern day has a sort of decadent and decaying vibe, culturally. And that vibe is rooted in some real problems. But lost technology is very thin on the ground and there was never a real golden age.
Okay, I agree that the elite conspiracy is both vital to the Tartaria conspiracy and completely insane.
That said, technology is, in many ways, far worse than it was 50 years ago, as well. It's, in many ways, vastly worse than it was 100 years ago. Not in the sense that we have literal Battletech-style lost technology, but that our civilizational capacity to construct and deploy new technology has regressed. For example, I haven't been able to find exact sources on the production time for the Spanish Flu vaccine, but it seemed to have taken about a year to develop, then was deployed immediately. Contrast that with the COVID vaccines, which were developed in 2 days, and then were stuck in testing hell for a year. Or public access airports, which being closed faster than they open, such that the number of public access airports has fallen over the last 30 years. Or nuclear power plants, of which a grand total of 1 has come online since 1996.
If you just look at new shiny things which have had prototypes shown off at conventions or published about in academic journals, then sure, things look good. If you look at the turnaround time and expense from those first prototypes to actual commercial availability and being put to work making peoples' lives better, then the picture looks a lot worse. If you exclude the (admittedly genuinely impressive) innovations happening in electrons and just focus on innovations in atom-space, then the picture looks downright terrible.
And, again, this isn't coming from a place of my thinking that we have literally lost the knowledge of how to build those things (though I have nuclear engineer friends saying a lot of institutional implicit knowledge about operations-level nuclear engineering is being lost as the engineers trained in the 1970's and 80's die or retire without a new generation to replace them). It's a matter of, to quote Josh Hall, "let[ting] complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering 'It can’t be done' predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering 'It won’t be done' prescriptions today". From a functional standpoint, this is basically identical to a Foundation-style civilizational collapse. The knowledge may still be there, in theory, in books, but the new things aren't. So, for people who want 0-emissions energy too cheap to meter, it's cold comfort that some professor somewhere still understands the design principles of nuclear reactors which will never be built at scale until something major changes to unstick things.
The "there was never a real golden age" is true in the sense that the age which should have been golden was marred by racism, sexism, and other non-technological social ills, which I despise and wouldn't want to bring back under any circumstances. But comparing wikipedia's list "Timeline of United States inventions (1890–1945)" to "Timeline of United States inventions (after 1991)", the latter is clearly shorter (a glance seems to indicate that the latter list is shorter than 2/3 of the former list, to compensate for the shorter time frame of the latter, but I haven't counted and checked). What's more, the things invented since 1991 are less impactful, have had slower "invention announced to first commercial application" turnaround times, and several items on the latter list were scientific advancements, not technological inventions (I didn't carefully check the former list, but I didn't check the latter list either, so take this with a small grain of salt).
Even if, for whatever reason, you don't count the interwar period as a golden age, I don't see how you can deny that, on this one axis, it was vastly better than now.
> We have technology which we still use despite being unable to produce it (nuclear power, skyscrapers, space travel)
wut? Are you claiming that we lost ability to build skyscrapers?
In space travel some pointless vanity project were scaled down, but spaceX (despite all Elon dumb Twitter posts) progress magnificently. The tandem landing was amazing - something considered nearly impossible and not worth trying just years before, and has potential to revolutionize space travel. It already brought cost reductions on massive scale.
And nuclear power was strangled by dumb people, see cases of reactor build, finished and newer used. Or dumb quest of German Greens to increase CO2 production by murdering nuclear power there.
See my comment to Philippe Saner above. In particular, the final paragraph beginning "And, again, this isn't coming from a place of my thinking..."
Why is that any better than the space shuttle? Decades old technology.
One of the more interesting Scott posts since moving to ACX. I'd put it in third place after `Book Review: Arabian nights' and `A modest proposal'
And yes, the cellular automaton theory of fashion, by one Scott Alexander, seems relevant here, as has also been noted elsewhere in these comments.
In Las Vegas, Macao etc. there are multiple casinos that, at least partially, adopt the more classical architecture style.
E.g. -
https://www.cntraveler.com/hotels/united-states/las-vegas/the-venetian
But as far as I can tell people mostly think they are a bit naff. Not 100% sure why.
I’ll take survivorship bias for $1000, Alex.
The other issue I had explained to me involves the Queen Anne style Victorian. A generation before that kind of detail would have been ruinously expensive. But with new technology they were able to mass produce all those wooden details. For a while poorer (but obviously not poor) people used that to build houses that were above their station. And then the rich had to go in the opposite direction and go much simpler.
"Queen Anne style Victorian". Choose one? Still not as bad as "French Tudor".
Queen Anne style as imitated by Victorians, I think it means. Middle-class Victorians imitated the style of the upper class in Queen Anne's time, so upper-class Victorians reacted by going simpler.
It seems to me that we do discover new timeless aesthetic truths. Perspective (lines converging at a point) in visual art, for instance. My own area is fiction, so I can give some examples there. "Free indirect style" -- the thing where the narrator says something but you know it's actually what the protagonist is thinking -- was invented by Jane Austen, Flaubert or Goethe, depending on who you listen to. There wasn't always such a thing as fiction set in the future. Even the novel itself, long form stories in chapters where the audience understands that it's imaginary, was invented at some definite historical moment (separately by Murasaki Shikibu and Cervantes, maybe?) For a 20th century example, I'd suggest deliberate "defamiliarization", like in dada or surrealism. Stream-of-consciousness (in novels, at least) is also a modern invention.
Some of these may seem like mere technical innovations, but once they're out in the world, they don't go away. Once you've seen a painting with well-executed perspective, earlier paintings are always going to look kind of childish. Painting without perspective is now a definite choice, which has a different meaning now than it did before perspective's invention, whether anybody likes it or not.
I don't think it explains all of the phenomena of aesthetic modernism. But it seems quite likely to me that architecture and fashion discovered new timeless aesthetic truths, and now there's no going back to the way things were. That definitely happened to fiction. If you write like George Eliot or Tolstoy now, it means something because you're not writing like David Foster Wallace or Virginia Woolf or Donald Barthelme. (I'm thinking of Zadie Smith, Amor Towles, Kristin Hannah, etc.)
That picture of Google's current headquarters catches it at a bad angle, and you should see the replacement they're building: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/24/thomas-heatherwick-on-designing-googles-new-headquarters.html
Also, why choose Google when you could choose Apple? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Park
If you judge by the sales figures, what people want isn't poems that rhyme. What people want is *Rupi Kaur*.
Unless you count song lyrics as poetry, most people nowadays don't want poetry at all.
Could survival/selection bias be impacting our perception here?
As a statistical matter, the vast majority of classical buildings, clothes, poetry, and visual art are gone and/or forgotten. I have no idea to what degree my perception of "normal" classical buildings aligns with "how buildings were built in this time" vs "the buildings that are most memorable from that time" vs "what happened to survive". Ditto for most artistic fields.
To flip it around: maybe the superhero movies will be the key thing remembered from our era, and some still survive as iconic and eventually be "high" art the same way opera transformed over time. I mean, I hope not... But it doesn't seem implausible.
Try Google Images for "Epic Campus"
"if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling": this is more or less where Tom Wolfe places the blame for modern architecture in From Bauhaus To Our House. Architects realized they could live in artists' compounds, which he describes this an exciting innovation in architecture, which could suddenly be about pure expressions of social and political taste. He claims the star architects of the day we busy theorizing at each other, disconnected from the rest of society, and fell into weird signalling loops.
It's an entertaining and opinionated book, but I think it leaves out the massive need for postwar rebuilding in Europe, which made the spare, "non-bourgeois" international style appealing on a practical level.
One example strikes me as odd: The pyramids. Yes, they're large, but they're nothing more than an orderly stone dump. We could build them right now with much more usable space and, in turn, people from back then would probably be way more impressed to see us building a large cube with straight walls. It's just that this was the best they could do.
Compare that to Bill Gates entrance: The TV alone is technology that people would dream about just a century ago. He does not need to build something large to show off, he can do so extremely understated - which in itself is just another power statement.
Overall, it's possible that the way you need to show off simply moved. Anyone can build a garden full of great statues now, you simply no longer get bragging rights for that.
I'd like to second that: What we now consider hellenic style, e.g. the White House, is only what remained of the original view after centuries. See for example the pictures at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antike_Polychromie
As others have noted, you are to a degree replicating Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House," which postulated a sort of conspiracy whereby modern architects - the kind who design buildings that look like the boxes that other buildings came in, as some wit put it - have bamboozled clients into ordering buildings that the clients hate, that everybody hates, but that they're somehow persuaded are what they ought to have.
There's a book by John Carey, "The Intellectuals and the Masses," postulating that modernist literature, and modernist art in general, was invented around 1900 by elitist intellectuals trying to keep on top of the newly educated masses by creating something those masses still couldn't understand. And Carey was an English professor at Oxford.
Whether these conspiracies are the explanation or not, it's true that all the arts took a turn towards this stark and ugly style in the early to mid 20C. The kindest explanation I've seen is that it was an understandable overreaction to the opulent excesses of the late 19C.
But what interests me is the recent - last 40 years or so - reaction against this. Mid-20C artists who refused to accept the prevailing styles, and who were mocked and ignored by critics at the time, are being rediscovered and feted. (In classical music, the prime example is Jean Sibelius: admired in the 1920s and 30s, between about 1940-70 he was despised and belittled by the critical establishment, but now he's considered one of the greats.) And newer artists, who come out of the modernist movement but rebel against its strictures, and consequently are scorned by it, achieve notable popularity. (In classical music, the minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich; also check out the popular reception of Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" against the slam it's gotten from critics like Jim Sveja.)
Fucking SHOTAKOVICH
I can't fucking believe anyone ever thought he was anything less an all time great.
Why is this written like it's trying to understand some alien civilization or obscure natural phenomenon? Modern artists and architects are nothing if not verbose about their thought processes, and their writings are easy to find. For instance, the essay "Ornament and Crime" by modernist architect Adolf Loos is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime . Robert Hughes' /The Shock of the New/ is a very accessible overview of modern art and the forces that drove it. You can observe directly how modern artists thought, not try to infer some underlying cause (although I guess there is room for both approaches).
This might clear up some mystery. Eg you say: "Partly because art is nice and we should want more beautiful things or at least try to understand where our beautiful things come from."
Modern artists by and large did not view their job as producing beautiful or nice things. They viewed their work as trying to respond to a world that was industrializing and otherwise changing. The world was becoming less beautiful, less organic, and more mechanical, alienating, and horrific, and the art had to change to match.
Maybe this was a bad way to think (it was very much linked to leftist politics) and the world would be better off if the artists had focused on beauty and niceness, but that's not what happened.
But why do difficult times demand difficult art? That didn't use to be the case. Beethoven wrote his sumptuously beautiful Emperor Concerto while Napoleon was besieging Vienna, and Beethoven was spending most of his time in the basement with pillows over his ears, trying to protect the remains of his hearing from the sound of cannon.
It's not that the early 20th century was "difficult", it's that it was undergoing technological. economic, and social change at an unprecedented rate.
The Napoleonic era also had some modernizing changes, but at a much less advanced stage. The Napoleonic wars were bigger but not all that fundamentally different than past wars, WWI was a mechanized hellscape that basically broke an entire generation.
This is very standard stuff; but you can't understand modern art without understanding the social context it was part of.
You should tell that to the polemicists who favor modern art, because they don't believe it's the modernization of WW1 & 2 which causes difficult art, but the terror and slaughter. But terror and slaughter aren't new.
I'd say it's the change in values over time.
In betovens time, a million frenchmen dieing cause of self agrandizment was just the way shit had gone for 1600 years;
then the napoleonic wars and balkan wars and WW1 were so incredibly, mindboglingly awful that people changed their minds, kinda thing?
Why are Google headquarters' buildings non-descript?
One of Parkinson's Laws is "a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done."
I doubt if Apple is about to collapse, but its recent $5 billion headquarters building sure looks like Apple's glory days died with Steve Jobs.
Scott also seems to have happened upon a particularly unflattering angle of the Google HQ. That looks like a closeup of the northwest corner of the main HQ campus, which features a pair of utilitarian short boxy towers presumably designed to squeeze in a bit more office space into the site footprint subject to the constraints of Mountain Views restrictions on building height.
The rest of the main campus is still in a relatively austere style compared to "Tatarian" architecture, but is quite a bit prettier than the picture used in the article. It's more aesthetic on the side facing Amphitheater Parkway where most people would approach it from the outside. It's also quite a bit better looking from the inner courtyard.
One point you didn't address anywhere was usability - did any of these architectural or stylistic changes have *practical* benefits? Like, big glass-walled skyscrapers let in lots of natural light, which is something people like to have. Vaulted, gothic ceilings are nice for churches, but in other settings they're kind of a waste of space and more expensive to heat and cool. Courtly dress made with ten billion layers of fabric is hot as hell and hard to move around in - would *you* want to wear one on formal occasions?
I expect this would affect public buildings the most, because elected officials would have to answer questions about whether it's really worth X million dollars to make the local library look like a Renaissance cathedral.
(Although I've also read that architecture is not actually that big a part of the building's cost - the town of Columbus, Indiana actually has an endowment from some millionaire for the purpose of getting famous architects to design public buildings... although it's modernist architecture, because that's what the millionaire liked. Some people just like that style, I guess.)
Agree with others that the pursuit of novelty is what’s driving a lot of this. When you’re completely immersed in any pursuit what you crave more than anything is the new. And it’s how you show skill. It’s not too different from science — replicating a study to confirm a result is considered less impressive than finding something new, even if the result you’re confirming is more scientifically important. This comment isn’t going to help my case against the people who say this is all about class signaling, but when I spent several months in Europe my attitude towards neoclassical and neogothic churches went from admiration to indifference to resentment. I’m just not going to feel anything towards the 36th of anything I see.
Maybe this helps explain a little why the elite-masses taste disparity seems widest with architecture, at least in the US. Those famous neoclassical / neogothic buildings are pretty rare here and are associated with Europe, so they seem novel and exotic as well as beautiful.
Generally I don’t think the elite-masses taste disparity in art is a social problem though. It’s not as though the “traditional,” more popular stuff is scarce or not around anymore, and people can go seek out what they like. With buildings and public art though, I’m very sympathetic, because 1) these are capital-intensive projects and 2) they are imposed on the local community.
The "beauty is just too easy" argument is very consistent with what modern artists would say e.g. in manifestos. I often think of what Kandinsky proclaimed: "We can't paint anymore the naked asses of Venuses, or the green meat of the gardens".
You could maybe charitably consider the following: the beauty of the ass of a Venus is a solved problem. The beauty of a naked piece of concrete is far from a solved problem. Yet, it might be quite an important problem, as the naked pieces of concrete are not going away, and can't really be hidden.
Should've fact-checked before quoting, actually it's from Boris Groys talking about Malevich, not sure if he's actually quoting or not. Anyway, they all despise this obvious, boring pretty stuff
1) What about photography as a cause? Ornate things don't photograph as well (particularly fashion). The unforgiving lens favors clean lines.
2) Cars? We see things at a higher speed and from farther away. A clean, geometric building looks striking from afar. Ornate details are only appreciated slow and up close.
3) Maintenance? It's really hard to keep ornate stuff clean and in good repair.
4) Clean designs make quality of components and labor a lot more obvious. In Bill Gate's living room, any damage or flaws would be readily apparent. A solid suit leaves nowhere to hide for poor fit, bad tailoring, cheap fabric, or hasty machine stitching. On the other hand, the riotous design of an ornate cathedral can hide a lot of flaws (cracks, lumpy walls, stone carvings or painted figures that look good in a group but individually are kind of amateurish).
Aerodynamic streamlining had a big impact on aesthetic tastes in the 20th Century. The Futurists wrote manifestos about it.
If you were asked, Steve, to speak for ten minutes about any topic of your choosing with no preparation allowed, you'd pick architecture wouldn't you?
I'd pay big money to be in the audience. Yet I still love brutalism, and can't tell you why.
I think he‘d pick golf course architecture in particular.
An interesting and thought-provoking article, as always. But all I can think about is Scott not enjoying fine wine. How is that possible? Obviously it is. But for a cerebral aesthete interested in hedonic experiences… how? Scott, please give it another try. There is as much cultural, social, historical, and various other -als in wine as there are in food or art. And if Scott, or really any of you, are in Seattle I am happy to give a quick tour of the wine world.
He might not have the taste buds for it. Take me, for instance, I can't stand the taste of alcohol. It's just the worst. Super bitter, and not in a good way. I looked into it and turns out some people just have the right (wrong?) genes for tasting phenylthiocarbamide as intensely bitter. Kind of like how there's a gene that determines whether you think cilantro is delicious or tastes of soap.
It kind of seems that of all aesthetic experiences taste may be the most dependent on taste.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1940064/
I might be committing Typical Mind Fallacy (TMF) here, but I don't find this phenomenon mysterious, because I like the modern stuff more than the older stuff.
Look at the high status Chinese dress, 1700s, and the high status Chinese dress 2000s. You win some eccentric lottery, and you get to have one of these two dresses for free. Which do you pick? The 1700s is kind of cool to look at if I were to display it in a museum or something (I don't own a museum), but if I'm picking something I might actually wear some time, I'd pick the 2000s one.
Look at the Milan Cathedral and the Luigi Bocconi University. "Winning" either of these in a lottery would probably be a maintenance nightmare, so let's say instead you got a job at a company that has offices in two buildings, and you get to choose which building you'll have to spend 8 hours a day in, 5 days a week. Which one do you pick? I'd pick the University one.
Look at the Receiving Room in Cardiff's Castle, and the receiving room in Bill Gate's mansion. You won a lottery which involves an interior decorator and architect and whoever else is necessary to give you your dream house, as long as your dream house is one of two options. Which do you pick? I'd pick the one that looks like Bill Gate's mansion.
The only one where my thought experiment fails is with the statues example. I have to admit, if I won a free statue to display in my yard (I don't own a yard, but hypothetically), I'd pick the Trevi Fountain one.
So am I TMFing and I'm the only one who would pick the modern choice most of the time? Or would most people pick the modern one, and therefore it's no longer mysterious why people who are rich enough to actually have the choice, also pick the modern one?
I'll agree about living in the mansion and the statues. Disagree on the clothes and work place. Well, assuming I can actually get into the traditional clothes unassisted. I *really* hate modern suits, to the point that I would never wear them if I had the option, whereas I could at least see myself dressing up in the traditional outfit to see what it's like (I suspect the shoes at least are pretty comfortable). And I'd much rather work in a historic cathedral where I can wander around during my breaks and see some breathtaking sights than in just another college campus. Or at least, the things that would draw me towards the campus have nothing to do with its architecture.
Are jeans and tee-shirt modern? It is simplistic, and not ornate, and clearly better than a business suit.