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.
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”.
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
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.
> 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.
"Rap is so mind-bendingly bad that attempts at mocking rap simply yield… rap." Every time I've heard someone express this sentiment and then rap mockingly, they sound quite bad compared to rap, and the fact that they can't tell the difference makes me question their opinions on music in general...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who wouldn't want to work in a cathedral? I just...why not? It's a freaking cathedral! What's the downside? Where's the upside of the block university?
And who wouldn't want to live in a beautiful castle like Cardiff than in a boring square box like Gate's built? And who would rather wear a boring suit then beautiful courtly dress?
In other words, yeah, from my point of view you're the crazy one. And it seemed like the surveys indicated two thirds of the country is more on my side then yours, so to speak.
In terms of music, there are trends in which I suspect we're becoming more accessible and broadly "nice-sounding", especially as the lines between art music, jazz, film scores, video game music, etc. blur. Caroline Shaw comes to mind, she won the 2013 music Pulitzer but her compositions are relatively accessible. Another factor is rejection of minimalism, where some composers are embracing noise, like in field recordings or sound art, and others are moving back to new romantic compositions.
In addition, the old stuff is just boring now, to compose (not to appreciate). It's a lot easier to go and pretend to be Vivaldi, but it's what composition students do to learn. Pushing the field forward requires trying new things, and sometimes they'll sound great and sometimes they'll sound weird, but the important part is the new.
And for the record, I much prefer Glass to Mozart.
The guy who owns the first one, also owns a much more comfortable room that looks more like the second one, where he sits, relaxes, hangs out with his wife, and talks to his kids about their day. And only his immediate family, closest friends, and most immediate staff have access.
The Filter of Time is also a factor. Good things are valued, and therefore resources are expended in maintaining them. Bad things are not maintained and decay.
There are any number of terrible buildings, artworks, and other artefacts which have been allowed to disappear because no-one thought them worth keeping.
We see this in fields with a long history including art, music, and architecture. Things that are old are almost universally respected as being good.
To throw another datapoint in there: whatever general theory of austerity is developed, it also needs to explain the turn away from contrasting spices in Renaissance Europe. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking . It's notable that in the case of food, it seems obvious that the elites have more or less completely turned average opinion to their way of thinking for a large chunk of the world.
I think the World Wars theory has a lot of merit. When something is strongly governed by taste, the politics associated with taste matter immensely. Both Post-World War I and Post-World War II there was a lot of wonderful experiments with modernism and postmodernism and so on. Some great, some less so, much not of interest to non-specialists. But traditional art and architecture at the same time became associated with a politics was considered quite distasteful, a politics that was considered the cause of these wars.
As someone who likes brutalist (and deconstructionist) architecture quite a lot, and enjoys listening to modern atonal music, I would say *different* (but not *better*) aesthetic truths.
One of the things in my adult life that I would say maps to a religious experience was seeing a concert by the Japanese electronic/noise composer Ryoji Ikeda. You can see some excerpts at https://youtube.com/watch?v=qzvZIV0u7vk . (The experience of being in the front row, with earplugs in, feeling the noise pound on you is a lot more intense than watching someone's mobile phone footage, to be fair.)
I think some people might describe this and other atonal/noise music as ‘sublime’, but that's a little too high falutin' for me. So I'd say that it's enjoyable in a way that running around in a thunderstorm, with the lightning flashing, feeling the air shake as the thunder rolls nearby, fighting as the wind tries to push you around is enjoyable. I think brutalist buildings are enjoyable in a similar way. A way that feels a little more energetic and excited, something more bracing than soothing.
Romantic symphonies can be bracing and antagonistic, too. I'd guess that they're as beloved as they are because they ‘top out’ the ratio of accepting/welcoming to bracing/antagonistic that most people like. I strongly suspect, just from personal experience, that a trained ear has something to do with it. Studying music in an academic context made me like noisy, atonal, difficult music a lot more. Not just high-class stuff, but also decidedly low class stuff like death metal. (Heck, I like Billy Joel and Sweet which are about as low-class and hated by critics as you can get.) The atonality and noise feel more structured. (Then again I also had a wonderful, near rapturous time finding the music in the noises from an MRI machine. Perhaps I'm just good at liking things and/or aesthetics is as much weird artistic pareidolia as it is anything else. I have a low-grade suspicion that people who might rate themselves highly on the knurd-to-always-tripping-a-little axis would also be more likely to enjoy unpopular forms of art.)
There's also probably some societal level of where the ‘ceiling’ of acceptably difficult art is that goes up over time as formerly unpopular techniques become popular, at least if there's any truth to the story of The Rite of Spring's initial reception. A societal version of the ‘trained ear’.
I think the novelty seeking that others have mentioned also plays a strong role. I kind of like the ‘walkie talkie’ building in London not because of any real aesthetic chord but because when I first saw it, I hadn't seen anything like it before. The way it was curved made it look like some building from another world that didn't quite belong in this one bursting out of our reality and inflating itself into a proper building and having not quite finished yet.
(There is also the unfortunate institutional dark side of this where things that are very well known are thought to be 'played out' and met with contempt as mere copies. Hopefully one day this will stop happening.)
Basically, I think the status/signaling arguments are mostly all-wet (all-damp?) with the exception of the dark-side of institutional novelty seeking as mentioned above, and that the people who end up in institutional positions related to the arts have gone through arts education which likely involves both self-selection and acculturation to sincerely liking antagonistic/bracing or unpopular art and wanting to see more of and support it.
Hot peppers, Sichuan peppercorn, and the like might be a decent analogy.
They have a distinct and definite flavor that some people like quite a lot. The more one has eaten them, and the more common they become in society generally, the more intense a fix of that particular flavor someone who desires it might seek out.
Yes, there is some signaling function, people do occasionally feel like they're proving themself if they can eat hotter food than the people around them. But it's only a minor effect.
And there's some correlation between who makes menus and who studied cooking intensely, and people who study cooking intensely are likely more inclined to try out unusual flavors and flavor combinations by temperament and training than average, and so enjoy more unusual things.
Are we just overemphasizing Gothic and Baroque styles? Truly “classical” architecture is not THAT ornate - it mostly relies on simple repeated forms. A Greek temple is just a rectangle with rows of columns. The Colosseum had some ornamentation to be sure - but fundamentally it’s a very practical oval constructed of arches and columns that needed to be that way to hold the thing up Egypt? Lots of fancy paintings and monumental statues, but the “architecture” was mostly simple shapes (the most famous of course being literally just giant triangles clad in smooth white stone). Japanese classic architecture positively values relatively simple shapes and clean interiors.
I think you're overthinking the issue way too much. The answer is mass production, and its corollary, manufacturing flexibility -- neither of which existed back during the Renaissance.
Sure, if you make an elaborate outfit for the Emperor, you might earn a million dollars. But if you manage to re-tool your disposable T-Shirt factory to make each shirt 0.5% cheaper to manufacture, you could earn an extra million *per day*.
Our technology and population density are now at the point where mass production is pretty much the only manufacturing that makes sense. Thus, if you want to be the kind of weirdo who wants to build a new Taj Mahal, or perhaps his own space program, then you need to be a rich weirdo indeed. And the rich weirdoes nowadays tend to go for space programs rather than Taj Mahals (which is not a bad thing at all, IMO).
Also don’t forget Coco Chanel and the sun tan. Prior to the industrial revolution the peasants were brown having toiled in the fields all summer. The rich were pasty white having been inside all year.
With the industrial revolution, the poor disappeared into factories and became as pale as the rich. So one summer Coco Chanel was hanging out in the south of France and said - “To hell with it - I’m not going to hide under a parasol.” And she came back to Paris with a golden glow and the rich said, “Ah yes, the poor toil inside now. We shall frolic outside and display our status with a tan.”
You're essentially asking why art has become mass produced and standardised in an industrial era of economic mass production. As you can imagine, many Marxists have already commented on this at length. I would recommend reading something like Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Production"
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".
Videogames are mass produced too. The workers who make videogames are doing so in a capitalist setting. The games are programmed by office workers, then put onto a CD at a factory, or maybe downloaded using commodities which have been purchased by the consumer. The existence of representational or non-representational videogames should not surprise us any more than the existence of representational and non-representational photography.
And sure, there's some who make small independent games (just as there are still artisans who lovingly handcraft ornate chairs or whatever). The Marxist point is that these craftsmen fade into insignificance compared to capitalist industry.
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.
I don't think you're understanding the point of Benjamin or Berger here. Their point was not that beauty or elegance cannot exist in an industrial economy.
Let's consider the dichotomy via the lens of the world's increasing 'complexity' as time goes on (see Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation for my usage of 'complexity').
Consider the stereotypical 'simpler' past, where one's day to day life could be deeply mundane, banal, and prosaic. Your life, beliefs, and flow of information closely resembles those of your parents and grandparents. Could we imagine that the artist, as well as the patron and consumer of that art, would be motivated to create the ornate, the elegant, the lavish, all in contrast with the banality of drabness of their environment?
The world can now seem very complicated - dynamic, intricate, complex. Truth is fleeting and reality itself is in near-constant flux. I could imagine how the architect, the designer, and the artist could, inversely, be motivated to create art that is simple - and that those titans of industry who influence their creation would appreciate the same.
I think the world has become more sophisticated or cerebral in past 100 years or so. Society has become more accustomed to and expects abstraction in everyday life. This applies primarily to the more educated elites. We appreciate subtly more. Look how much better TV has gotten! Baroque style is too didactic compared to minimalism. Most monks of any tradition prefer simpler architecture because they spend so much time in abstract contemplation and a loud overbearing style of architecture is considered a distraction.
How would you say TV has gotten better? I watched a lot of TV as a kid in the 90s, and I would not rate what I've seen of 2020's TV as any better than the stuff of 20-25 years ago.
If you look at shows from like the 60s,70s and 80s I think you’ll notice a significant jump in sophistication in storyline and subtlety of dialogue beginning in the 90s.
You might have a point going back that far. I've barely watched anything from before the 90s. On the other hand, I would take I Love Lucy or All in the Family over modern reality shows any day.
TV got a LOT better with the end of syndication and then the rise of the DVD (which was basically "streaming via postal mail"). Suddenly one could have developing characterization, plots that actually affect the setting, and long interesting story arcs.
More cerebral (not quite the same thing as smarter, but related) seems right. There's a lot more interest in world-building (including long-form tv series and movie series) than there used to be.
No. Watching long form TV isn’t as cerebral than reading the books. And book reading has dropped off. It’s clear, anyway, that the news, debate shows, movies, newspapers and culture were more cerebral 50 years ago than now.
It's all class warfare. An attempt to exclude and degrade. Tom Wolfe wrote some really perceptive pieces about it. inter alia: "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House".
My basic rule of thumb is that everything the urban elites, do, like, and argue for is valued to the extent that it humiliates, impoverishes, and demoralizes the lower classes.
This is interesting. I was thinking there almost seems to be an element of sadism to it. As if the plebs don't deserve beautiful buildings. But I couldn't pin down the thought any further. I'm going to read those essays, thanks!
Couldn’t we define this discussion as complexity vs simplicity? In olden times your life was simple. You got up, you worked in the mud and then maybe you got to eat, and that’s really about it. You didn’t have much choice in what you did every day and then one day you just died. You needed art in olden times to add complexity. You needed volute columns on your buildings and fancy trills in your fugues. If art is escapism you were escaping your mudworld to an ornate world. Complexity wasn’t aspirational, it was just something you could look at to help you get through your boring ass life.
In now times things are really complex. You wake up and have two hundred emails waiting for you and tps reports and there are 74 different brands of multivitamin, so you gotta worry that the one you bought won’t be as good as all the others and you’ll die from a combo of fomo and choice-overload. You need to escape that complexity and that’s why you might value a rothko over a rembrandt. If you work in the mud you’re lucky and probably have some business where you sell handmade bricks to millionaires in Aspen for 40x the factory brick price. If you make handmade bricks everyday maybe you like rembrandt more than rothko.
Maybe the complexity vs simplicity thing isn’t because tastemakers make it that way, maybe we just flipped that coin in the last 140 years or so because we need a dose of simplicity to get through the daily grind.
Not sure I buy it. The pressures you describe should be applicable even to a low- or mid-level office worker, yet I think those are exactly the people responding at a 2:1 ratio that they don't like modern art. You could perhaps save your theory by positing an inflection point around the CEO level where the complexity becomes too much, but I'm not sure such a point even exists. And I don't think there are many (more than chance) people overwhelmed with the complex demands of modern life who prefer newer art, etc..
I want to put forward a theory for which I have little evidence but had not seen discussed: deliberately forging a new identity. Most of those aesthetics are rooted in one specific culture, often with religious overtones. As organized religion and nationalism declined throughout the 20th Century, culture sought a new identity. The people with the money for new buildings abandoned principles, like ornateness and symmetry, to be something new: somewhat organic but obviously artificial with precision only attainable through the scientific minded e.g. an Apple store.
Since then, it's become subtly associated with wealth, globalism, and multi-culturalism, as both Western and Eastern cultures have adopted this meme, forsaking traditional architecture to forge some idea of a modern world as easily as they abandoned their traditional clothing for blue jeans and t-shirts. Going retro in aesthetics could be like deciding to become deeply religious and going to church: plenty of people do it, but it's shunned in pop culture as being on the "wrong side of history".
I think the signalling taste theory is obviously correct and is supported by a number of different factors (also see every other blog post and tweet Robin Hanson has ever made). Moreover, note that the signalling theory is the only theory which explains why there isn't a socially accepted explanation of the phenomenons mentioned in the piece. Was any other theory (excepting the fun sci-fi conspiracy...and the split theory insofar as the mechanism is just the need to signal status) true and it wasn't already obvious someone would have built an academic career
proving it. Taste questions are relatively easy to test in labs, have little trouble with IRB issues and supplement the massive datasets we have about consumer choices, auction prices not to mention all the historical material assembled by art history departments.
Only the signalling taste theory implies that we can't have common knowledge of the explanation....to advance the correct account is itself to signal you aren't high status while representing an attack on those who are (you would be showing elites to be laughably gullable idiotsand/or engaged in the kind of flaunting we despise).
Importantly, this also explains why high status art isn't merely weird but also often daunting, theory laden or viscerally unappealing to the uninitated. I mean it's notable that the less approachable the work itself is the lower the minimum amount of theory one seems to need for one's appreciation to be deemed classy/good. For instance, just reading Shakespeare for love of the dialog or even the sex jokes draws admiration but if it's watching mass market TV shows you only draw admiration if you can explain how it's ironic in a particular hard to absorb theoretical vocab.
In short, the trick only works if the only people who can claim to have the necessary expertise in that piece of art and associated theoretical framework are those who have convinced themselves it's objectively better. On most of the other theories you would expect to find cases where it turns out that actually certain random pieces of mass market art were exceptional in ways that didn't require theoretical overhead to appreciate. On this theory it makes perfect sense because the only ppl who can claim to have the expertise to evaluate the worth of the art have invested so much into appreciating that art that they won't admit it's nothing special (memetic evo ensures that ithe art is sufficiently unapproachable that anyone who might say it's nothing special won't invest the time to dodge the accusation of ignorance about it)
And this is all stop fact we have evidence that people are quiet good at tricking/plaveboing themselves into believing they like something for its own first-order properties (see various wine substitution experiments) so we should start with a relatively high probability this kind of effect exists in any area where there are similar incentives for signalling wealh/status.
Maybe the builders want use to feel sad? We as the masses might not want to feel sad, but the elites benefit from a sad demoralised populace. Much better to have waves of suicides and depressed people than to have active bright people who want to rebel against a do-nothing leech class of elites. These hideous inhuman ugly modern buildings with some of the fancy ones looking deformed are upsetting and demoralising. That's the exact kind of feeling you want in a fake democracy!
The turn towards a lot of this mind bogglingly terrrrrrible buildings was around the time mass propaganda was invented in the 1930's-1950's when TV, film, and radio met psychology. Rather than you feeling impressed by your government's awesome stuff....if you just feel bad when you go outside, that'll also keep the population under control.
You'll notice outside of the autistic silicon valley rich, many wealthy people still have quite elaborate and ornate homes. Look at shows like 'Cribs' showcasing rapper and celebrity homes....Even if they want to hide some of their wealth on the outside to some degree, that's not the case on the inside of their homes.
One of the benefits of Covid is that I don't have to go outside as much which means I don't have to look at those ugly buildings. The 'brutalist' architecture from the soviets was an inspiration. Drab concrete buildings with flat faces...how could you NOT feel like shit looking at them? I get literally nauseous and upset around these buildings and will always want to go to some Tuscan village or Swiss mountain retreat (I'd imagine, I've never been, but I know what they look like) as an ideal with zero desire to sit in some concrete box apartment surrounded by skyscrapers. Even the rich people go to places like Davos or have their film festival Sundance in a beautiful location with human appropriate buildings.
I'm being a bit specious here and probably feeding more into the Tartarian idea than detracting from it....but as the wise connoisseur of conspiracy theories knows, these are metaphors and are overstated to make a grain of truth much more exciting and meme-like to transmit better.
My impression of the intent of Brutalist architecture wasn't to demoralize the masses, it was to convince them that life is serious and they ought to work hard on what is important.
There are some interesting side details to this. 1) civil engineers *hate* the fancy parts of new architecture frequently. Turns out that if something looks impossible, it’s often at least very hard. 2) building code, building science, even availability of materials and construction crews familiar with particular techniques are often huge constraints on this sort of thing. LEED gold certification is a big deal for any entity capable of affording a classical style massive building, and in many ways it actively insists on not doing the things that make classical buildings last. Watch just about anything by Joe Lstiburek where he discusses wall and window efficiency and issues, and marvel at how poorly we build buildings these days. 3) good luck getting the permits in a typical city to build something like the Art Deco Detroit Train Station — it’s massively too big for its neighborhood these days and all the “in character for the area” crap isn’t going to be easy for the cool old giant buildings. I don’t have great evidence that this is the case, but I have a feeling that selling a small group of “elite” people like a planning board on the exciting new thing is easier than an Art Deco style fancy building. 4) cost to do a lot of the old style things has skyrocketed, so going cheap or justifying new expensive on environmental grounds is the new way of the world.
I would be interested to see if any people in the ratsphere are going to become "patrons of the arts". I'm sure there are some people with artistic talent in the comments here, and they would benefit from matching with wealthy connoisseurs who are willing to pay for the commission. We could create world-famous art that will resonate with people for centuries to come.
In totally unrelated news, I have made a new Instagram page for my lingerie and swimwear photography, check it out: https://www.instagram.com/see_elegance
I mean, I don't think the modern pictures look *uglier*, to me, so much as they look *less detailed*. That seems like the biggest shift wrt architecture, and the explanation that springs to mind is that - basically - the fine details used to be made by the individual whims of a hundred bored masons, and with industrial processes instead of manual labor, there's a whole lot less brainpower and time involved in designing a given volume. I dunno, maybe that's not how it ever worked, but anyway.
This seems a bit different from most artforms, where a high culture vs. pop culture split basically describes things. Modern art was never meant to appeal to the masses, and it doesn't, but that's a matter of choice and there's artists that make representational art where it's profitable. Though with poetry - abandoning meter may have killed poetry as a popular medium, but to some extent there's also the part where poetry was always an oral medium first. With audio recording becoming more common, maybe the switch to song lyrics was always going to happen.
I was surprised growing up to hear the word "common" used as a derogatory term by adults. All the examples you provided were considered uncommon in the eras that are were found. Similarly, photography destroyed photorealistic painting since it made photorealism too common.
More than half of my Facebook friends have gone to Paris and been to the Lourve, or even visited Rome and seen the Vatican. Now those places are considered common to visit, probably because travel is one of the things that has become increasingly relatively cheap over the past forty years.
Art with lots of spectacle is common now because it's easy to produce, like sugar water. But at one point, it was hard to make sugar water, and those were delicacies worth fighting wars over.
Sometimes supposedly tasteful-looking things are too common, and then provenance becomes more important. Look at Oscar runway dresses: it's more important who made them than whether they're objectively pleasing to the eye, or even subjectively classy or tasteful.
One-of-a-kind will always be the most valued thing in society, despite what category of things people select in a survey.
"More than half of my Facebook friends have gone to Paris and been to the Louvre".
I've been to the Louvre. Twice. Meh. The only thing there that moved me at all was the Nike of Samothrace.
Now, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie , every time I have been to Paris I always book an entire day to spend all day in them. They may get "old" to me eventually, but they've not yet.
I personally favor the selection bias hypothesis (meaning that building, art and clothing style images survived because people liked and preserved them whereas all of those buildings/art/clothing styles not in the top 3% of beauty were lost). But another hypothesis is that people grow to like certain styles more over time especially with buildings. The Eiffel Tower was famously panned by critics when it was built and the beautiful Brooklyn brownstones people are fighting to preserve were considered ugly when they were built in the 20's
To be fair, I still don't find the Eiffel Tower beautiful. It's a feat of engineering and it's now so quintessentially Parisian, I would oppose its destruction. But I'd have been asking for it to be torn down after the Expo too.
I feel the same about the Centre Pompidou. Absolutely ugly (though, some like it) and still recent enough it could be torn down without altering Paris self image. So we should do it, presto!
The one exception I have is the Louvres Pyramid. I was against it when the project got announced but I find the result aesthetically pleasing. Not sure why. Maybe glass is better than plastic and metal?
The thing I will say about the Louvres Pyramid is that it brings a lot of natural light into the multistory entrance mezzanine layers under it. And that structure was absolutely necessary for the population load that was being placed on the museum.
The natural light may be the reason. I don't know but I'll admit I like it, despite my prior against mixing modern aesthetics with old, historical buildings
I'm not convinced by any cost disease explanations. Yes, producing ornate beauty via hiring dozens of stonemasons or embroiderers is prohibitively expensive, but as Scott points out, ornate beauty can be mass-produced now (okay, I know nothing of construction or architecture but it can't be actually impossible to decorate a building with e.g. laser cutting)
And look at these. OK, it's painting not architecture, but these are beautiful buildings. It's not prohibitively expensive or even currently unfashionable to create something like this. Why isn't there a lot more of this in our urban environments?
I think a huge part of what has happened is that the ornate has become associated with femininity, and therefore with low status. This is very obvious in the context of fashion, and almost equally obvious in the context of architecture. In music too; pure pop music has been seen as feminine and denigrated for that reason.
I don't know when the association of the ornate with femininity began - it's clearly not a cultural or historical universal, although it seems to have been exported worldwide by now. French Revolution?
I agree on the cost disease aspect: making ornate things is not terribly difficult these days at a large scale. Casting, laser cutting, printing, computer 3d sculpting, all sorts of things work together to make designing and producing more ornate and decorative details easier. Keep all the glass and windows, but put some nice bits around it.
Especially odd about the labor costs is that decorative, artistic and creative occupations are supposed to be what people really want to do. You'd think that would limit the cost disease, as once money in these fields approached others there would be a strong movement of people into these more appealing jobs. I would think it wouldn't be hard to find lots of people who do these sorts of things, filling the demand for more decorative and interesting construction.
It just seems like there are a few different strands of this cost disease theory that are mutually contradictory with other points people bring up to explain modern culture.
I think the blue ones would look kind of arrestingly cool solo, scattered around a neighborhood, not adjacent. But I'll never "get cartoon-y or joke-y graphic art made big, as it seems like a jest should not be monumental in size, nor permanent, as its playful quality is necessarily transient in time, but I admit I haven't really thought this through and I'm sure there are many exceptions, though probably more serendipitous in nature (the rare witty graffiti). I just tend to think the commercial-inspired graphic things don't work as well being sanctioned and imposed by the authorities. These are by no means the worst, but such things have a smug quality, like: we're having a joke. Forever. There's an ugly, or rather pointless, huge red metal sculpture in front of a (beautiful) house museum near where I am currently living, and it seems like a patronizing announcement, as if by a pompous teacher and we're all high schoolers - "Here is art for you to drive past, bet you don't think it's art! But we'll learn you!" When in fact it is just a very crude sort of thing, and everyone now has internalized "Big red metal thing - must be art." And that's really all there is to it.
1) I've been tangentially involved in the process by which a moderate-sized evangelical megachurch went about building itself a new sanctuary twice at two different churches in two different states. As I recall, while there was initially some interest in trying to build some intensely beautiful space to glorify God, in both cases the faction that wanted the least expensive way to accomplish the functional goals (in terms of space and multi-use and etc.) ended up winning the argument (as good stewards we need to spend the extra on missions always ended up being the prevailing view).
2) My understanding is that, as other commenters have shared, there has been a substantial turn in the aesthetic world (so art, music, fashion, architecture) post-WW1 against beauty and beauty-like things (niceness, gentleness, etc.) generally. I think in some ways its more interesting to ask why some fields (cooking or film) escaped that trend.
I'd add that I think establishing as a truth and studying this phenomenon is super important for epistemic hygiene.
It may [1] not matter too much that, for speakers of modern English that we make them read Shakespeare at school. But it is really helpful to recognize the pattern that identifies this sort of status signalling dressed up as factual claims, eg, help us realize continental philosophy is bullshit mixed with amature armchair psych/politics pretending to be an academic discipline).
For instance the following features of a practice should be epistemic red flags.
1) Only those who have invested deeply in the enterprise (eg studied Shakespeare in depth or read a bunch of impenetrable books) are able to really appreciate the 'genius'. There aren't byte sized pieces that can be appreciated with what you learn in a few hours.
2) Hermeneutic readings. Plausibly this is just an instance of 1 but nothing ever bottoms out cleanly ensuring there is no place to start criticism from without investing an amount of time few skeptics would.
3) Subject is sucpiciously hagiographic and has few to no really important contributions credited to people who dont do much else. Higgs postulated his particle, Goodman introduced Grue and Zorn proved his lemma but the casual investigator isn't likely to hear about any other contributions from them. OTOH looking at continental philosophy or lots of signalling sort of art one you tend to either be hero worshipped as a genius or not get mentioned at all to casual investigator.
4) Unusual concern with the original works. What this means may vary (physical objects for art...the original words for novels). Contrast with math and sciences where originals are quickly digested and improved upon so no one reads the Principia to learn calculus or anything else.
Relatedly a reluctance to admit that seminal works/authors could contain really dumb mistakes. When wrong it's for complex or systemic reasons never just that they didn't think of it.
5) Skeptics are derided as luddittes or otherwise suspiciously class or wealth adjacent insults rather than being directly confronted as to why they don't accept specific claims or arguments.
6) Which criticisms or concerns are seen as requiring addressing depends heavily on context (who said it and to what end) and can't be predicted from content of criticism. Imagine cutting up discussion of the subject to remove context (was it an art Prof who asked it or a 13 year old...was it a conservative anti-affirmitive action activist or a dedicated proponent of Asian Americans etc).
7). Unreasonable correlation between who society judges positively and negatively and who is taught/read/viewed. Millikan remains in the textbooks for his oil drop experiment despite his eugenic connections.
Also Implausibly much continuity or too little in what is seen as worthy of teaching/consuming.
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yes a number of these are just general good epistemic hygiene and other flags may be present in some perfectly legitimate subjects but recognizing the features needed to both perform the necessary status signalling and protect it from being dismissed as empty signalling can help.
[1]: Tho if you add up all the millions of person hours suffering through shit and subsequent induced dislike of reading it might.
This sounds like a fantastic excuse to convince you to review McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", where he attributes this kind of societal shift to hemispheric dominance in people's brains shifting over time. It has the singular distinction of evoking violent disagreement from me on every premise but coming to conclusions I agree with. I still don't know how that happened.
> They want poems to rhyme so bad. But we won’t give it to them
That's ok. We already have them. We probably have enough poems that I could read new one every day, never repeat them, never read anything that was written after 1980, live a long happy life, and still die without having read a significant part of them. Unlike many other modern fads, bad poetry is extremely easy to ignore.
What part of this is just filtering? Don’t we just hang on to the best old stuff? Maybe they built lots of ugly stuff in the old days too, but we never see it?
I’ve often wondered if art and architecture were ugly because broadly appealing taste is actually just hard. Not sure how you’d show this, but it does seem to be measurably easier to be edgy then good. This would partially explain that rich people preferring novelty / rarity over tasteful because they likely don’t have enough taste themselves to achieve it, or their peers to have enough to appreciate the effort.
Another example is why doesn’t good software get cloned more effectively? I’d guess that part is funding, part is software engineering skill, and part is taste and all are pretty rare. So if skilled product teams can’t copy well, how many artists are out there making sistine chapel level art? Probably very few. Curious your thoughts!
Steven Pinker devoted a chapter ("The Arts") of The Blank Slate to this question. He comes down pretty strongly in support of the idea that the elites do this stuff *because* people don't like it. (As presented above, "Maybe elites are specifically trying to signal not being commoners, by choosing the opposite of commoners’ aesthetic preferences?")
> Modernism certainly proceeded *as if* human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depictions gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy *Art*, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes.
> Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the naive bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place.
> But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda.
> [......]
> Modernist and postmodernist critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their *own* hunger for status.
> The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts.
> In twentieth-century art, the search for the new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation.
> [O]nly a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new workds of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
> In his 1913 book *Art*, the critic Clive Bell [] argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences.
> Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty".
> In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters."
I mentioned that last anecdote to the art teacher in my high school, and was surprised to get a fairly enthusiastic response to the effect that yes, there is a raging controversy over whether art should be beautiful, and if not, whether beautiful art should even be allowed. She directed me to a recent story, clipped and posted to her bulletin board, about a city which had arranged for a public art project, seen the proposal somehow come in as a larger-than-life statue of Poseidon in the form of a merman holding the reins of four orcas, canceled the project because *that's just not the sort of thing we do*, and run into the absolutely unprecedented problem of massive public support for the public art project they wanted to cancel.
Thanks for the link. That quote from the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art is almost too good to be real: "We've spent a lifetime honing our eyes and developing our knowledge. It's enormously insulting that anyone's opinion is as valued as mine when they haven't spent their lifetime honing their eye and educating themselves." 100% elitism, 0% humility or self-awareness...
Why does any waterfront any need artwork? Don't people visit for the breeze and the view over the water? Why block those?
Why not put the glorious Poseidon in a spacious inland park, for the benefit of the children living nearby? (Placing the god of the sea somewhere inland isn't incongruous if you accept Poseidon's insistence, in the Iliad, that he, Zeus, and Hades share supremacy over land. Only the sky is Zeus's exclusively, Poseidon says.)
I noticed one of the critics was ready to take his art and go home: "Moving in for the kill is Union-Tribune art critic Robert Pincus, who writes: 'If this is the future for art in public places here, then let's have public places without art.'"
I can get behind that sentiment. Austin seemed to think it needed to fund public art every year. Maybe it didn't need to be so frequent? Sometimes we got fun-enough temporary things, like painted pianos outdoors in novel places, for people to play if they like. Or those domes huts made of branches and twigs. Other times we got stuck with the bill for stuff like this, that seemed merely a continuation of the city's habit of having a dozen signs in the space of a few hundred feet for drivers to read when one would do:
I'm in general agreement, but ASoIaF, one of the most popular recent works of fiction, doesn't have an omniscient narrator. Martin is philosophically opposed to it, he thinks there's nothing but points of view. He presumably thinks there's some degree of real world, but it's not as though you can trust people to get a lot of the important details right.
Also, he doesn't offer the simple pleasures of a good guys/bad guys division.
Well, because of this he is widely hailed as a visionary subverter of tired tropes. Or was, before it became all but certain that his magnum opus would remain unfinished, and the adaptation turned from a cultural phenomenon to an embarassing farce. Also, while it may lack conventional "good guys", it has utter monsters by the boatload.
My usual label is the rising marginal cost of originality. If you are the first city planner in the history of the world and very clever, you come up with Cartesian coordinates. If you are the second you don't do Cartesian because that's been done. Perhaps if you are clever you come up with some version of polar coordinates, like the Undercity in WoW.
By the time we get to the six hundredth city planner all the good ideas have been done, all the not bad ideas have been done, so you design Canberra.
And, for any ANU folk here, if you are the three thousandth architect you come up with the Coombs building, such an elegantly bad design that after walking around a bit you no longer know what floor you are on.
Yeah this is a big part of it. I love the TWA terminal at JFK (now a hotel), a swoopy airy building that shows the potential of modern architecture to be inspirational. Why don't they make more buildings like that? Because swoopy and airy was Saarinen's thing and you shouldn't just imitate him, you need to be original!
Not sure I agree there. I'm looking at pictures of the TWA terminal right now and it looks an awful lot like a lot of other airport terminals I've seen. Swoopy and airy are defining characteristics of modern airport terminal architecture.
The TWA looks like a pretty good example of that style, but the style looks like every expensively-constructed airport built recently. And I'm thinking that the reason the TWA looks better than (say) Heathrow Terminal 5 is that the TWA terminal was built on a manageably smaller scale.
While we're on the subject of architecture, anyone seen the waterfall room at Singapore airport? More awe-inspiring than nine out of ten dusty old cathedrals.
I think Steven Pinker had some good insights on that issue in "The Blank Slate". If I remember the argument correctly: modernist architecture/ city planning/ art came into fashion as the conviction spread that there was no such thing as a "human nature" - that, in fact, human tastes and human society were nearly totally malleable, and shaped by their surroundings.
That can take different flavors: the proactive approach is, if you thought that the olden ways were bad and needed to be changed (and after centuries of monarchy, after the excesses of the industrial revolution, and after World War I, there was good reason to believe that), getting rid of the art and architecture of these periods and replacing them with something radically different was a good first step toward molding a new society. This was explicit in communist countries, maybe less so in democratic ones.
The lazy approach is, if people don't have innate preferences, you don't have to worry about making buildings aesthetically pleasing, providing green spaces etc. You can build stuff as cheap and as functional as you can make it, and after a generation no one will miss the pretty old houses and cozy parks. That was probably the thinking behind a lot of post-war planning in Europe - partly out of necessity, because the old stuff was lying in ruins, and rebuilding it close to the original would have been a luxury that would have been hard to justify. The same approach is also present in US housing projects from the 70s onward. And in office buildings around the world, for that matter :-/
Did this reshaping work? Yes and no - we ended up in a place where people still miss the old elaborate styles (because, IMO, they did tap into universal human aesthetic preferences) and pay good money to travel to see the old masterpieces of art and architecture, but where it would still feel weird and anachronistic to just bring them back. It may be time to find a new twist - a new way to please those preferences that doesn't feel 100% rehashed old-school. In architecture, I think new technologies should help a lot - with 3D painters, CNC machines, robots, CAD and AI, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a way to produce eye-pleasing ornaments , murals and building shapes at a reasonable price. But no one is doing it, because the current crop of architects can apparently only think in steel, concrete and glass.
Another reason modern art might be an elite project is because, if the consensus on what is great art is arbitrary elite signalling, then only the elites or near elites can produce the art. A modern Michelangelo producible a David would be ignored.
We can do the intelligent alien, or neutral culture, test already on our public Art. Tourists travel across cultures to see the architecture of Rome - from China and India they travel to see the Trevi fountain, and from Europe and other parts of Asia to see the Taj Mahal or the forbidden city.
I doubt anybody is travelling specifically to see the three dancing figures in San Francisco, although it’s a touristy town.
I want to note that I think the comparison between the royal dress of the Kangxi Emperor and Xi Jinping's nondescript business suit is unfair. Sure, those are the highest-status people in China in each time period. But the Chinese Communist Party's single strongest ideological commitment is that the imperial system was bad. Xi Jinping can't wear imperial robes no matter how much he or anyone else might think it would otherwise be a good idea.
And while there is something to this point:
> This only works if making beautiful things is expensive. For example, the clothing of the Kanxi Emperor (first picture on left) required servants to create the intricate patterns, dyes that had to be harvested from finicky insects and rare plants, etc. Displaying your ornate dyed objects let everyone know you were rich. With the invention of sewing machines, industrial dyes, rhinestones, etc, even poor people could dress like the Kangxi Emperor.
It is overstated. This problem was encountered by pretty much every traditional society, and they almost all implemented the obvious answer of sumptuary laws. Wearing yellow clothing in China could get you in serious trouble. Wearing clothes with dragons on them *would* get you in serious trouble. Feudal Ireland had a careful system in which your social status determined the number of different colors you were permitted to wear simultaneously. Etc. etc. etc.
And while imperial costumes are popular in modern China, and lots of people have them or rent them, they are, predictably, cheap imitations. A true imperial robe would be cheaper now than it was at the time, but it wouldn't exactly be cheap today.
Many aspect of architecture are not visible in a photo- is it accessible, does it have enough toilets, is it impervious to wifi, is it a pleasant temperature, are the materials environmentally concious... (also we so CAN, the Sagrada Familia does exist). Historical clothes-for-the-rich were heavy, uncomfortable, impractical, and impossible to put on without help (for normal people they were generally OK); today even billionaires value being able to dress themselves and drive a car (an expensive one, of course).
Perhaps there is a real problem with perfection in art forms. The most obvious example seems to be painting, where Picasso was a photo-realist level draughtsman, able to do everything with shape and light and shade that the centuries of artists before him had aspired to... so then, in search of something new, he turned in a different direction.
In music there were peaks of perfection in the European tradition, and it seems pointless trying to reproduce them. In jazz, there was a peak of technical innovation in the 1940s-50s with bebop and the jazz that grew out of it, and there would be sharply diminishing returns to trying to play faster and harder than Bird.
In clothing, mechanical cloth technologies take the skill out of ornamentation, so for a clothing artist, there isn't any value in doing that. If the artistry of a piece of clothing lies in its cut, then having sumptuous decoration on the cloth only distracts from the artistry.
I'm not sure if this holds for architecture, though. But I do have another idea about architecture: internationalism. Ornate styles have to be local - you have to pick a specific kind of ornamentation, and that's always going to have some local origin. But plain styles can be international.
In trying to figure out why modern art (architecture, poetry, painting, whatever) is inferior to older forms I think you are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Your basic premise is wrong because instances of modern art that are universally admired (by elites and common folk alike) do exist, they're just not nearly as numerous as the the schlock that mostly covers the modern scene. And my guess, thus it ever was. The only reason that older forms seem superior is that we are only looking at the good stuff from those earlier ages, the dross having long ago been swept away. Making something beautiful is and always has been incredibly hard to do. That's why those who can't nevertheless come up with fancy explanations for why their crap is great. But it never passes the test of time. So really the problem of why the old stuff is good and the new stuff is bad is only a cognitive illusion where folks get fooled by survivor bias. They are not seeing all the terrible stuff from bygone ages because it's all been tossed. Looking back 200 years from now the same illusion will persist because only our best current art will survive.
I think Scott's series of comparisons of "the best" are a good refutation of the theory of survivorship bias in this case. Anyway, I'm not convinced that the best generally survives. Who's supposed to do this sweeping of the dross, and why are they always able to distinguish what's good from previous centuries, yet never able to do it for their own times? Why are they able to do so in art, yet so incompetent at doing so in the related spheres of philosophy and religion?
Besides which, modern art has dominated Western institutions for 100 years now. When does the test of time begin?
Talking about "the best" should probably always be relative to some particular purpose. We might be able to talk about "the best" Byzantine icon, or "the best" Nazi propaganda, but the great disagreements in art are these continual squabbles over what "the purpose" of Art-with-a-capital-A is. That's just wallowing in Plato's vomit: the notion that every word corresponds to one eternal Form, which is the perfect example which every instance of that word should strive to conform to. That's based on a lot of bad metaphysics which we now know is wrong in every way, and a complete and deliberate ignorance of how language works.
When you talk of "making something beautiful", that's one particular view of the purpose of art (as decorative). Tolstoy's book /What is Art?/ is a brutal excoriation of that view as being shallow and eliminating everything worthwhile from art. He claimed that, before the Enlightenment, no one spoke of "beautiful music" or "beautiful deeds"; beauty was strictly visual. I don't know if that's true. The usual term for "beauty" in the Middle Ages was "pulcher", which basically meant either "pretty" or "sexy".
You'd have to twist the notion of "beauty" pretty severely to include things like The Battle of Maldon, the Iliad, the story of Jesus, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", or the songs of Leonard Cohen.
The best conception of art we have so far is Rudyard Kipling's:
Right, there is no problem... Ornate, traditionalism, minimalism, primitivism (From Dawn to Decadence; Barzun), spiritual, ideological are all reflections of the belief systems of the communities of people that build collective accomplishments.
What is funny is how many threads here are chasing a singular solution, instead of entertaining the multiplicity of human civilizations over the last 30,000 years.
The word "Modernism" is click-bait: does it mean 20th century? does it mean the industrial era? or does it mean from the Renaissance to today?
Of course occasionally we wreck good buildings too, but on average, humanity attempts to retain the artifacts that resonate across millenniums, even when we don't fully understand the context of such artifacts.
Modernism is an accepted term in architecture, generally it means post war architecture through to the 80s, although it originated before the war. Post modernism is a reaction to that style. (The future, being more modern than we are might rename these terms but that’s where we are now).
I guess the point is that modernism, as a term, is losing its value and relevance as the decades proliferate behind it. Evidence is the wildly different opinions expressed in this gigantic thread. It might just be minimalism that ornate people strongly dislike, from any era. Ditto in reverse: It might just be ornateness that minimalists find grotesque, from any era. Which speaks to people's and society's particular sensitivities.
I've been exploring the question you're asking for the past several years. I haven't got a well-organized answer yet, nor time today to say much. But this isn't an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill.
- The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized).
- The stone "goddess" idols of Europe circa 6000 BP were more realistic than their artistic descendants, the highly abstract, smooth, angular stone "idols" of the Cyclades, ca. 5000 BP, which were strong influences on modern art.
- Minoan and Mycenaean art (circa 2000 BCE) were both much more naturalistic and sophisticated than the highly abstract Greek art of the Geometric and Archaic periods.
- Ancient Egypt produced extremely skilled naturalistic art, and very stylized, abstract, and seemingly less skillful art at the same time. Check out the art of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who briefly introduced very naturalistic, realistic art, and was erased from history after his death. Note that most Egyptian wall paintings are Cubist.
- The representational art of Western Europe, starting with Constantine, and throughout the Middle Ages (with the exception of the Frankish court and some Byzantine art), up until nearly 1300 AD, seems to have been very deliberately bad, and in many times and places it was banned entirely. This was probably due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art (which fear came straight out of Plato). Note much medieval art was also Cubist.
- 19th century African art, which is what everyone today thinks of as "African art", is nearly all highly abstract and anti-naturalistic (and was also a big influence on modern art). Yet the very few pieces of pre-colonial African art (pre-1500 CE) which we have are more naturalistic and technically sophisticated, including a few (from present-day Nigeria) that were more skillfully made than their European contemporaries. I've even seen a series of statues made in Benin, from IIRC 1400 to 1900 AD, which show the gradual loss of realism and heightening abstraction.
Don't think of this as "progress". We also see change in the opposite direction; e.g., the gradual naturalization of Greek art from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic era. Art around the world has always cycled between the poles of naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism. The former tends to appear in times of wealth, safety, sea trade, and intellectual freedom (e.g., Athens, Venice, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Masters, Elizabethan England); the latter, in times of great crisis. I think this is because abstract art is, seemingly without exception, more spiritual in its motivation.
These two opposing types of art are based on two general opposing philosophies, one which takes the physical world as real versus one which takes the transcendent as real. Many artistic features of each recur consistently. For instance, abstract art is often linear, with clear black borders between solid (unshaded, unmixed) primary colors, cubist in perspective, & uses size and distance to denote spirituo-political rather than physical truths.
The underlying opposition is not so much stylistic, as about the "purpose" of art. "Spiritual" art comes from the point of view that one already possesses absolute Truth, and the purpose of art is only to indoctrinate (as in Plato). Nazi and Stalinist art both used "naturalistic" representational techniques, yet were spiritual in nature: they used art for the same propagandistic purposes as religions do; they always presented images of either the ideal or the demonic; they are generally images of power. Art that is naturalistic "in nature", by contrast, is made by people who are studying nature and trying to understand it, as opposed to people who scorn messy, "imperfect" nature in favor of their beautiful abstract "Truth". Naturalists don't see everything in terms of propaganda, power, and conflict.
The rise of modern art is well-documented. The motivation for its abstraction derived originally from Plato--modern art is supposed to be the artist-as-prophet providing humanity with a more-direct vision of Plato's transcendent forms; the argument for why representational art is bad comes straight from Plato's Meno. (Though many of the early modern artists got their Plato indirectly, through Christianity or Hegel; and Romanticism and the decadents were also major influences.) Those other periods of abstract art I just mentioned which were just then being discovered were also influential, as was medieval art.
But analysis of the rise of modern art has been hindered by the fact that it was an ideological movement which still controls academia and Western art institutions, and it has always been in that movement's interests to revise the past in order to blame its failures on its enemies. For instance, you'll commonly read that modern art began as a response to the horrors of WW1. The truth is quite the opposite: proto-modern artists were demanding a great war from about 1906, and got quite psyched up about WW1 (see eg Ezra Pound's BLAST). They believed Western civilization was systemically corrupt and needed to be utterly destroyed before they could create "true Art". (They used phrases like "a clean sweep" and "a great burning".) Albert Gleizes, one of the founders of Cubism, hoped for the complete destruction of cities and a return to a more pastoral, spiritual, community-oriented medieval lifestyle. The artists now paraded as "modern" to give the illusion that modern art was some sort of peace protest movement--e.g., Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen--weren't modernists at all; just read their poems. Not a single modernist technique among them.
I wish we could upvote responses. This was extremely interesting to me, as I had never paid attention to the historical alternances between "modern"/abstract art and the naturalistic/representative art...
And I feel you're on to something with this being a representation of the grander, spiritual claims of modernists (certainly today) vs. the less philosophically ambitious aims of representative arts.
That said, you rightly point out that the Nazi and Soviet idealism art forms tend to contradict this scheme. They're not representative per se but definitely not abstract either, though their aims (artists as "engineers of the human soul") are as high as it gets.
Thank you-- that makes sense that naturalism and abstraction both come and go.
There are probably (at least?) two flavors of naturalism. One is about the literal world with its irregularities, and the other is an idealized version very like the real world so far as the structure of space is concerned, but with symmetry added and some of the roughness smoothed out.
Very interesting and a more generalized (and more informed) take of my own comment here. On "African" art I would have to say, perhaps too much generalization, Africa has a huge diversity of artistic styles. Also, and a bit more to the theme of my own comment below, even abstracted African art is often representational at root, if rarely as naturalistic as the Benin bronzes. And it tends to have more organic shapes, as opposed to the extremely linear shapes of modernity.
Thanks! Re. 19th-century African art, when I said "abstract and anti-naturalistic" I didn't mean to imply "non-representational". To be more specific (though still very general):
- There's a lot of non-representational 19th-century African art; this is mostly decorative, geometric, linear, and mostly in the mediums worked by women, such as textiles and pottery. When we see it in wood carvings (a male medium), it's usually decorative rather than religious, and an adaptation of designs used in female media.
- Using formal, geometric art for decoration in 19th-century Africa makes a lot of sense.
If you spend your time inside rectilinear houses and office as we do, it's pointless to put up a Piet Mondrian painting in a building that looks like a Piet Mondrian painting. Likewise, if you live outdoors, or in round houses made of still-visible natural materials, decorative realistic art would just look like a shoddy imitation of everything around you. We see this same tendency of decorative art to be abstract and/or geometric in native North American pre-colonial pottery and textiles.
- In Africa, the Americas, and Europe before urbanity--a sweeping generalization, but mostly true, at least by 3000 BC--spiritual or magical art was the domain of men. Also, carving wood was usually the domain of men.
- This spiritual art was usually representational, but abstract. Ladislas Segy wrote a lot about this in /African Sculpture Speaks/, 4th edition (1975), chapters 2 and 9, and especially his ideas about why the similar spiritualistic views of Africans and modern artists converged on similar styles. For instance, on p. 120: "When the question concerns such indefinable matters as what one is, or what a spirit is, the obvious choice of the means for making such a statement is abstract forms, with their indefinable meaning." Segy is guilty of gross over-generalizations about African life, but the generalizations he made of African sculpture were based on his private collection of thousands of wood carvings and bronzes from every part of Africa. No one was more familiar with the variety of styles of 19th-century African wood carvings than he. But, as an idealist himself, he was more interested in similarities than in differences.
- These religious wood carvings are always representational, but nearly always abstract. Abstract in different ways, different styles, but always deliberately distorted, to make it clear that the artist wasn't imitating some living person. They aren't /rectilinear/, but are geometric, comprised of elliptical curves, often having sharp edges rather than organic ones, unnaturally straight sharp lines along noses or cheeks, perfect geometric cones or triangles for breasts, and so on. Segy points out on p. 115 how this resembles Cezanne's principles: he "once wrote to his son that what he wanted was to treat nature in terms of cylinders, spheres, and cones... Cezanne's idea was to decompose the elements of nature into simple forms... A painting was to be a construction with simplified forms taken from nature, not a copy of nature."
- Segy noted the consistent correlation between abstract art and religious fervor (which he admired). p. 11: "The 15th- and 16th-century Portugese crucifixes were made in a rather naturalistic style, indicating a decadence in religious fervor and its expression. This was the type of work given to the Bakongo people to imitate. But the African, being deeply religious, could not tolerate a naturalistic image of a spiritual symbol... so they transformed a decadent style into a highly abstracted on, giving the impression of having been produced by Byzantine or Romanesque artists, who in the 9th or 11th century possessed true religious fervor."
- One exception is that many nail fetish statues were more naturalistic. I don't know why. Servile figures, such as those on headrests or stools, are sometimes more naturalistic. Ancestor statues aren't usually naturalistic, probably because they weren't supposed to represent dead people, but to be new homes for the spirits of those people.
- I didn't mention previously that the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians deliberately made their religious art abstract, and their secular art naturalistic. So for instance the most-naturalistic ancient Egyptian sculptures are of scribes rather than of pharaohs.
- Segy also noted another thing I didn't mention before: the correlation between naturalism and individualism, and abstraction and collectivism. A naturalistic artist studies and depicts individuals, and is especially interested in what makes a subject distinctive. An idealistic, religious artist sees only the similarities as important, and sees differences between people as due to flaws and corruption.
This is becoming a very interesting discussion. While I really appreciate the many examples you cite in abstract/spiritual vs naturalistic/secular , we could draw a slightly different axis here, the one used by Camille Paglia i.e. Apollonian vs Dionysian, say quoted here https://libquotes.com/camille-paglia/quote/lbs0a1o. This would also fit the contrast between enraptured/mystic/bodily/representational religious fervor, and intellectualized/rationalistic/abstract religious fervor. Say, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox vs Protestant, the earlier forms having been made representational to attract "the masses" while the latter having been dis-embodied and intellectualized to fit the elites. Putting things o this axis would resolve the issue I cannot help noticind in Segy's (your quotes) views - that a lot of quite fervent art is representational alright.
The other thing that comes to mind in this context is Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind - where he contrasts totemistic (but traditional) art with modern art. Paraphrasing from memory, totemistic art is _about_ something, the meaning is central and the means accidental (bricolage). In modern art, the means and _technique_ have become central and the meaning has shrunk, sometimes to nothingness.
Finally, coming to modern architecture, and here is my biggest question mark. If you take just about any modernist art, and let's pick the big winner in architecture, Bauhaus: here we have the most abstract and least representational forms of all, and yet they are also the most stubbornly atheist and non-spiritual ones. In my comment here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023941 I'm expressing some ideas about that, I'd be curious about your opinion on it.
Many others have noted that modernist buildings may simply be cheaper, definitely some truth to this, with modern industrial production techniques, flat, straight, glass, steel and concrete structures w/o details are very easy to manufacture, and carves detail or organic shapes are comparatively expensive. In traditional societies where manual labor was used, organic shapes and details are quite easy to make, while flat and straight things were exceedingly hard to pull off. But I don't think that's the complete answer - the "modern" look often has been built at outrageous costs, the Sydney Opera being a famous example but it's quite common in prestige buildings.
This is great. I think we're gonna have to break these into parallel threads. Please tell me if I'm writing too many words.
On abstract, naturalistic, and representational art:
I don't see fervent art being representational as an issue to resolve. Modern artists contrasted abstract art with representational art; but in the longer view, I contrast abstract, idealized, or highly stylized (iconic) art with naturalistic art. The most-common type of religious art around the world has probably been abstract representational art. The conflict isn't between whether or not to depict things and beings, but whether to focus on the ideal (or typical) vs. the individual, the transcendental vs. the earthly.
Religion is usually functional--it's a way of placating the gods, seeking the assistance of ancestors, divining the future, or securing eternal life. So nobody minds if their statues look like all the other statues--in fact, that's usually required! Abstract, religious art is usually required to look just like all the previous instances of it. A Byzantine icon of Mary and Jesus from 1700 AD is difficult to distinguish from one from 800 AD; Egyptian politico-religious art changed little from 3000 to 1000 BCE; and Franz Boas emphasized on pages 83, 150, and 167 of his book /Primitive Art/ (about native North American art) that departure from traditional styles was extremely rare and heavily criticized.
I think the desire for novelty is Western. I travelled in the north, center, and south of China in the years around 2000, and everywhere I went I found wooden statuettes of the same half-dozen or so animals, which were made in the hundreds of thousands at least, and carefully carved by hand to all be indistinguishable from each other all across China.
This craving for novelty may have arisen from the Romantic (esp. Wagnerian / Nietzschian / Hitlerian) tradition of taking Art-with-a-capital-A as their religion, and the artist as not merely a priest (who could only mediate with a God who was no longer there), but a prophet (who could "see" and interpret the impersonal, silent God of Plato or Hegel). This brings us to your observation that "in modern art, the means and _technique_ have become central and the meaning has shrunk, sometimes to nothingness."
The modernists all cried "Make it new!"; but some, like Wagner, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, & Joyce, took it to mean not making something new (which Platonists believe is impossible), but to re-make the old anew, by re-translating Japanese poetry into English sensibilities, re-telling the story of Odysseus or Germanic sagas, or filling The Waste Land with obscure references to Wagner's references to those Germanic sagas. This was eventually codified by Barthes in "The Death of the Author" (1969), which says not (as most people claim it does) that the author's intentions don't matter (a claim no artist or critic has ever made, but which was falsely attributed to the New Critics to drive them from power), but that nothing new can be created ("authored") nor discovered. This meant that content, which could never be new, didn't matter; style was all.
Others, like Arnold Schoenberg in music, and most visual artists, re-read Plato's argument in the Meno that language and representation can't communicate anything that the recipient doesn't already know, and concluded that they could communicate new truths if they used non-linguistic, non-representational art. (A corollary is that, if you can verbally explain even non-representational art, it isn't Art.) They took their task as being to discover, via something like divine inspiration, never-before-seen Platonic forms, and to reveal them to the public using their art. (This was when the term "plastic arts" came into vogue, and was in practice used mainly to distinguish the visual arts as more holy because they could make contact with reality without the mediation of words or notes, as all words and notes are already known.)
So unlike Renaissance or Byzantine painters, or modernist authors, they weren't content to keep drawing the same scenes over and over, even in new ways. They ditched representation not because of their idealism, but because Plato had "proven" it was inadequate to their new job of being not mere priests, but prophets.
I could try mapping Catholics to Dionysius and Protestants to Apollo, owing to the more severe and iconoclastic nature of the Protestants. (Also, cathedrals, mass, incense, etc.) But this isn't consistent. For instance, the Catholic church kept music spare and Spartan as long as it could, enforcing Gregorian chant for perhaps an entire millennium, and opposing the use of melody, rhythm, harmony, and instruments other than the organ. Even today, Protestant hymnals give four vocal parts, while Catholic hymnals give just one--only the choir is trusted with the harmony.
Also, the Orthodox church was even more iconoclastic and abstract, and differed in theology from the Catholic only by a hair's breadth. Islam is also iconoclastic, but I don't see it as either Dionysian or Apollonian.
Also, the Catholic church was mostly anti-naturalistic until the Italian Renaissance. Their art looked representational, but not at all natural. Most artists made no attempt to draw things realistically or skillfully; "my kid could draw that" applies as well to most medieval Catholic representational art as to modern art. (And it wasn't really representational; it was symbolic or allegorical. Catholic art wasn't supposed to be so beautiful or artful that anyone would admire the artwork itself; it was supposed to be like a finger pointing at something else.)
(One example is Catholic maps pre-1300, which, unlike their contemporary Islamic maps, made no attempt to be geographically accurate based on mere observation, but instead tried to infer the True shape of the earth by fitting empirical observations into some sort of regular Platonic geometry, most notably in the standard map of the Earth showing three continents having three-way symmetry with Jerusalem at the center.)
All that great naturalistic Catholic art began in southern Italy in 1300 with Giotto, in a time and place where the Catholic Church didn't have much control (it was much more powerful in France than among the independent city-states of present-day southern Italy); and also around the time when the papacy began spinning out of control, becoming completely corrupt and un-Christian by anyone's definition, being bought and sold, sometimes occupied by literal pirates and murderers, and eventually splintered into multiple competing papacies in 1378. So rigorous Catholic theology had less influence on art in that period.
And both Catholicism and Protestantism are very rational. Catholicism is based on Plato's philosophy, and the medieval scholastics were arguably the height of rationalism in Western civ. But Reformation Protestants wanted to be even more logically rigorous, starting with choosing one single foundation for their faith (the canonical scriptures) rather than the haze of Catholic tradition. (This sort-of made sense: the Catholics originally took the Church traditions as foundational, partly for the great power it gave them, but also because they had lots of competing and contradictory scriptures to choose from. Then they burned all those other scriptures, and by the time of the Reformation people had forgotten them, giving the illusion that the canonical scriptures had simply been passed down from the beginning without being selected by the Church.) Protestants were also more rational (I'm using the word in its philosophical sense) in eliminating the practice of taking verses of scripture in context. They believe instead that, since truth must be absolute, you can quote a single verse in isolation from its time, place, and textual context, and take it as dogma.
So I see Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy as all being dogmatically rational and Apollonian. I think that, except in cases like ancient Greece which self-consciously worship Apollo and Dionysius (e.g., with tragedy for Apollo and comedy for Dionysius), usually Apollonians rule and Dionysians are marginalized, because Apollonians are so much better at organizing and maintaining unity. All political parties are more Apollonian than Dionysian, except maybe the Green Party and the Swedish Pirate Party.
Maybe we could call Nazism Dionysian, due to its blood-thirstiness and glorification of violence? But its festivals were rigidly ordered, in large squares, with men in uniforms and marching in squares. Its organization was Dionysian in that it had no clear or stable hierarchy, but Apollonian in that it was nonetheless authoritarian.
And I could write similar things about Soviet or Maoist communism, yet communism doesn't project a Dionysian image. Maybe all this distinction comes down to in this case is that the Nazis and the communists both murdered tens of millions, but at least the Nazis had fun doing it. I don't think this is a helpful way to look at Nazism or communism.
Nazism, definitely Dionysian but with the tools of a modern society. They plundered pretty much all of historical semiotics they could find. And that sets them apart from hyper-rationalistic (secular-religion kind) communism. Best book in this respect, eye opener wise, "Le matin des magiciens" which I read, ugh, in the 80s... Unlike what Wikipedia says here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_of_the_Magicians I didn't take it as a prescriptive manual for life but as an intuition pump on what was going on, say, in the minds of the Nazis. And reading it made me think first time ever of the mystic and irrational cultish roots of the Nazi mindset. Superficially we were all taught they they emerged from the German hyperinflation, then 29 and the Great Depression, as people who promised they could fix the economy fast. That was one aspect for sure but no one points out that the deep attachment people had for them, the fervor people invested and wished to die for, was on a much deeper emotional level, they were masters of manipulation the assignment of mystical meaning to people's lives. In my humble opinion. Which distinguishes them from your average populist, statist, or socialist, nevermind their name as a national socialist party.
The Nazis and Soviet Communists were both artistically traditionalists, a fact many "modern" traditionalists are happy to overlook.
Paglia strongly differentiates between Dionysian (wild) from "Daemonism" (earth) and demonism (evil). It is the earth (daemonism) she contrasts with Apollonian.
[it is our spell checkers that continuously write demonism.]
Sexual Personae:
"The daemonism of chthonian nature is the West's dirty secret. Modern humanists [circa the 500-year Western enlightenment] made the "tragic sense of life" the touchstone of mature understanding. They defined man's mortality and the transience of time as literature's supreme subjects. In this I again see evasion and even sentimentality. The tragic sense of life is a partial response to experience. It is a reflex of the West's resistance to and misapprehension of nature, compounded by the error of liberalism...
The Western will, setting itself up against nature, dramatized its own inevitable fall as a human universal, which it is not."
Now, we can revisit the fascinating cycles between naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism:
naturalistic | abstract
|
____________|______________
|
realism | spiritualism
If we think civilizations cycle between phases, we break two ideas into four and see more flexibility than a pendulum swinging between opposites.
And then–
We find the left side, naturalistic realism, is an approach used by urban societies of "wealth & safety."
The right side, abstract spiritualism, is an approach used by urban societies experiencing "crisis" & wild change.
Urban societies build collective accomplishments, i.e. the style of architecture and urban plans correspond to a particular fitness landscape.
The diagram also reveals the diagonal approach of the Nazis and Soviet Communists: Naturalistic Spiritualism (maybe like EA per Scott). Their fitness landscape was the trauma of rapid global industrialization, which created large cities and disease (1918 pandemic), and the appearance of a failing American Democracy, evidenced in the Civil War & the USs 1930s depression.
Also–
Looking at the upper half, we see non-urban, escapist/dispersion experiences such as hippies and cults and their individualistic (at least very smallish) retreats.
Then,
In the lower half, we find non-urban, escapist experiences such as monks, rabbis, and Buddhist's solitude.
Dispersion tendencies led people to into naturalistic realities (think 2012s ZADists in France)... i.e. create small community encampments of a style corresponding to a particular geographic landscape, often with an idea of sustainability, either physically (hippies) or mentally/intellectually (kibbutz).
Wrapping up:
Civilizations tend to come together in urban lifestyles and disperse into countryside lifestyles, depending upon the totality of the environment within which people are operating.
What is notable is that architecture, especially capital 'A' Architecture, is built by collectives of people. This collective itself enables the production of both a lifestyle and the expression of that collective lifestyle in the forms of cities and buildings that are built: ornamental, minimal, awe-inspiring, or power-demonstrating.
The phrase "modern vs. traditional" is clickbait.
And, I clicked, finding some good ideas in the extensive dialogue!
Lots of good points here though maybe not always conclusive w.r.t. the subject. Camille Paglia definitely maps Orthodox traditions to Dionysian, and interestingly so does, of all people, Alan Watts - I think at some point he writes about how organic orthodox mass feels, with liturgy read in a language no one understands, incense and bread and wine and everyone getting gloriously drunk in the process. For the rest, thanks for pointing out the rationalism within Catholicism, contra the Whig interpretation of history - we could have added anything from the misuderstood angels on a pin's head to the Jesuits and the genesis of capitalism. That said. It's more about the contrat between contemporary movements - and there Protestantism does seem to be the more Apollonian, Catholicism somewhat more Dionysian, and Orthodox churches the most Dionysian.
I have a hard time calling the Orthodox Dionysian, because to me Dionysian implies liberty and chaos, and the Orthodox hated both those things.
I'd say Pentecostals and charismatics are the most Dionysian, followed by the black Baptists, then the southern Baptists. Odd, bcoz the latter two descend from the Puritans, and are taxonomically very close on the tree to the Unitarian Universalists, who are extreme Apollonian.
I get more mileage out of the rationalist/empiricist epistemology dichotomy than from the Apollonian/Dionysian culture dichotomy, but it handles some important cases badly, like pagan religion, ancient Rome, Romanticism, Nazism, Social Justice. I think I've come to the limits of what I can do with a single dichotomy. I think we need a multi-dimensional model, or a multi-variate model, or more than 2 categories.
Reading what I just wrote, all of the badly-handled cases have elements of ancient paganism. Hmm.
Like, where does Apollonian/Dionysian divide things up differently than rational/empirical? Rational is too similar to Apollonian to treat A/D as an additional dimension; but empirical isn't at all similar to Dionysian. Can we just take the three categories Rational-Appolonian, Empirical, Dionysian? Is Dionysian an epistemology? I think phenomenology might correspond to Dionysian. The Nazis used phenomenology to justify Dionysian behavior, anyway, I think. They used Heidegger, "lived experience", and "authenticity" to denigrate reason and justify violence. The Social Justice movement does the same thing today.
Dionysian is more similar to fideism, I think; which is similar in effect to rationalism. I've tried thinking of the Nazis as fideists, which I interpret as meaning they start with a foundational set of unquestioned assumptions like rationalists do, but they don't seek the logical closure of those assumptions. Dionysian is also similar to mystic, I think.
There should be a variable that distinguishes between Left and Right Hegelianism. Same as "left/right", I suppose, but I've never been quite clear on what that supposedly-important distinction is.
What I wanted to do with my metaphysics survey was to split out all the dichotomies correlated with rational/empirical epistemology, like collective/individual, abstract/naturalistic, certain/uncertain, integer/continuum math, virtue/consequence ethics, magic/marvel, soul/mechanism, realism/nominalism, universal/particular, eternal/temporal, transcendent/material, and find which might be useful additional dimensions. But I think the data was too noisy to do that with just 50 questions.
Dualist / monist is a necessary sub-division of rational.
Pitirim Sorokin used the set of epistemologies {empirical, rational, mystical, critical, skeptical, fideist}. I'm not clear on what fideist or critical means, and I think a skeptic is just (A) an empiricist, whom rationalists mis-characterize as "believing that one can know nothing" because they demand that "knowing" requires absolute certainty, or (B) a rationalist who's disappointed that the world fails to meet his philosophical demands on it, but refuses to admit any alternatives exist. (B) sounds like post-modernism, but the skeptics didn't run around smashing everything to the ground.
In epistemology, I lean towards using the categories {empirical, rational, pragmatic, phenomenological}. In aesthetics and ethics, {formal, idealized, naturalist}, where "idealized" goes with "rational" and "natural" with "empirical". "Formal" is an older aesthetic category, analogous to taboo and rule-based ethics, mostly involving repetition and a kind of visual grammar, manifesting in music as dancing to drums (there are African languages that don't distinguish between "sing" and "dance"), and manifesting in poetry as rhymes, consonance, and compulsive repetition. Sorokin used the categories {ideational (idealist), idealist (mixed ideal/natural), visual or "decadent" (naturalist)}.
BTW, Sorokin was a fanatical Russian Orthodox heretic--IIRC he believed only his particular church congregation, which split off from a group that split off from the Russian Orthodox, were true Christians. But far from being Dionysian, he was all about categorizing everything in human culture and stuffing it all into neat little boxes, and in reimposing strict medievalish Christianity.
Even with all these divisions, I can't handle Eastern philosophies. I think the issue here is that the West tries to build systematic, logically-consistent philosophies. These can be powerful when applied to the problems that the system designers were thinking of, but lead to believing insane things at the fringes. Whereas Eastern philosophers (since the "School of Words", which was China's postmodernist period, which they ended about 2000 years ago by saying "quit it, you're just being silly") rely more on common sense, approach each case individually, and say far fewer batshit-insane things; but are difficult to understand because you can't "understand" them in the Western sense of collating everything into a few logical principles.
BTW, tangential but maybe important: I mentioned in my first reply to this that the Chinese "School of Words" (not an actual school) was Chinese post-modernism, and that (East) Asian philosophy is less systematic and logically consistent than Western. The latter could be a consequence of the former. Due to their lack of insight into grammar (and some peculiar ambiguities of Chinese grammar), they were never able to resolve the deconstructionist logical contradictions pointed out by the School of Words, and dealt with it by not taking logical consistency so seriously.
Architecture and design do often seem to be on a different track. Medieval stonemasons gave us great cathedrals in the 12th century, at the same time that medieval painters were giving us frescoes that looked as if they'd been drawn by children. And, heck, I /like/ Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and Wassily chairs. The Bauhaus stuff was great until Apple got hold of it but forgot it was "form follows function" and not the other way around.
I think the difference is that architecture and design, and especially that of the Bauhaus, was grounded by the function and the cost of the product. They didn't aim to make things beautiful; they aimed to make them do a good job simply and cheaply, and that, somehow, magically, is beautiful.
Minimalist functional things are beautiful. I don't know why. Drill bits are beautiful. So are hex nuts, airplanes, spoons and forks. Many years ago I was at Michigan State University and came across a piece of modernist sculpture in the center of a room. It fascinated me. I had to that point always hated modern art, but I couldn't stop looking at this wooden sculpture, full of weird spirals and ellipses interlocking in indecipherable yet seemingly purposeful ways.
So I asked around to find out who had made it, and discovered it "wasn't art" at all. It was a wooden mock-up of a cyclotron that the Physics department had built years ago, to give the machinists to make sure the parts were all sized correctly. Those spirals and ellipses /were/ purposeful, and somehow that made it beautiful.
As to Bauhaus being atheist, I don't know enough about the people involved to know what that means. Leninists insisted they were atheists, but they were still religious fanatics. I know Wassily Kandinsky was on staff at the Bauhaus, and he was a bona-fide mad Russian Orthodox fanatic. His books "Point and Line to Plane" and "On the Spiritual in Art" are more Platonist than Christian. Paul Klee was on staff there for 10 years, and he opened his 1920 “Creative Confession” with the very Platonist claim that “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.” "Formerly we used to represent things which were visible on earth... Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things." "In the highest circle an ultimate mystery lurks behind the mystery, and the wretched light of the intellect is of no avail." He also speaks of purity, deep insight, "ultimate things", "sloughing off your earthly skin", morality, and other Platonist themes; although his is a kind of anti-rational Romantic Platonism. It sounds very spiritual to me.
"until Apple got hold of it but forgot it was 'form follows function' and not the other way around" two thumbs up, way up... though Apple didn't directly copycat Bauhaus, they wholesale plundered the Braun company's designs ca. 1950-1980, look at this and weep: https://www.flickr.com/photos/34019036@N05/4934602704 . That was 1956.
Agree on the origins of Bauhaus. It wasn't "Form follows funtion" either, as proclaimed, it was "Form follows production process".
I enthusiastically agree on the beauty of simple objects. For years I had a Facom brand #24 spanner wrench framed in my living room. It was so beautiful.
Interesting info on key Bauhaus artists, I did not know this. Just not sure if these examples are representative of the movement overall.
The Reber..Winkielman article looks interesting. But I think it's wrong in the opposite direction from those art theorists who talk loosely (non-mathematically) of "complexity" as being good, where by "complexity" they actually mean "unpredictability" (randomness). That leads to randomness and noise being praised as objectively good. R..W instead seem to say that simplicity is good. That leads to that guy whose name I can't remember who makes nothing but giant wall paintings of 3 horizontal colored stripes. Ultimately it leads to the black square, which is why we now have 4 generations of "black square" artists (Malevich being only the second of them), and now there's some guy who's made $100 million selling white squares.
In practice, people give high aesthetic evaluations to things that aren't too simple and aren't too complicated, not too repetitive and not too random, but just patterned enough that they can continue studying the thing for a long time before they stop improving the predictive power of their model.
I would rather say beauty is high <computational power or bits of information needed to predict or describe the thing given model M> / <computational power or bits of info needed to construct M>. That could be similar to fluency times complicatedness (a word I'm making up to avoid using "complexity" in 2 different ways).
So, functional objects would score high because they come with a big part of the model for free if you already know what they're supposed to do. But then they should appear more beautiful if we already know what their function is, and I don't think that's correct.
There I theorized that dynamic systems are beautiful when their parameters lie in the part of parameter phase space between stasis and randomness (ice and fire, order and chaos), in which a dynamic system has chaotic behavior. "Rules for the game of Life which can produce replicators and large-scale patterns" is an example of such a subspace. This wasn't my idea, but Wolfram's idea (or at least he said it was; sorry, claims by Wolfram requires that proviso).
R..W's statement, "we follow this philosophical tradition and define beauty as a pleasurable subjective experience that is directed toward an object and not mediated by intervening reasoning", is reasonable, but also problematic for me, because I think aesthetic and moral judgement are unified at some level--use the same algorithms on different data--and that would imply moral judgement isn't mediated by intervening reasoning, which might be correct but would be depressing.
I was just looking up pictures of the Benin bronzes and found a recent story about Nigerian artists offering the British Museum some newly made bronzes in exchange for the return of the old placques, as well as throwing in a "life-sized ram made of spark plugs" which seems like a pretty funny commentary on the art world.
I remember meeting a painter who told me she preferred old-style figurative paintings, but abstract expressionism is what sells so that’s what she did.
Modernism embodies the trauma of both World Wars and a rejection of the pas that led to them. It has iconoclastic tendencies like Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” to raze Paris’ historic center and build Stalinist tower blocks there.
At this point I think the signaling theory is the most likely, to paraphrase Dave Barry, the primary qualification for modern art is that no normal person would ever mistake it for art, and thus the mastery of the code is a signifier of class, just as the mastery of Confucian classics in a bygone era, or of of Marxist-Leninist dialectic.
For the sake of completeness, let's add "modern people are all stressed and depressed and build buildings that mirror how they feel". Works for clothes too, the relaxed hippie types don't go around wearing suits.
I think the reason modern buildings don't imitate classical ones more is a cost thing. One 1994 attempt to construct a large building in a classical style (Castello di Amorosa in Napa Valley) cost the owner ~$73m in 2021 dollars, and the quality of the workmanship still doesn't come close to what you see in the best examples of the 1800s.
Presumably we see more old buildings constructed in this style because income inequality was higher in the past, so construction costs were relatively more affordable. After taking account of taxes and transfer payments, inequality today is probably considerably lower than it was in the early 1900s, to say nothing of earlier periods (https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality#inequality-of-disposable-incomes-over-the-long-run).
I think there are some important dynamics here which explain why trying to make classical art, architecture, or poetry *now* would be more risky (for the artist) than trying to make modern versions of the same, and which thereby explain why artists are less likely to try to make classical art.
If you tried to make a building now in the style of Milan Cathedral, or tried to make classical poetry, or a painting in the style of Rembrandt you'd run a higher risk of embarassing failure. If you fail to produce something roughly as good, you've simply failed to reproduce a long-existing style. But, even if you succeed at a very good reproduction of the style, and people agree that it looks nice, many would also find this an unimpressive achievement. At best, it would be viewed as a pastiche, which at least in architecture, is usually meant derogatorily (https://www.iconeye.com/design/movements/the-architecture-of-pastiche). (Notably, when pastiche is used approvingly, mostly in other fields, it seems like it's not usually referring to a straightforward replication but to some kind of post-modern play on an existing style) One might wonder why one could not simply produce something *better* than the original Milan Cathedral or Rembrandt, which *would* be recognised as impressive, but this seems exceptionally difficult. The only realistic way to try to achieve that seems to be to attempt some kind of 'play' on the style, where you reproduce it but cleverly add novel elements in some way.
I think this accounts for the important fact that many elites within the relevant cultural domains don't think that classical art, architecture or poetry was bad (so this is not merely about a radical change in elite aesthetics or taste) but they would look view negatively someone now attempting to reproduce these styles, which would be seen as unoriginal and derivative, if not at little cringy.
You're not wrong, but I often fantasize about a really specific sort of retro-modernism which has a chance, I think. Optical scanning technology + AI + computing power could plausibly scan the shape of natural or minimally worked rocks and 3D-puzzle them together to make a stable walls, columns, arches, and other such structures. Then self-propelled cranes could actually execute the building of the structure, which would basically look like a 13th century European castle - also built from stacked stone sourced very nearby or even on site. The materials would be almost free, which means that even ordinary people could live in a literal castle. Is there some AI dealbreaker that would make this not practical, or would the demand for such buildings not materialize?
The official line is that the older styles are "played out"--that they were good, but there is simply nothing more that can be done with melody and harmony, or with plot and character; everything possible has already been done.
This is in line with Barthes' "Death of the author", and is related to a larger counter-Renaissance by the elites in the humanities, who wish to de-humanize the humanities and return to the Platonist metaphysics of the Middle Ages and of Romanticism, according to which the creation of new things is either impossible, or requires a divine act or prophetic revelation (the artist as prophet or God).
In representational arts, including literature, there's a second general argument, which is that representation, including language, is incapable of communicating anything new, for the reasons given in Plato's "Meno" and Derrida's "Of Grammatology".
Platonists are essentialists, which means they believe that things have their properties not due to internal mechanisms, but to spirits. They have no way of incorporating structure, mechanism, or grammar into Platonist ontologies, so the meaning of a picture can only be the sum of the meanings of all the individual things depicted, and the meaning of a paragraph can only be the sum of the meanings of the words in the paragraph. When you see a picture or a word, either you already know it, so it tells you nothing new; or you don't know it, so it tells you nothing. Hence Plato's theory that no one can ever tell or show you anything you don't already know (and all "learning" is remembering from past lives, which is also a proof of reincarnation for Plato). That's why modernist writers always said "Make it new!" but actually meant "Remake it anew!"--give us a new Odysseus, a new Fisher King, etc. It's also why some gave up on narrative to play with word sounds (Gertrude Stein) and philological puns (Finnegan's Wake).
Plato's arguments don't address the problem of grammar, which bewildered Plato because he couldn't conceive of relationships like "A is bigger than B". Somewhere in the second half of Republic, Plato says that he invented his theory of the Forms to account for the "paradox" inherent in the observation that (my example) a rock may appear to be bigger than an ant, yet smaller than a house. Plato says this is obviously impossible, as the rock should be either bigger or smaller, but not both; therefore, the rock cannot be real, and reality must lie somewhere else.
So it was left to Derrida to apply Aristotle's proof of the existence of God (the First Mover) to language. This turns Aristotle's claim that the existence of movement implies a first mover, into a proof that for language to have meaning requires a God to provide the first meanings. There is no God; ergo, no meaning. This proof requires several wrong Platonist assumptions to work. Also, Derrida spreads it out across a hundred or more pages /Of Grammatology/, and didn't state its conclusion as "language can't communicate meaning", but as "there is no outside text", leaving it to others to infer his meaning.
Going back to the opening conspiracy premise... we see the present state of affairs (relatively) clearly and the conspiracy believers cherish their single cause/single affect tidiness of thought as an explanation of what we see.
However 'life' or even 'life as we see it in buildings and dress' is the result of lots of prior causes and lots of effects all interacting positively and negatively. People then make a living explaining 'the single cause' behind some event (mostly academics and pundits), or find solace in identifying 'the single cause' (ordinary people and cranks).
It appears that people in general view symmetry with positive feelings, and regard certain proportions (e.g. the Golden Mean) positively too. But then other people will deliberately subvert those views to boost their status. Lay the development of social classes over the last few centuries, the non-survival of vernacular buildings, and the changes in urbanisation on top of peoples' feelings and you have a many-to-many cause and effect set of relationships. Not a 'single' cause.
I work as a programmer and there are Serious Problems involved in college and university programming courses. To put it bluntly, students learn from people who don't know how to program; they know the buzzwords, they know the academically accepted techniques, but they've never sat down and spent a few years writing real code with actual other people.
So the result is that students don't learn how to program. They learn this kind of weird ivory-tower shadow version of programming. Then they graduate and get a job and we have to deprogram them; we have to teach them how to not do whatever their classes taught them, and instead how to actually, you know, program things. Many people just never get this training and as a result there's a lot of phenomenally awful programmers out there who still think that every project starts with a UML diagram and trying to cram as many design patterns in as possible.
This is a vicious cycle because very few people who are good at programming want to go into education - it's stressful and the pay is bad - so education ends up filled either with people who learned "how to program" and then turned out to be unable to actually program, or with people who never actually learned how to program, either in its shadow version *or* its real version. And the problem perpetuates itself.
So maybe something similar is going on with architecture, and art in general? People learn from architect-teachers who aren't architects but are actually teachers, and they learn ivory-tower shadow architecture, and then they reach the real world and a lot of them just keep doing the same stuff; they build stuff that people don't actually want, that people-who-don't-know-architecture-and-ended-up-teaching think people want, and eventually they get trained out of it but it takes a while. And some of them end up in high-priced consultant roles ("they must be good, they have a degree!") and never have an incentive to learn.
I have no citation for that whatsoever, but it fits the pattern.
Heh. One of my favorite CS teachers was a Russian who had a very ... *pragmatic* approach to programming. While today I can't even remember the name or subject matter of that class, I learned a lot of general principles that are still influencing me. :-)
> if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling. Science has a safety valve here
String theory and evolutionary psychology are sometimes accused of this, so I wouldn't say this is only a problem of the humanities and "soft sciences"
> As A Change From Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste
I'd say the part that's missing here is "taste as a proxy for wealth". Most expensive clothing and design is still made more expensively, e.g. hand-sewed, with high quality materials, etc. The difference to 500 years ago is that the expensive stuff is harder to spot at a distance, you have to know where to look. This gets sold as taste.
On a side note: has anyone ever asked the poets which kind they'd rather write?
I'm not sure I've got much to add to the previous posts but I'll try.
With regards to clothing, I prefer a modern suit to whatever atrocity that Emperor is wearing. But there's a matter of practicality. An Emperor probably didn't have a day job. Representation was probably 90% of his duties. Thus extravagant costumes were justified. Xi is both Emperor and mandarin. His day job probably doesn't look very different from what a banker, consultant or executive manager does... so his clothes have to be somewhat practical.
It'd be fairer to compare the Emperor to Queen Elizabeth and her hats or high fashion models wearing stuff that cannot possibly be worn in the streets or the office but make for interesting (according to some) displays/impermanent art.
For the building stuff - it's a bit harder but one thing you'll see in Paris if you ever get INSIDE one of those beautiful old palaces repurposed for administrative function is that they're awful. Sure, usually, a couple of (ball) rooms have been kept for public receptions etc. but the offices you have to visit to get your admin tasks done have been tucked into artificial divisions that don't suit, elevators had to be crammed in places they don't belong to etc. It basically ruins the building - cheap 70s office cubicles in a grand XV palace... Going in there always make me feel the French state is pathetic and inefficient, which I doubt was the intent.
A priori, I'd expect modern buildings to be fit for purpose. Also while you get cubicle/brutalist horrors, you also get glass and steel sky scrappers and I personally quite like those (though they wouldn't belong inside Paris or Rome centers or even Manhattan but outside, in dedicated business centers like La Defense or Canary Wharf? Sure!). And I cannot wait for solarpunk to take off for real...
Private mansions. One, rich people playing it safe is not that new. You have the father of the Medici famously building his house to be plain outside but beautiful/ostentatious inside. That was when the Medici still had to pretend Florence was a republic...
But also Bill Gates is the wrong type of rich person. He clearly isn't into showing off his wealth like that, even if he's got an enormous house with tens (hundreds?) of rooms, not all of them standard (a trampoline room? swimming pool with under water music system? 6 kitchens?). He wants to be 'comfortable' but is more concerned about influencing the policies of the world than showing off his wealth. I think Russian oligarchs are a lot more 'classical' in that sense : Just Google-image "inside home Russian oligarchs" ; or check out https://guestofaguest.com/real-estate/inside-the-extravagant-homes-of-russian-oligarchs
Public art. Yeah, no comeback on that one. See others about the problems with modern artists needing to distinguish themselves by doing something different, having higher philosophical pretensions than simply entertaining/delighting viewers etc etc.
As for buildings, there's no reason why a building can't be both extravagant-looking and also practically efficient. I mean, even if they just put some interesting looking patterns on the walls. Something has definitely changed with regards to our vibrancy. I think it's maybe that all these buildings are used for business and business has by default a culture of seriousness.
And If artists wanted to do something different and extravagant today, they would ironically create something magnificent like the Taj Mahal. They would spend their entire life studying poetry in their chambers so they could surpass William Shakespeare. Instead we're seeing a general trend of "meh". Society's artists are for the most part mediocre and opportunistic, and I don't think it's because they're trying too hard. On the other hand, society's reception to art has dulled as well. No one cares as much for poetry anymore. But no one cares much for the new San Fran sculptures either, so it can't be that people want something new.
Wouldn't you say, though, that the Walkie Talkie in London or the Gherkin (though honestly not my taste) or the Burj Khalifa are extravagant? I personally find them awe-inspiring, if nothing else...
And obviously, they're functional. Again, I wouldn't put them in the center of historical cities (London, there, made a mistake, imho) but they're impressive...
Actually they do look quite nice. A little inconsistent though, because like you said they're in a city and surrounded by comparatively boring looking buildings, but point taken.
Are they really functional? If you wanted lots of office space, you could get that much FAR cheaper and more practically (for starters, avoiding the whole elevator conundrum) by building less tall buildings covering a larger area. In case of Walkie Talkie the space at financial district of London is at premium so it's somewhat justifiable, but there's literal empty desert just next to Burj Khalifa. Purely on aesthetic grounds I'm a big fan of it, however.
As you say, most sky scrappers are an answer to expensive real estate. Dubai is definitely a special case where it's easy to argue they could have extended horizontally before going vertical. Still, I think the point stands for most tall buildings in most places.
This has much less to do with elites vs commoners and much more so with the essence of modernity, or modernism. In a really small nutshell, nearly all traditional arts and crafts (including fashion and architecture) attempt to imitate nature in its glory complexity. In a religious context, this is to glorify God's creation, if you will, and in a mythical context, it is to express being part of nature. Modernism rejects all this and sets man apart from nature. And all of modernism is the attempt to look as artificial and unlike nature as possible. Nature is complex, so modernism is minimalist. Nature is soft in materials, modernism hard. Nature is brown and green, modernism is either grey or neon colors. nature os round or wavy, modernism is straight and flat. Basically, modern man embodied in the artist expresses through their artifices their alienation from nature. Either as a proud statement, proud to assert that the product can never be mistaken as something natural, or as a sad attestation of fact, a kind of yearning. Famous architects such as Le Corbusier have said things in that vein quite explicitly. Or look up the conversation between architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. Paraphrasing, Alexander says "why are you building such alienating buildings, people hate them" and Eisenman says "why, if I feel alienated, why shouldn't I?" http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm
I think you're on to something there, but now I will write about what I disagree with.
People have been looking for brighter dyes and paints from very early on. I don't know whether they were trying to separate themselves from nature, or trying to create "nature, the good parts version".
Hi Nancy, not necessarily a contradiction - I was outlining what I believe is a general tendency and for sure there will be some loose ends not fully grasped by my generalization.
Forget A vs B photograph comparisons for a second. How long do you think the average person could spend at Milan Cathedral, or Cardiff Castle, or the Trevi Fountain, before they get bored? Or any major exhibition of Renaissance painting, or any classical music concert, anything like that. Keeping in mind that the competition is whatever other fun thing they could be doing like hanging out in a bar, playing video games, watching a movie, going to a gig, playing a sport, whatever. How long do you think the average non-art-nerd could maintain genuine spontaneous interest and excitement in the presence of these things? I don't believe the answer is zero minutes, but I also don't believe it's very much longer than like ten minutes.
I'm not saying that "modern" stuff is more engaging--I agree it's probably less so--but it's important to realise we're comparing "stuff people basically don't give a shit about but think is kind of pretty" with "stuff people basically don't give a shit about but think is kind of ugly". There's a genuine mystery about how the first thing got outcompeted by the second thing, but it's a much less mysterious mystery when you realise that no one really gives much of a shit either way.
("People want poems that rhyme". Which people? How many people do you think spend their evenings reading Edmund Spenser and wishing there was a modern equivalent they could be reading instead? Also tons of modern poetry rhymes so what even the hell)
There are art forms that people really do give a shit about, and it's harder to play the A vs B game with those. People care about movies, and if you put The Matrix or some other much-beloved movie side by side with some great Elizabethan or Victorian piece of theatre, I don't think the movie would embarrass itself. People care about clothing, and if you don't cheat by focusing on business wear and look at the clothes people actually get excited about wearing, that fancy Chinese dress doesn't actually stand out that much. People care about music, and if they genuinely preferred Beethoven to modern stuff then he'd have a lot more listens on Spotify than he does now. People care about novels, and whether your tastes run more "literary" or more "genre" I bet you can name books written after WWII that you'd happily choose over Jane Eyre or Robinson Crusoe.
Again, not claiming to have explained the thing you're saying needs explaining. But I do think that if the average person felt passion for good sculpture deep in their bones the same way they do for good music or good stories, it would be a lot harder to get away with producing lots of sculpture that has no popular appeal.
As I understand it, poetry has fallen out of Anglophone (American?) culture for reasons which aren't clear to me, but has remained popular in other cultures. I've heard about this for Hispanic cultures and Israel, at least.
Does anyone know what popular poetry is like where there is still popular poetry?
"("People want poems that rhyme". Which people? How many people do you think spend their evenings reading Edmund Spenser and wishing there was a modern equivalent they could be reading instead? Also tons of modern poetry rhymes so what even the hell)"
Rap rhymes.
Also, not all traditional poetry used rhyme-- Norse poetry used alliteration: "Bare is back without brother behind it."
People give a shit about popular novels, but not about literary novels. Even runner-ups for the Booker T Washington award--maybe the most-respected award for English literary novels--usually sell just a few thousand copies. So the popular pop / unpopular "high culture" division still holds in fiction. Likewise in movies. There are lots of boring pretentious award-winning art films that most people still don't like.
The difference between literary and popular novels and movies is that popular novels and movies are made to make money, and literary ones are status symbols that lose money. The rule is that art that needs to make money stays attuned to what people want, while art that doesn't need to make money, doesn't.
(Note that Shakespeare and Mozart had to make money.)
I found in my career that an analogous thing holds for research and engineering projects: Those done for profit usually do good work; those funded by the government, or by VCs who don't understand what they're funding, tend to cater to current fads and buzzwords, go way over budget, and get hijacked by the interests of the researchers and workers.
Does something similar hold for architecture? Modern architecture is funded by governments; but so were big architectural projects in previous centuries--weren't they?
I suspect the difference is in how the contracts are awarded and who makes the decisions. If you have an individual, or even a committee, in a government agency choose the design, which I suspect is how things were done in the 19th century, I predict you'd be more likely to get buildings that most people don't hate. But if you hire an art consultant, or a panel of architects, to choose the design--which I'd guess is how things are done now--you'll probably get an artistic death spiral in which artists break free of public opinion.
But there is also a difference in that artists today probably have more scorn for public opinion than artists in the past did. In the past, artists didn't care what the public thought, as the public probably wouldn't even get to see their art, and certainly none of their views on it would be published, or listened to by people who mattered. In the 20th century, many artists were horrified if members of "the public" liked their work. The only real standard of excellence for art in the 20th century is that of not being liked by the public.
I feel divided about this issue, because while I often hate pretentious award-winning movies and novels, I also often hate popular box-office busters and runaway bestsellers. As a writer, I've found that readers legitimately have different needs due to their different age, circumstance, & life history. So I'm open to the possibility that the cultural elites have special needs that the rest of us don't understand. But I suspect those "special needs", when expanded, turn out to be things like "I need not to be mistaken for a member of the herd", or "I'm alienated from society because I'm rich and feel guilty, and am not oppressed by any exploitative controlling narrative that would give me a sense of purpose", or "I want to prevent art from relieving the suffering of the masses and thus allow them to achieve revolutionary consciousness." Or possibly just "I hate the masses."
One thing that would help this analysis would be to replace the 1D old-good/new-bad axis with a 2D compass of ornate/austere and good/bad.
The two Chinese outfits pictured are ornate+good and austere+good. Xi's suit is elegant in it's simplicity, the strong contrast between dark/light with a red highlight works aesthetically. Milan Cathedral is ornate+good. Brcconi University is austere+bad. Keeping these separate will help.
A couple of examples of austere+good architecture would be a classic English redbrick house[1] or that plantation mansion from Django Unchained[2].
With this reframing questions like why do we wear suits and not traditional Chinese robes are a lot easier to answer. You might be able to get a robe for the same price, but the suit is also good looking so you can say "tastes change" without having to worry about why people are accepting uglyness.
But Brcconi University, that is damn ugly. And you have to ask why architects keep giving us stuff like that. The giant glass tower I get, it's space efficient, cost effective, and lots of natural light. It don't think it's pretty, but it has function if not form. Brcconi has neither.
I agree with this. A lot of the comment thread seems to be based on the false assumption that beautiful = really ornate = really expensive, when in reality the first equation isn't true (and with the invention of 3D printing and the like, it's arguable that the second equation isn't true any more, either).
I've been especially interested by the architectural clash between anti-aesthetic YIMBYs, RETVRN TO TRADITION revolutionaries, and the bien-pensant architectural elite. I have planned a book review for your next contest on this topic – you have pipped me to the post!
The debate is often framed as a conflict over the influence of the dastardly French – Le Corbusier etc. But if the changes wrought by these thinkers are so unpopular, why haven't market forces simply swept them away? People have agency over which art they buy, which galleries they visit and over which houses they buy. In the UK, where I'm based, basic market logic supports your intuitions: old houses command a premium. But that preference hasn't been carried through into the housing projects that are built.
I hope to compare two different perspectives. Barnabas Calder's recent book, Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency, ascribes changes in architectural style largely to changes in material conditions. Roger Scruton views the changes of modernity as a conscious and ideological break with the past, whose discontinuities are responsible for its jarring appearance.
I have many ideas and many, many questions about both of these perspectives. Perhaps some of you can help me!
1. Why is the change so widespread? Global ideas differ greatly (Russia, for example, seems to be on a bit of a Trad kick at the moment) and so do global material conditions (the Baumol effect should differ according to prevailing wage conditions). And yet the stereotypical "bland concrete tower block city" is a global phenomenon, and practically no recently-built cities are winning plaudits for their beauty.
2. Why are traditional building materials so expensive? In many parts of the UK, buildings were traditionally built of cheap local materials, like Oxfordshire's ooidal limestone. Yet reading about the restoration of traditional buildings, the costs of materials like limestone, traditional brick and slate is always one of the biggest obstacles. But why? Are they running out? Do they require labour that can't be automated?
3. Recent attempts to build traditionally housing en masse, by builders like Barrett or by ideologues like Prince Charles, have resulted in an uncanny valley effect – they look like fake old houses. Why? Is it just placing old designs in modern streetscapes, with contemporary signage and hard asphalt roads? Have they not weathered in yet?
4. Why is there such a difference in reception between mid-century architecture, such as Brutalism, and its associated interior design, mid-century modern? The interior of Brutalist buildings is constantly aped in commercial settings, from Ikea to Heals, but the exteriors are still fairly unpopular. Why?
I think in response to your 3. part of the issue is building something traditional that meets modern standards for things like insulation is prohibitively expensive. Most of those Barrett homes are still modern timber frame with a facade of stone or brick on the outside, the more offensive ones don't even put the stone somewhere that makes sense from a structural view, it's obviously just a decorative layer.
There's currently a new house being built near where I live entirely out of stone, complete with masons and chisels on site, presumably because it's in a conservation area and had to match the surrounding properties. But it looks like they're building a traditional stone shell then lining it with what is effectively an entire modern house on the inside, which is going to be almost as expensive as building two houses.
This is a good point. One major factor I'm looking at in my essay is the impact of comfort and safety on aesthetics. From the C20, having well-insulated, well-lit, fire-proof buildings became possible. With these highly attractive qualities now available, aesthetic concerns were secondary. As you rightly point out, this ends up massively adding to the cost of buildings that try to be both traditionally aesthetic and comfortable.
Nevertheless, there's an unanswered question I feel. The actual materials themselves are massively costly. Just purchasing a house-worth of limestone or a roof-worth of slate is costly in a way it clearly wasn't to vernacular builders of the past. I wonder what's going on there.
Construction cost isn't the main reason for the change. The main driver of a building’s cost is simply its size. Every square foot of building means a certain amount of structure, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, sprinklers, elevators, etc. Finishes and moldings matter, but less than the bare bones.
Moreover, modernist design is more expensive than you might think. Glass curtain walls cost a lot of money. And simplicity can be deceptive. Remember that traditional architecture developed in times when construction was more labor-intensive. Things like roof overhangs and moldings at joints were built in part because they have genuine, functional purposes, and it is often harder to achieve clean and waterproof details without them. Modernism is more about the aesthetic of simplicity than about actual simplicity.
Some of the traditional materials and construction techniques are more expensive now simply because they're not used that much. The pool of suppliers and subcontractors who provide them is small.
And most buildings in the past weren't built with slate roofs or limestone walls. Wood and brick aren't that expensive, relatively speaking.
I like to visit Poundbury when I am in that part of the world. When I first visited (over 10 years ago) all the buildings were new and the surface treatments fresh. I visited this year and there is much more greenery in front of the houses, and the rendering now looks like it needs repainting. But Poundbury still feels creepy. It looks like a place where the Stepford Wives would live.
Wikipedia (includes some pictures):
Poundbury is an experimental new town or urban extension on the outskirts of Dorchester in the county of Dorset, England. It was initiated by prize-winning architect Léon Krier with the keen endorsement of Charles, Prince of Wales, on whose land it is built (Duchy of Cornwall). Its design is based on traditional architecture and New Urbanist philosophy.
I've just had a walk around Poundbury on street view and I think part of the problem is it's a planned development that's trying to look like (and using architecture from) cities that grew up organically. So there are old style buildings right next to newer ones but the wear and tear makes it obvious they were put up at the same time. It also suffers a bit from being a small town that's trying to have the architectural diversity of a large one. I imagine the developers did the thing they do with all new builds now which is to spend 6 months flattening all feature from the underlying ground which makes building cheaper and easier but removes the need for any of the little quirks of building on natural land formations that help make houses feel human.
I think a lot of the uncanny valley of modern housing comes from trying to make the mass produced look like it isn't. So you end up with estates full of houses that are all unique combinations of the same 10 basic parts and it looks wrong. In the same way that having roads curve around non-existent landscape features (because you flattened them all) looks wrong, it's obviously fake.
Indeed. There are a few gentle slopes in Poundbury but as you say anything inconvenient was removed. There are comparatively few house designs although they have differing external finishes. Cars are normally parked around the back in yards not visible from the road, and there is little street furniture (street lights are brackets on houses mostly).
My architect friend reckons that Poundbury is what you get when you transplant a genteel London neighbourhood into a rural setting - but with all of the old decrepit clutter left behind.
The landscaping issue is a great point that had escaped my notice! The need to accommodate large numbers of cars is of course the other crucial factor.
I'm a professional architect, albeit one of the minority who does traditional design work. Will try to answer a few of your questions here and below.
>>But if the changes wrought by these thinkers are so unpopular, why haven't market forces simply swept them away? People have agency over which art they buy, which galleries they visit and over which houses they buy. In the UK, where I'm based, basic market logic supports your intuitions: old houses command a premium. But that preference hasn't been carried through into the housing projects that are built.<<
Because almost all of the architects are modernists, and you need to hire an architect to get a new building built. The complexity of design and construction has increased enormously in the past century, in part because of new technologies and in part because of regulation. The design professionals have the licenses and expertise that you need to navigate the maze, which puts you at their mercy. They can throw you a few bones by making vague references to your preferred aesthetic, but mostly they’ll do what they’ve been taught to do and like.
And since modernism is all they know, even their sincere attempts to do traditional design work tends to generate kitsch. That goes to your comment about Poundbury below.
>the architectural clash between anti-aesthetic YIMBYs, RETVRN TO TRADITION revolutionaries, and the bien-pensant architectural elite.
The funny thing is that, in my experience of actually dealing with them, NIMBYs are motivated in part by the sheer ugliness of so much new development. The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
Note that the preservation movement followed close on the heels of widespread modernist building. It's quite possible that modernist architecture has had an enormous, though indirect, negative economic impact on middle class Americans by driving land use restrictions that make housing more expensive.
Hi Jim – thanks for all your useful comments, they're much appreciated. It sounds like there is a real shortage of traditional architects. Do you find yourself in very high demand as a result?
I agree about NIMBYism - have you seen the work of Policy Exchange on this issue? Some very interesting policy papers on using traditional design to encourage development. Historic England's papers on traditional housebuilding are also very illuminating.
I don't get this take from the first thread. Elaborate colors or not, I assume pre-Beau Brummell and post-Beau Brummell men were still working within the confines of an acceptable dress--weirdo dress fashion that did not actually permit "freedom."
I know the writer doesn't say this, but they make it seem like women's fashion by contrast is pure freedom of expression. But women seem to operate within the same limited confines of acceptable dress -- women at the Oscars or whatever wear a wider variety of different colors or whatever, but in the end if you wear legitimately unusual stuff you end(ed) up on Mr. Blackwell's list, not praised and affirmed.
The thread claims men's "fashion" is hoodies and stuff, but that's obviously untrue. Tons of men get expensive haircuts frequently and wear nice clothes from a personal shopper, and they get complimented frequently. (They are typically also handsome or jacked or whatever.)
The schlubs don't get complimented but that's not Beau Brummell's fault?
I think for a lot architecture utilitarianism might be the answer to why modern design rules supreme.
What the cost of heating or cooling a building are for instance rings to me as a modern consideration. Routing of pipes and cables comes to mind.
That shirt that Scott linked in the comments: can you put that in the machine or does it have to go to a professional? But aside from utilitarianism, you need to be able to pull off a certain style ofclothing. That shirt imo speaks more to the flamboyancy of the wearer than his wealth.
There might be a link to increased governmental accountability. The most liked projects may be "beautiful" in general, but also act as magnets to social and international discontent during times of austerity, since they are perceived as more expensive. Imagine the reaction of the german public if Greece started work on an extremely ornamented, high profile public building... So we add international debtor pressure / fiscal virtue signalling to the mix of internal pressures by the population.
Possibly an economic factor besides the literal monetary costs is the time it takes. I don't mean just that building an ornate house takes longer than a squarish box, but the time involved in studying and learning *how* to design and execute such a thing is no longer economically viable in the creation path of such things. Architecture in the modern world has to happen fast, you know, to get those humans into the boxes.
Also, extend that to the art world: nobody has the time to learn to make and then mix layers of paint to create something like a Rembrandt; you can buy your Windsor & Newton tubes at the store and slap them on a pre-gessoed canvas. *If* indeed you have the time to paint with physical paints rather than rendering your desired image in Photoshop or whatever. Who is even spending the time to practice instruments when you could just load up Garageband and somebody is already sampled doing so. Or better yet, just DJ and use recordings. There was a really great essay by Ian Svevonius from 20+ years back (can't find it in a quick search engine query ATM) about how DJ culture was basically bourgeoise use of other people's labor and was, as you say, a move from using that as a signal of wealth to a signal of taste, ie DJs are paid the big bux for their taste in choosing the labor of others, not for their own creativity. The management class in music.
I know a guy who's an amateur painter. Boxer, real interesting guy, decided to start painting as a way to relax. He's rather good. He himself states that initially, he was also very skeptical of modern abstract art. But as he started to paint more, and look into the history of art, he started to understand too. And then, he says, his realistic approach started to be boring - so he decided to experiment more. Now note, this guy isn't some highbrow educated person - like, he doesn't even have a high school diploma.
This brings me to another comparable thing - internet memes. You might have noticed that "21st century humor" is popular. Very abstract, completely nonsensical, very loud. And considered extremely stupid and unfunny by most "out of touch" people who are stuck in the 2000s internet culture wise, mostly older people. They don't get it, because they don't follow these trends so much - it's all really a big in-joke. Nothing more.
You see where I'm going with this - all this current hypermodern art is, well, one big "in-joke." It only starts to click when you really get into the matter itself. All art styles are just a reaction to the previous one because artists got bored.
On the other hand, I see they're starting to get bored of it now too, with a return to more traditional forms - like complementary architecture.
Recently it has become feasible to use 3D printing for construction of entire houses (first projects in the Netherlands and Germany). While the first projects that have been completed look very ordinary (standard blocks with rounded edges), this technique would in principle allow to build any shape and degree of ornamentation without any cost penalty. It should also be straightforward to algorithmically generate endless streams of intricate designs, even surpassing what was common during turn of the century. It will be interesting to see whether this is what people really want. Slavish reconstruction of destroyed historic buildings (Berlin palace, Frankfurt inner city) is not uncommon, but it will be interesting whether with new technology a new ornate style develops that is not simply a carbon copy of past designs.
Many of the older works we now see as uncontroversially great were controversial in their time (e.g operas causing riots, every new style of painting being described as awful going back to the renaissance at least). So one explanation is that the category of "good art" is continually broadening, and public opinion just lags elite opinion
Related: The Berlin Stadtschloss ("city palace") was reconstructed in the last 10 years, and has just been officially inaugurated last week. It's mostly a reconstruction of the old style, with lots of ornaments.
There was (and is) a furious debate on whether the reconstruction should be in this ornamental, reconstructive style. As far as I can tell, one side of the debate included most of the architectural/artistic world, who would have favoured something modern and condemned the reconstruction as "fake Baroque palace.. a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century."
The other side was the general public, who generally was in favour of lots of ornaments and its beautiful aesthetics. Perhaps untypically, the general public won this fight.
Hmm. There's one hypothesis that's absent from the article, and that is unlikely to be the one complete explanation for everything (e.g. it doesn't really explain architecture), but which I believe to be a significant contributing factor:
Artists became high status, so high-status people now aim to be artists.
This runs into a problem of artistry requiring, well, artistry, which in turn requires both talent and hard work to acquire skills and then more hard work to produce art. High-status kids are just not used to hard work and are statistically unlikely to have talent, but they still want the status, so they push low-skill, low-effort abstract and conceptual art they're actually capable of creating as a pinnacle of taste (and deride people criticizing it as tasteless rubes).
(E.g., I don't have links at me, but I've read several people making a critique that art schools just don't teach proper technique anymore, in large part precisely because instead of preparing people for a trade, they exist to please their paying customers.)
Formerly artists were skilled laborers for hire by people with money. Nowadays, they are the people with money. In part because making money and status is the only way to make it as an artist, as the market for the merely competent has dried up or hidden in niches. In part because the status is alluring to people who already have money.
(I also don't think there's any particular status difference between high-brow and popular culture. It's just that popular culture still ultimately needs to be, well, popular, which serves as a defense against the worst excesses of academic art community. This also explains those "Spiderman classes" better, I think. They're not existing to please commoners, as commoners don't attend liberal arts universities, they're existing to please rich kids for whom they're the next best thing after actually creating Spiderman.)
I think Skopje is a major counterargument to Scott's claim about people preferring traditional architectural styles. Briefly, the Macedonian government decided to build a bunch of public buildings and monuments in a neo-classical style to remind everyone of their ancient heritage - it looks awful, and everyone inside and outside the country agrees that the buildings are super kitschy and shouldn't have been built.
My interpretation is that people prefer *old* buildings, not *old-style* modern buildings. The 19th century saw a large number of buildings built in revivalist styles, mostly neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque, but most of these buildings are forgotten nowadays (compare the relative popularity of the Stephansdom and the Votivkirche in Vienna - they look the same, they're both located right in the centre of the city, but the Votivkirche barely gets any visitors).
On the other hand, architecture that fused classical and modern influences could become really popular and admired. Take for example Jože Plečnik's work in Ljubljana, or Antoni Gaudí's in Barcelona, as two different examples of such a fusion.
I think Skopje looks pretty, going off Google Images, to be honest! What tourists want to visit may respond to different incentives than what is directly pretty — tourists like to tell themselves they're learning about history, after all, not just flocking to whatever tickles their eye in the moment.
I am, and I have never been in London. When I was a kid, a relative went to London once, and brought some kitchy tourist memorabilia. I got a ballpoint pen that had an inaccurate scene of Westminster inside a plastic "aquarium" with some kind of gimmick that made Thames look a river. It was coolest thing ever.
Likewise, most the cityscape in Helsinki worth looking at consists neo-classical revivalist architecture, designed by Engel and funded by czar Alexander I, which is amazingly popular amongst both the local elite and the populace. The people in suits would like to build high-rise near the city center, but all proposals to build anything modern and tall enough to disturb the skyline (currently commanded by the main cathedral) have been turned down.
Two hypotheses:
1. Objective standards exist. Macedonian government built low quality neo-classical revivalist architecture. They should have allocated larger budget or hired more talented architects.
2. A full, all-encompassing definition of "soft power" is difficult to come by, but here is one way to recognize its presence: You know someone had *lots* of it when the generations afterwards still like the buildings they built and call them "iconic soul of the city" instead of "kitsch that should be demolished at earliest opportunity". It is anyone's guess whether it is because "soft power" is so powerful it can make people see things differently, or the power manifests in ability to attract the best architects who can build such things.
"It is anyone's guess whether it is because "soft power" is so powerful it can make people see things differently, or the power manifests in ability to attract the best architects who can build such things."
Or else it's a mix of (1) and (2): objective standards exist, and buildings, works of art, etc., which meet those standards tend to become more popular and be imitated. When a particular culture produces large numbers of objects which meet those standards, people are more likely to think well of it, which is more or less what we mean by talking of "soft power".
A counter-counter argument about Skopje. The reason people see it as kitsch isn't how it looks but because of the ideology that the ruling party tried to impose. Modern Macedonians have no cultural, linguistic, genetic, or any other ties to ancient Macedonians (except the name). And the buildings were seen as propaganda and were rejected because even in North Macedonia most people don't believe that North Macedonians = ancient Macedonians. Skopje airport was named after Alexander the Great and it was also considered kitschy, with nothing to do with looks.
Victorian factory interiors are very pretty, with no apparent increased cost or business impact: they had to cast the metal, so they cast it into pretty shapes; and they have to paint it, so they paint it tasteful colours. But this is not in the public sphere, so removes a lot of the considerations. Compare this to modern factory interiors.
Brick houses: similarly, houses in the town I am currently in, you can see the old houses, even if they were cheaply built, would use several shades of brick and alternate the colours somehow to provide a pattern -- adding ornamentation at no cost; modern houses seldom do this.
Court rooms: again I'm speaking for England, but old Court rooms look very imposing and new ones look like random office spaces. The judges and barristers are still wearing the silly wigs and stuff, and I think the desire to have an imposing space is still there -- but it doesn't work somehow.
Office exteriors: people want natural light; so you need big windows. Windows get dirty so you need to be able to clean them. But you can't have opening windows because they're huge. So you need a building exterior that is flat to provide easy access for people to go up and down the outside cleaning the windows. You're pretty limited for interesting designs at this point.
Office interiors: you need disabled access, so everything needs to be flat and wide. You need air conditioning so that limits what you can do with the ceiling because you need removable panels. You want to be able to restructure the building to sell it on or when you have a re-org, so you need interior walls that are essentially disposable -- what can you do?
The bit you might expand on is class, cos I think that class (rather than wealth) signaling is possibly the thing here.
And by 'class' I don't mean wealthy vs poor, workers vs owners. Class (to me) now seems to be delineated by education.
The educated seem keen to differentiate from the uneducated partly by a process of making obviously untrue things doctrine among bien pensants (eg impenetrable but silly critical theories) and partly by foisting ugly buildings on their retinas and saying daft things about their architectural merits.
Personally I love the sense of superiority I feel for really 'getting' that the music of Steve Reich is sexier than the music of Beyonce. And that I could reasonably articulate why it is so, while making someone a bit discomfited that they are missing something that a more 'sophisticated' person just knows.
This may be why I see the Taj Mahal as slightly vulgar, whereas the Musée des civilisations européennes et méditerranéennes, in Marseille, is my favourite building.
Us Brits call things fish 'n chippy when they're obviously accessible. Or 'common'.
So, my theory is that modern art etc is just a form of trolling.
With architecture in particular it seems likely that "how it feels to be inside that building" has become more important than "how the building looks from the outside." Rotundas have awful acoustics.
I recall a theory that modern architecture (and possibly by extension art in general) is a consequence of massive societal PTSD caused by WW1: everything was toned down as a response to lower arousal threshold not to be offensive. Especially Walter Gropius is named as the main culprit of this moment: Bauhaus would therefore look dead inside because the main designers were, literally, dead inside, and social contagion explains everything else.
In addition to that, there's indications Le Corbusier was autistic – and that, as a consequence, his designs cater to autistic rather than neurotypical mind. Would again fit with observation how the Silicon Valley where autism would be the norm is so eager on such designs. Some neuroscientists have even done eye-tracking studies on pictures of classical and modern designs and apparently classical designs, in their ornateness, are too much for autistic mind to manage.
Interestingly, Gropiusstadt was the place where the heroine of Christiane F. (We Children from Zoo Station) grew up, and she credits the awfulness of the place with her own slide towards heroin addiction.
IDK if this book and movie are known in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in Germany and neighboring countries, both are notorious.
It's the shift from 'form as a function' to 'form follows function'.
Things used by people who impersonated institutions (king for the realm, pope for the church, nobles for their area) needed to communicate being more than just a person. In modern times, such an impersonation is communicated by other means; now, everybody consumes media.
This shift freed the creators/designers/architects to maximize for functionality, and that is what we see. Status now is conveyed in possessions serving convenience, or collected as cultural capital, and in entertainments.
A lot of Edinburgh's Georgian buildings were funded by local businessmen or aristocrats and designed by local architects. People who would either walk past their buildings every day or who would have regular interactions with people who did. A lot of it was vanity projects, a way for a well off local to leave their mark on the city and that means designing at with at least the locals in mind. In contrast they've just this year finished building a giant golden turd in the city center designed by London architects and paid for with mostly anonymous foreign money, people who's motivation is praise from other architects and finance executives and who certainly aren't going to be accosted in the streets because they took a literal shit in the middle of a history city.
We should let rich people fund public building projects again, and put their names on it. Sure we'd get a couple of Trump towers but at least you know who's fault it is. When Taylor Wimpey vomits another awful housing estate onto the countryside nobody responsible has enough at stake to care.
Zaha Hadid seems to be a decent person (she is dead, I know), because her design for an office building replacing an urban jungle in Prague looks fairly futuristic and nice.
No, please not THAT project. Have you ever been to Prague? That... thing they are... depositing next to the old train station is the architectural equivalent of a kick in the nuts, for the whole part of town it will get erected in.
Zaha Hadid was probably a nice enough person, as a human being: but most of her buildings that I have seen close up and personal are bizarrely uninhabitable pieces of alien spacecraft spare parts. There is one in Vienna, on the riverbank, which has sat empty ever since getting built: simply because the shape serves no conceivable purpose. No one wants to live there, no offices want to rent the space. Spoiler alert: buildings with at least a few right angles in their floor plan aren't old fashioned: there are reasons why people didn't build houses in the shape of weird interlocking prisms in the past, just to say "fuck you" to the surrounding countryside.
Outside H.P. Lovecraft novels, that is. And then only on the South Pole.
I have lived in Prague since 1996. I quite like the project, but my impression might be colored by the previous state of that particular place. It was an awful, dilapidated chunk of real estate.
I've only been in Prague since 2008, and the state of that place was indeed not all that great. But this is still a false dichotomy: just because it was an eyesore does not automatically mean that one should build something bizarre there instead.
The centre of Prague is an architectural marvel, mainly due to modernism having had so little opportunity to wreak havoc there.
I suspect it is all a matter of preference. I can live with this particular kind of modernism. What I intensely disliked was the planned "blob" library by Kaplicky and I am glad it wasn't built.
Indeed, preference plays a big role as well. Of all Hadid buildings, this one is actually the least terrible that I am aware of: and it kinda sorta meshes with all the new stuff along the riverbank in Karlín.
That having been said, I personally still consider most of modern architecture, this included, to be downright dreadful and an eyesore. Not to mention ecologically questionable, especially in the longer run (what with the vast amounts of non-recyclable high tech materials used, which will have to be disposed of at some point). But this particular example could also be a lot worse, granted.
It says a lot about that building in Edinburgh that googling "golden turd city centre" brings up the project as first hit - without even mentioning the city in the search.
When I look at those "old vs modern" comparison photos, it makes me wonder if the difference is that the modern era has an uneasy relationship with ornamentation. Traditionally, ornamentation, (certainly in architecture and sculpture, but I suspect in other arts) has relied on a language of symbols that were expected to be legible to the target audience. Whereas today the entire concept of a language of symbols with one-to-one relationships to some abstract reading does not have widespread acceptance (I'll leave it to cultural history experts to confirm or refute that statement). The modern aesthetic is exactly what you would expect to find when you're trying to produce visual appeal but can't earnestly use ornamentation.
I do also suspect the architecture-specific factors Scott mentioned are more important than he's giving them credit for. Technological innovations like steel framing and stronger glass were huge factors in the development of modern architecture, and the aesthetic of technologically-permitted plainness probably spilled over into other arts.
Art Deco and Frank Lloyd Wright come to mind for having broken the classical mold and established precedents for much of contemporary architecture while producing works of real beauty. Jazz sometimes approaches the sophistication of classical music. Many examples of beautiful artistry can be found in the design of cars (particularly pre-1970s, but I think the past decade has seen a return of pleasing design) and computer hardware and software in the post-iPhone era.
I think another way of looking at the change is that, for centuries, artists and their clients agreed on a set of principles that programmatically produced things that everyone agreed were good. For example, in architecture, you had columns, arches, and domes, and if you assembled them in the right proportions, you were pretty much guaranteed to have a nice-looking temple. Great artists would play with around with the principles or even subvert them, but the principles were still the common reference point.
The modern world broke this mold and showed, in one domain after another, that things of beauty can be produced without following the old rules. Where artistry was once about showing off how well you could do what everyone else was doing, or how cleverly you could innovate within the prevailing idiom, it has now become a matter of purely individual expression. Reference points are no longer required.
But the artists who first broke the rules in their respective domains were generally educated or at least culturally steeped in the pre-modern understanding of art. If an architect spent years studying classical notions of aesthetics before deciding to go his own way, his rebellion stood against those classical notions and many concrete examples thereof in his built environment, and he probably felt at least a subconscious compulsion to produce something that achieved the aesthetic effects that his culture believed architecture should achieve, so that he could say to his contemporaries, "You see, we can achieve the desired effect without following their rules!"
But with the link to the past broken, subsequent generations were unmoored. Architecture is no longer expected to produce awe, to serve as a testament to the genius of man or the glory of God, etc. We are back to apishly copying the prevailing mode, as people did before the modern era, except no longer with the goal of impressing others. Now architecture is largely expected to meet a bewildering number of legal requirements and otherwise blend into the background.
Your final two paragraphs, contrasting the founding generation of modern architects with later imitators, remind me of something David Chapman wrote. This excerpt is from 'A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse' essay, part of his Meta-rationality project (https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge). Chapman, similarly, contrasts the first generation of postmodern theorists with their later imitators:
>In the 1970s and 1980s, the best postmodern/poststructural thinkers presented meta-rational views, based on their thorough understanding of systematic rationality. This first generation of postmodern teachers had a complete “classical education” in the humanities; they mastered the Western intellectual tradition before coming to understand its limitations. Deconstructive postmodernism, their critique of stage 4 modernism/systematicity/rationality, is the basis of the contemporary university humanities curriculum....
>In fact, even most teachers of postmodern theory don’t understand it. Unfortunately, the postmodern pioneers chose to write in obfuscatory riddles. Their insights were difficult enough to understand without that. Few followers could extract the insights. Most teachers are second-generation professors who didn’t understand pomo when it was new, and third-generation ones who were mainly taught dumbed-down second-generation “pseudo-pomo.” They were never taught to think, and can’t. What they learned was to imitate the founders’ appalling rhetorical style.
I wouldn't be surprised if we find critics making this contrast between a pioneering generation and the successor generation(s) in almost every non-empirical field that experienced radical innovation in the 20th century.
I think you're right that it's a more general phenomenon. Traditional education was more like training -- everyone was expected to memorize the same texts, develop the same skills, etc. Modernity's rejection of such strictures is supposed to be liberating, and I think it's quite possible that there are infinitely many avenues worth exploring in every domain that were closed off by traditional thinking. The problem is that there is a much larger infinity of insipid crap.
At their best, the traditional strictures served to maintain hard-won, battle-tested principles while inculcating intellectual discipline. This varies by field (obviously, traditional cosmology wasn't worth maintaining), but I think art stands out as a field where most everyone feels we've lost something worthwhile (hence the theme of this post). An infinity of possibilities is wonderful when everyone makes great use of it, but if everyone is just going to slavishly copy prevailing modes, then you want the prevailing mode to be something that reliably produces stuff and ideas that we like.
Maybe just a symbol of progress. Regular people may prefer the asthetics of older architecture and art, but if you're an artist your goal may be to do something new, push new boundries, instead of just retreading what was already done a few hundred years ago.
I wonder if the commenters here would be more or less likely to appreciate modern art?
Is it possible that certain types of conceptual, technical, or abstract exposure in general tend to favor development of appreciation for modern style vice traditional, and these exposures happen to be common for the elites in the last 100 years or so?
It may be an ‘does X cause Y’ problem where status is correlated but not causal.
>It might be helpful to go through a list of countries, see which have more modern vs. traditional architecture, and correlate that with their system of government and level of inequality. My impression is that the more democratic and developed a country, the more modern its architecture, which would require a lot of additional explanation.
I think that social homogeneity/heterogeneity is a better way to look at it as opposed to the level of wealth inequality. In the less developed places, you have less diversity in terms of jobs, hobbies and so on, for example in a very poor African nation everybody would be a farmer or a miner or be engaged in some form of physical labour or what have you. In the "more democratic and developed countries" the culture, lifestyles and environments are far more diverse so there is a lot of social fragmentation. In a largely agrarian country, there would be little lifestyle or cultural diversity, whereas in a country like America there would be an awful lot.
I think it mostly has to do with the shift from autocratic aristocratic societies to modern bourgeois democratic ones.
In aristocratic societies, the rule of the hereditary nobility lacks any rational legitimacy. So they constantly have to appeal to other kinds of legitimacy. They do so by constantly wowing and bamboozling the public (i.e. the lower classes) into thinking that the they, the nobles, are special, extraordinary beings, blessed with the grace of the heavens. So that’s the purpose of classical aristocratic art: making oneself appear as a higher, otherworldly being, separated from the ordinary material world of the peasantry, endowed with a supernatural (mostly religious) legitimacy. The ruling aristocrats are the chosen ones of the gods – and they have to look and act like it.
In modern bourgeois democratic societies, the status and power of the ruling class is not (overtly) coercive and hereditary. Their rule seems to be rational, based on legitimate public consent. The politicians are voted into office because they are judged by the public to be the best for the job (in theory), and the rich are richer than others because they are the most productive on the fair and perfect marketplace (in theory). So since modern democratic elites understand their power and status to be legitimated (mostly) by rational public consent, they don’t feel the need to appeal to a higher legitimacy – by constantly wowing the public and convincing them of their superiority. In a democratic setting, doing so might actually prove detrimental, which is why modern elites mostly do the opposite: they try to convince the public that they themselves are ordinary people like everyone else.
I think the bland modern architecture is to do just that as well: it serves to demonstrate the ordinary, unexceptional and therefore egalitarian and democratic merit of the building and its purpose. More classical and pompous architecture might be (more or less rightfully) perceived as aristocratic, elitist and therefore anti-democratic. And I think there is some empirical truth to this. Pompous and ostentatious buildings are still being constructed … but almost exclusively by markedly autocratic regimes. In a democratic setting, spending public funds for rational but boring expenditures, such as public utilities, may gain a politician more public approval than spending it on ostentatious building programs. Thus, a cheap and bland modern building is a seemingly prudent and democratic building; an expansive and sensational building is a seemingly wasteful and autocratic building.
In a democratic setting, elites have to prove they are prudent and ordinary (even though they may not be) in order to secure the rational legitimacy from the governed. In an aristocratic (autocratic) setting, elites have to prove they are utterly extraordinary (even though they most likely are not) to secure their personal glory and thus the perception of supernatural legitimacy.
(Obviously many modern autocrats also heavily try appealing to ordinary appearances in order to fake democratic legitimacy. They want to have it both: the personal grandeur and the man-of-the-people persona – and most likely they are failing at both of them)
What about classical Greece and Renaissance Italy? If anything, republican/democratic politics and commercial economies seem to only fuel more artistic output as politicians and merchants seek public renown by commissioning art. But that link has been largely broken in modern times, as few would care if Bezos commissioned a painting, so instead he goes to space.
As far as I know, both the city states of Classical Greece and the republics of Renaissance Italy were exceedingly aristocratic. Sure, most had mixed constitutions, including also some democratic and monarchical elements, but I think it’s fair to say that the aristocratic element was by far the most dominant. Almost all of those cities were dominated by a hand full of noble houses, constantly busy imposing their own grandeur. That democracy comes at the price of ordinariness and blandness has always been a common critic of democracy from the Greek classics all the way to Nietzsche in the modern era.
In general, I don’t think it makes much sense equating the socioeconomic dynamics of premodern Europe with today’s industrial capitalism, which comes with very different socioeconomic (and thus cultural) dynamics – that’s why I stressed the “modern bourgeois” part of democracy. Modern (mostly) bourgeois democracies are not the same as premodern (mostly) aristocratic republics.
What I find interesting, however, is that the bourgeois class, once it eclipsed the nobility in wealth and power in the long 19th century, for a long time still stuck to the ‘high culture’ style of the old aristocracies, since they still thought it essential to emulate aristocratic appearances in order to secure legitimacy. That may be why in the late-19th/early-20th century, bourgeois republics were erecting neoclassical buildings en masse. It’s also why John Adamas famously argued that the US president should be addressed as Your Highness. Such aristocratic illusions seem to have mostly disappeared from today’s mass democracies.
Modern elites seem more interested in appearing ordinary rather than extraordinary. I guess that’s part of Trumps appeal – he dares to be extraordinary. A shift backwards towards the construction of imposing neoclassical structures could thus also be interpreted as reflecting an autocratic shift in the broader political culture. I’m not saying that’s necessarily true, but I think it’s interesting.
Your argument is starting to sound more plausible, but you've narrowed the relevant dichotomy down to aristocratic vs egalitarian, without the political dimension (autocratic vs democratic) you originally included. It now fits history better, but we have to ask why the existence of aristocracy would matter. Unless we believe it's all down to the genes of particular aristocratic families, it must have to do with the education and socialization of the members of those families.
This dovetails with the thesis I offered above, that there was a change from a paradigm in which artists and their clients generally agreed on the core principles of good art to one in which the rules were abandoned in favor of individual expression. Aristocracy matters because when an insular minority is responsible for all of a society's artistic output, you're more likely to see convergence on a core set of aesthetic principles... right?
Well, our view of history would be incomplete without considering the United States. Egalitarian from the beginning, at least in the North, we also have our fair share of monumental architecture, particularly in structures related to civic institutions, infrastructure (e.g. train stations), and public squares. The rise of industrialization only brought a greater proliferation of grand architecture, from the Carnegie libraries to the skyscrapers of Chicago to the opulent mansions of Newport, RI.
I get what you're saying, that a god-king seeks to inspire awe while a populist politician tries to seem like an everyman, but I think the overall effect of democratization is to give a much larger population the chance to make a name for themselves, so this should generally result in more people wanting to do big, impressive stuff. That is in fact what we saw in US architecture for generations, and we still see it today, only the stakes have risen. Funding a university isn't enough to make a splash anymore; you have to go to space now.
Also what we see in the US is that the state continues seeking to aggrandize itself, it's just not in the service of a single man any more. Hence the monuments and grand buildings of DC, as well as the town halls, courthouses, and war monuments which stand as the most impressive structures in towns across the country.
I think your thesis needs to account for why the change in architectural standards in the US was not associated with a new emergence of egalitarianism here. That thesis might work better in Europe, which didn't really become democratic until after WWII. But we already were egalitarian, and we still built monumental architecture as an expression of various aspects of our egalitarian culture.
I already tried to present a theory on why the US bourgeoisie (and European ones at a similar time) was so obsessed with monumental neoclassical architecture, in my third paragraph. I will try to flesh it out a bit:
The aesthetics of wealth and power at the time were still shaped by the aristocratic visuals of the past. The bourgeoisie had become the dominant social class, but culturally the jumped-up class suffered from a sort of inferiority complex, trying to outdo the grandeur of the ancien regimes by (over)reliance on the architectural language of classical republicanism. The American bourgeoisie in particular was especially motivated not only to outdo the old aristocracies but the competing European bourgeoisie as well. The New World was not to be a savage hinterland but culturally abreast with the capitals of the Old World.
After WWII, the US was sprinkled with grandiose neoclassical structures it could construct and spread easily, while much of Europe lay in ruins. The US was the indisputable superpower, both politically and culturally, so there appears to have been no need anymore to emulate the (architectural) styles of old, aristocratic Europe. The modern US bourgeoisie had achieved a level of security and legitimacy that no longer required the outdated aesthetics of classical grandeur. As a consequence, architecture became more practical and less representative. Where it was representative, it was to be markedly different from the classical Old World – appealing to frugality, egality and practicality. The cultural subtext being: We don’t need false pomp and grandeur; our rule is legitimated by rational consensus alone.
It should also be remarked that the early US was not as democratic as is often implied. Only one of its three federal branches of government was to be elected by a direct democratic vote. The president was to be elected by more or less independent, upper-class electors, and the Senate directly by the governments of the states. And even the democratic vote was limited to white, male, fairly old property owners – thus excluding the vast majority of the population. Sure, for its time this was still remarkably democratic, and the US after all never had a ‘hereditary’ aristocracy. BUT the American elite did very much consider itself to be a ‘natural’ aristocracy – chosen due to their individual, natural abilities. So, even without a hereditary nobility, the US upper classes (both in the south and the north) have for a long time been influenced by a distinct aristocratic culture. This culture came more and more under pressure by the democratic advances of the 20th century.
I see that your username identifies you as a Marxist, so you're probably inclined to think in terms of class. That can be a useful tool sometimes, but it shouldn't be the only tool in your kit.
It could be as simple as that Americans who founded towns wanted them to look nice, and everyone shared a design language at the time which was heavily influenced by classical architecture (and neoclassicism was also popular in Europe, so the idea that Americans specifically chose this idiom for its republican connotations may be a bit of a red herring).
Regardless of class affiliation, if you wanted a civic building or town square, you would hire architects and urban designers who were all steeped in a common set of ideas. Everyone agreed on the end goal: to make something formal and impressive, something that had basically the same effect as its analogue in every other town in the known world. And the things they built then have a similar effect on us today, so it seems that people really had worked out over the centuries how to do impressive monumental architecture.
There was nothing essentially democratic or antidemocratic about this. A town was supposed to have a civic plaza whether it was in Ohio or Bohemia. What was different about the US is we didn't have the lord's castle on the hill -- all the monumental structures were property of the state and thus, in theory, the people. But despite the difference in sociopolitical context, the monumental architecture was built anyway, and not just during some distinct period of acute national insecurity, but for probably 150 years, through waves of immigration and tumultuous socioeconomic changes.
You should at least consider the possibility that it had as much to do with facts on the ground -- common prejudices, training and education, reference points, constraints, etc -- as with the timeless logic of class distinctions. The problem of how to build structures with certain effects on their audience is not specific to any sociopolitical context, so whether we're talking about American bourgeoisie or European aristocrats or a committee of proletarian urban planners, if their goal is to build a civic plaza with some impressive buildings and statues, they'll end up drawing from similar wells. Think of it in terms of convergent evolution.
I think you're still not properly isolating your variables. The notion that Americans moved on from neoclassical architecture because our ruling class was finally secure in its position may make sense when you only look at our history, but then why did Europe undergo a similar transition away from traditional idioms? What about the Soviet housing projects? As Alexander suggested, the change seems secular, not specific to any particular context. There are too many confounding variables to explain it in terms of US political economy.
Of course my attempt of a ‘Marxist’ explanation isn’t the only valid one. But I think that it does contribute a useful and important element (maybe even the most important element) to explain the issue at hand. I don’t think that aesthetic and architectural norms and preferences develop randomly in a cultural vacuum, disconnected and independently from the socioeconomic structure that very literally produces them. Instead, I belief that the enormous socioeconomic changes human civilization has experienced during the last couple of centuries must have had a large impact on cultural and aesthetical norms as well. Therefore, I don’t think it’s much of stretch to argue that the bourgeois class, once it came into power, heavily (and quite consciously) relied on monumental architecture inspired by classical (mostly aristocratic) republicanism, in order to boost its yet fragile political legitimacy.
I also find it somewhat unfair of you to criticize me for focusing to much on the US. The reason I focused on the US in my previous comment was because you specifically asked me to do so – which is legitimate since the US is in many ways a special and interesting case. My first two comments, however, did not focus on the US, but instead laid out my case more generally.
Regarding the changes following WWII, again I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to argue that during the first half of the 20th century, the aristocratic nobility was mostly wiped out (both figuratively and somewhat literally), the labor movement gained a lot of political influence, bourgeois society thus ended up heavily democratized, and that therefore the monumental architecture of the past came to be associated with authoritarianism, pretention and public waste. Given this more democratic and less aristocratic social climate (aristocratic both in the European hereditary and in the American ‘natural’ sense), it’s small wonder that the more practical (and I guess more cost-effective) Bauhaus-style come into fashion and began to shape modernity. Since autocrats the world over still relied heavily on the monumental architecture of the past, it furthermore became a signifier of anti-democratic grandstanding and unimaginative kitsch.
Have you ever heard of St Joseph, Missouri? I like to use Google Maps to explore the world, and I particularly enjoy checking out random towns across the US. The architecture and streetscapes are often quite pleasing, and some of them have surprisingly illustrious histories. When I stumbled on St Joseph, I could not believe how impressive the municipal courthouse was. Take a look at it below. Built in 1873, it's just a courthouse in some random town you've never heard of. But it's almost grand enough to be a national capitol, if you ask me.
Well it’s certainly charming, but I’m not sure what you are trying to say. Are “grand” capitols a sign of the democratic spirit of its citizenry? One of the most “grand” capitols I can think of is Romania’s ‘Palace of the Parliament’. Needless to say, its construction was ordered by Romania’s dictator, without consulting the Romanian people who (allegedly) despised it. Many of the most spectacular public buildings in the present and past were and are constructed by autocrats, lacking rational democratic legitimacy.
Of course, I don’t have a problem with citizens coming together, democratically deciding to build and fund grand public buildings – they should be perfectly free to do so. I’m just saying that a lot of grand public buildings that exist, were not created this way, and that the people, if they were given a choice, might oftentimes prefer the public funds to be spent for more practical purposes.
Sorry, if I am interpreting too much into your comment.
I was just providing anecdotal evidence for my assertion that even amid the democratic egalitarianism of the US, monumental architecture was ubiquitous until the aesthetic transition.
We can automate ornament, but we can't automate the process of each bit of ornament being made by humans who are gradually tweaking it to make it more satisfying.
****
Older brick factories and warehouses would always (?) have a little bit of unnecessary ornament. they didn't have gargoyles, but they'd have brick arches over the windows or somesuch. They weren't just boxes.
Interestingly, I have a very strong preference for the business suit over the emperor's garb. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I think it's the cohesion of the business suit which makes me like it more, not specifically the austerity. It's an ensemble: the simple dark of 80% of the suit helps draw the eye to the cuffs and neck where bright colors and contrast flash, and the austerity gives way to a little more detail and design.
The bridesmaids and groomsmen (and to a lesser degree the groom) are all deliberately more austerely dressed than the bride (and to a lesser degree the groom.) There's exactly one person who's supposed to be the centerpiece of the show, and so there's one person allowed to wear something ornate and of a unique, contrasting color to everyone else.
And I think that's a useful thing to design an outfit to do. You WANT people to be looking at your face, or tracking your hands as you gesture. It's kind of rude and awkward if they're staring at the ornate, beautiful whorls on your left knee instead. Good art includes good framing, and good framing draws the eye to where the artist wants it while being non-distracting.
On the other hand, the robe is basically unframed. Where are your eyes drawn? The dragon on the chest probably SHOULD be the focal point, but there's equally vivid, intricate, colorful, etc. details all over the robe. The eyes aren't particularly drawn to the dragon, because there's nothing visually different about it. To me, it looks kind of like a bunch of overly proud tailors were assigned different parts of the same outfit, and each was determined to show off their best skill and make a centerpiece out of their part of it.
Obviously not mainstream, and really a reimagining of the older style, but it's an illustration of how ornateness can still work well and have good framing (even though the emperor's robes really don't.)
Perhaps neurology or specifically neuronal plasticity is part of the explanation. To some extent, perhaps to a great extent, our preferences for certain shapes, lines, patterns, colors, and sounds have had to do with what we have been exposed to from birth until adulthood. Over the centuries these early life experiences have changed drastically. To get one silly off the cuff poorly thought out example: our modern lives are so filled with chaos, screens, rapidly changing things in a visual field, perhaps this predisposes us to Prefer square unelaborated buildings.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Fountainhead. In one of the earliest scenes (it might even be in the first few paragraphs), the protagonist (who is basically Frank Lloyd Wright with Ayn Rand's moral sensibilities) shits all over the Parthenon for not being innovative -- the celebrated classical elements being holdovers from wooden temples. "Copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood" is the way Rand describes late-19th/early 20th pre-modern architecture.
That had an impact on me. I used to hate modern architecture, but after that I started to appreciate it for being innovative and having its own type of aesthetic value, which is different from the more ornate styles, but not necessarily worse. As a corollary, I've come to disdain new buildings that try to copy older styles, not because they are ugly, but because they are lazy and backwards looking.
Yeah that book gave me a lifelong love of skyscrapers!
But as I got older I think it's more subtle. It's not "Columns are evil and the actual Parthenon/Tudor Style/whatever" is bad or ugly.
It's that things belong where they make sense: a real medieval castle vs a fake one, or a pastiche of medieval and Greek and Tudor, or fake columns on a skyscraper, or an opulent facade on a normal house (think Italian facades in parts of Brooklyn!)
(If you remember, the "modernistic" exhibition later in the book that looks like squeezed out toothpaste also gets no love, nor do plain old boxes everywhere!)
I personally don't love Wright because it's so dark inside some of those houses!
I agree. Rand wrapped the whole thing up in her rigid morality, but you don’t have to be an Objectivist to believe that art should aspire to more than imitation.
I don't think it's quite true that more democratic countries have more modern architecture. Lots of modernist buildings are built in China.
That leads me to a question -- has modern architecture always been unpopular with the masses, or this a relatively new phenomenon?
I have the impression that when societies are generally optimistic about the future (e.g. China today), they embrace art and culture that makes a break with the past and charts a new course to something that is assumed to be better. Meanwhile, societies that are generally pessimistic about the future (e.g. the US today( embrace art and culture that hearkens back to a lost "golden age".
If there is any truth to that, I expect modernism would have started to lose popularity sometime around the 1970s or so, maybe experiencing a brief resurgence in the 1990s.
The obvious counterexample is The Renaissance, which revived Greek and Roman styles. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm also not sure how long it lasted before new styles took over.
-We consume a lot more information now, maybe we like quieter aestethics now to give our brain a rest? The more goes on inside, the cleaner our environment needs to be, visually and auditorially? Maybe our brain needs a certain amount of stimulus, and a lot of busy figures and prints and details provides a lot more stimulus.
-Some aspect of modern art is also the skill of appreciating it. That is why back in the day if art was not realistic and you did not like it right away you would dismiss it. But now there apparently is a skill to it, so if you dismiss it you admit your ignorance of being able to appreciate high art. And sometimes this is pushed to an extreme where nobody really likes something, but few want to admit, and a turd in a plastic bag is suddenly worth millions.
And maybe the reason for that is that intellectual pursuit is much more highly valued now? Whereas piety was more highly valued back in the day.
-As for general visual art, and possibly large building projects, they were a much greater cost back then. As a percentage of incomes (paint and materials) and GDP. So if something was produced, it better be something of obvious great skill. Add in that hierarchies were much more rigid, and gate keeping was much easier.
-This adds in to my last point, for something to catch on to the point where it becomes worth doing, it needs a certain critical mass of adopters. In a society where 80% is farmer and is poor, and where information travels very slowly, it is simply not possible to get this critical mass for anything that is beyond obviously easy to interpret and enjoy as a very skilled work of art.
I think a lot of ideas and tastes are also locked into network effects. So if you got a small well connected elite, they keep each other locked into the same taste. Whereas in a more fractured modern society where more people can consume, different sub cultures can more easily form?
-Obviously whenever finding the reason for some social trend, there isn't one answer, there are often multiple forces that work together to keep something locked in place. And multiple forces at once that are required to break this network effect.
Part of it is related to Baumol cost disease, in that we can get a lot of nice things today for that money that were inaccessible in the middle ages, while the cost of producing art has arguably gone up in absolute terms because the salary of a skilled artist is much higher. Part of it is just different values - we value art much less compared to our general standard of living, and I think it's a good thing.
If you want to look for an historical precedent, the Roman republic/empire may be one. Their art and monuments were much less impressive with respect to other ancient mediterranean civilizations, especially once you factor in the larger Roman population and economy. On the other hand, they built a lot of useful things like roads, bridges, and aqueducts. Plus, like us they spent a lot in popular entertainment (gladiatorial games, chariot races...). On the whole, we remember them as a great civilization, enough that we try to forget their fondness for enslaving people and torturing them to death if they rebelled.
This is in the beginning of "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath" -- an iconic Russian New year's eve movie whose premise is a man accidentally ending up in the same apartment, same lock and key, same furniture even, same address, same building.... Just in a different city.
The cartoon has no words in it but it speaks exactly to the issue your outlined in architecture.
> One possibility is that, even though normal people prefer traditional architecture, modern architecture is actually better, and good architects know this. This is not really the way I think of aesthetics, but I guess it’s possible.
Maybe it's not just aesthetics, but modern design is just more functional and practical. More than likely, it's the confluence of "functional, practical, cost effective", all of which incentivize modern design.
It's also possible that "the grass is always greener on the other side", ie. if people lived in classical buildings, they'd actually prefer modern design.
I think there is just a general aesthetic trend away from elaborate ostentatiousness and toward something more minimalistic and elegant, once some maximum of reasonable ostentatiousness has been reached.
I think it’s kind of illustrative, actually, to look at computers. Remember Windows XP, where the buttons all looked glossy and shaded and brightly colored? Modern Windows UI is flat, solidly colored panels. Today, the Windows XP look looks inescapably tacky and old-fashioned. You can see the same trend with websites, and even with corporate logos, which are all gradually evolving in a more flat and minimalistic direction. This is despite Windows XP being much younger than modernism in architecture!
I’d suggest the mechanism here is something more along the lines of a general drive away from what seems old-fashioned at a given time. Computers and the internet are new; the initial evolution in their history was toward showing off greater technological capabilities (look, more colors! Look, shading!). Then, when that potential had been exhausted and there weren’t really ways to keep making things look even fancier that way anymore, instead that look became dated and tacky-looking, and sleeker, more streamlined designs came to be considered more modern in comparison.
The general populace, meanwhile, doesn’t have as much of a sense that something looks tacky or old, compared to the people in the field working on designing the new.
I don’t think we should necessarily assume that new art and architecture can’t be ornate in new and innovative ways. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if we see a move in that direction, since it seems like we may have recently passed peak minimalist.
I wonder how much of this is survival bias? Do people like classic art/music/architecture because only the best examples are still around? Will people like contemporary styles once the mediocre examples have been filtered out by the passage of time?
I would say no. I live in the periphery of Europe where we have many mediocre examples of 17th and 18th century buildings (it's not that the only ones left are the best examples), and I like them much more than the modern buildings we have. Of course, our modern architecture is also mediocre I suppose, but then they should look equally bad. I like even the early 20th century factory worker's cheap housing districts more than the modern housing districts for the cosy middle class. I know it's because I haven't learned architecture and have undeveloped taste.
While there have already been many plausible and complementary explanations, including economic drivers with respect to architecture, Stephen Hicks' article on "Why Art Became Ugly" is a useful thesis regarding the aggressive ugliness of modern art,
"The big break with the past occurred toward the end of the nineteenth
century. Until the end of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness,
meaning, and passion. Its goals were the significant, originality, beauty, the sublime.
The artist was a skilled master of his craft. Such masters were able to create original
representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining vision and
skill, artists were exalted beings capable of creating objects that in turn had an
awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who
experience them.
The break with that tradition came when the first modernists of the late 1800s
set themselves systematically to the project of isolating all the elements of art and
eliminating them or flying in the face of them. . . .
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual
world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded,
exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity,
optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared.
The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for
beauty. So the question became: What is the truth of art?
The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand that we
recognize the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying,
horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible."
Read on to be reminded of the stunningly aggressive ugliness and offensiveness of modern art.
Whether to reject pre-revolutionary aesthetics or to democratise them was a very real and explicit debate in the post-war Soviet Union. Though as long as resources are scarce, any earnest central planner may be forgiven for building two tenements instead of a single gilded tenement with chandeliers.
The only context necessary is multiple levels and lots of green.
There are still a couple places that are building intricate buildings but they are mostly religious: Hindu Temples in India, Buddhist temples in Thailand, Islamic buildings in the middle east. Here are some hindu examples: Akshardham temple in New Delhi https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/02/akshardham-temple.html.
the Sheikh Zaid Grand Mosque in abu dhabi, hassan ii mosque in morroco were built in the 1990s/2000s.
These temples/mosques strike me as high context. As the world gets more diverse/globalized high context becomes a problem because it makes it harder to relate. It is easier to all speak english and wear a suit because it reduces transaction costs. Public buildings all the more need to be low context so that they don't create problems. Religious buildings by contrast can and should be high context because their whole point is the context: religion. The decline in religious buildings being high context are probably a sign of secularism as much as they are protestantism.
I do think labor costs are related here, the higher context, the higher amount of time it takes to be read someone in. If labor costs increase it becomes too expensive to read them in so to speak.
A tour guide at a cathedral I visited said that the intricate sculptures and paintings were a way of teaching the Bible and local history to a non-literate population.
ya that is a big part of how i am thinking about it. If everyone is literate why not just point to the books instead of pointing to the statues/pictures/architecture?
This is an interesting theory, although it is completely at odds with the "modernist architecture is about signalling how sophisticated and educated you are" theory.
I don't yet have an opinion on either the frequently mentioned signalling theory or on Stephen Jonesyoung's theory. (Both assume some psychological insight into architectural elites which I don't possess.)
However, I disagree that they are necessarily complete at odds. Speculatively: abandoning some of the tangible components of one's own cultural tradition might have two simultaneous motivations. One would be a display of sophistication (i.e. signalling). The other would be a practical approach to the increasing frequency and intensity of interactions with cultural outsiders (i.e. lowering transaction costs to increase the benefits of globalization). Can't they go together, or am I missing something?
Time flies, but I somehow remembered this old EconLog post on this subject. Their view is that this is definitely a species of status signaling:
<i>I’m currently reading a truly interesting book, which some of EconLog’s readers may be already familiar with: “The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939” by John Carey. Carey argues, in his own words, “that modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century education reform.” He thus describes How intellectuals endeavoured to develop an increasingly less intelligible sort of artistic production, to distinguish and separate themselves from “the masses.”</i>
I like this part:
<i>One of the ways in which “common men” are depicted in “uncommon books,” Carey points out, is as partakers of bad food. Simple and “industrialized” food habits speak badly of those who hold them. In particular, a customary enemy of the high culture intellectual happens to be tinned food.
...
We saw E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast eats tinned food, a practice that is meant to tell us something significant about Leonard, and not to his advantage. The Norwegian Knut Hamsun waged intermittent war in his novels against tinned food, false teeth and other modern nonsense. T.S. Eliot’s typist in “The Waste Land” ‘lays out food in tins’ (…) Tinned salmon is repeatedly a feature of lower-class cuisine in Graham Greene.</i>
"But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling."
This was very much my experience in liberal arts academia. So much time was spent on internal conflicts that I often felt conversations had fallen into the Pit of Self-Reference and were no longer meaningful to anyone outside the specific discipline. I found myself being flung out of these circular arguments into "just do some damn empirical research" conclusions a lot.
I feel like "garishness" is a big factor in all of this. The Taj Mahal looks cool. But if every building in your city looks as bright and complex as the Taj Mahal, then it's a bit over the top. Now that it's no longer expensive to produce bright/colourful/complex art/architecture/clothing etc because of industrialisation, we can't all go out and make it that way because it would look super garish and loud and a lot of people would hate that. What looks great for one building doesn't look so great for an entire city.
Now, the ideal would be to have a bit of both. Mostly modern architecture, but with a few "special" buildings thrown in with a classical style. But who wants to be that one building that goes against the grain? Far easier to just play it safe.
Philip Glass is an interesting (counter-?)example, since he was scorned by the classical music establishment for most of his career precisely because is music is too broadly appealing. To start, he formed his own small band of players to play his music, was then gradually accepted by experimental theater, modern dance, mid-career pop singers, corporate record labels, late night comedy shows, avant-garde filmmakers, mainstream filmmakers, and only recently, decades after he started, has he been regularly getting performances and commissions from the major orchestras and soloists that are arbiters of taste in the classical music world.
And there's still a lot of Philip Glass resistance, too, especially in the music conservatory world. I know of at least one composer who was literally inspired to become a composer because they heard Philip Glass' music as a child, and yet they don't write music anything like Philip Glass', probably at least partly because doing so would make it harder to get teaching jobs and convince classical musicians play their music, probably also because they were steered in a different direction by their teachers.
I guess Glass is an example of how someone who appeals to commoners can wrest grudging acceptance from the elites through sheer persistence and stubbornness. Are there any examples of this in other fine arts fields? I'd be curious to hear from people familiar with other areas.
Another interesting thing about Glass in the context of this discussion is that while his music appeals more broadly than most other contemporary classical music, it also conspicuously lacks the intricacy and ornateness of the old masters.
A favorite story - the guy who got in a cab in NYC, saw the name tag of the driver and says "Hay you have the same name as the famous composer Philip Glass".
Glass was part of a movement reacting against the "crazy, creepy music" of the serialists. For more on the history of the "downtown music" reaction against high-status "uptown music" (academic, Columbia) and its distance from bourgeois "midtown music" (conservatory, Juilliard), see Kyle Gann's music reviews for the Village Voice, gathered in the book "Music Downtown". Amusingly, Kyle Gann now has a teaching gig at Barnard, so downtown has invaded uptown. Kyle Gann is an old white dude, though, so not long for the world.
One: When ornament can be mass-produced, it loses its purpose as a signifier of wealth or specialness. This is partly addressed in your comments on signaling wealth to taste, but I'd go a bit further to the specific observations made about people like Donald Trump, who still choose a highly ornamented design aesthetic. Most people don't view it as a status symbol, but rather an anti-status symbol; "he's rich, but has no taste" is a common opinion.
Traditionally opulent design now reads as gauche to many people - this is probably due to a mix of changing tastes, some really questionable design trends in the 80s and 90s, and the availability of mass media to tell us in detail how generally shitty some wealthy people are. With no mystique and no specialness other than that provided by wealth, it all seems like excess in the name of nothing.
Two: I'm curious what you think about the specifics of the art economy at the time that much of these classic works were done - for example, a lot of great Italian classical art and architecture exists explicitly because of the Medicis. This is a scenario in which wealthy patrons and the government are actually the same, which allows public works to be an explicit expression of wealth. There are comparably fewer situations today, I think?
One modern example is the J. Irwin Miller (and family) effect on Columbus, Indiana. A wealthy patron of specifically public goods; a library, city hall, etc. The modernism on display there is pioneering work for multiple artists and leads the way for a lot of derivative work. Is it possible that we're "stuck" in modernism/postmodernism because we need more wealthy patrons of public works to invest in daring design?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Rap is so mind-bendingly bad that attempts at mocking rap simply yield… rap." Every time I've heard someone express this sentiment and then rap mockingly, they sound quite bad compared to rap, and the fact that they can't tell the difference makes me question their opinions on music in general...
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.
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.
Socialism is correct, so it should be more pervasive.
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.
Death, destruction and ruin is part of human nature, so I don't think we can really pin it all on socialism.
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.
Can you name an author from the 19th century who predicted the rise of communism better than Marx?
Eugen Richter.
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.
Oh yeah, I'd prefer jeans and tshirt to either, but if I had to pick between the options presented, it'd be the traditional garb.
Who wouldn't want to work in a cathedral? I just...why not? It's a freaking cathedral! What's the downside? Where's the upside of the block university?
And who wouldn't want to live in a beautiful castle like Cardiff than in a boring square box like Gate's built? And who would rather wear a boring suit then beautiful courtly dress?
In other words, yeah, from my point of view you're the crazy one. And it seemed like the surveys indicated two thirds of the country is more on my side then yours, so to speak.
In terms of music, there are trends in which I suspect we're becoming more accessible and broadly "nice-sounding", especially as the lines between art music, jazz, film scores, video game music, etc. blur. Caroline Shaw comes to mind, she won the 2013 music Pulitzer but her compositions are relatively accessible. Another factor is rejection of minimalism, where some composers are embracing noise, like in field recordings or sound art, and others are moving back to new romantic compositions.
In addition, the old stuff is just boring now, to compose (not to appreciate). It's a lot easier to go and pretend to be Vivaldi, but it's what composition students do to learn. Pushing the field forward requires trying new things, and sometimes they'll sound great and sometimes they'll sound weird, but the important part is the new.
And for the record, I much prefer Glass to Mozart.
I've never understood Mozart's popularity.
Who has more money and power?
This guy:
https://www.mvrdv.nl/media/uploads/3(31).jpg
Or this guy:
https://homedesignlover.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/3-victorian-window.jpg
The guy who owns the first one, also owns a much more comfortable room that looks more like the second one, where he sits, relaxes, hangs out with his wife, and talks to his kids about their day. And only his immediate family, closest friends, and most immediate staff have access.
The Filter of Time is also a factor. Good things are valued, and therefore resources are expended in maintaining them. Bad things are not maintained and decay.
There are any number of terrible buildings, artworks, and other artefacts which have been allowed to disappear because no-one thought them worth keeping.
We see this in fields with a long history including art, music, and architecture. Things that are old are almost universally respected as being good.
To throw another datapoint in there: whatever general theory of austerity is developed, it also needs to explain the turn away from contrasting spices in Renaissance Europe. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/26/394339284/how-snobbery-helped-take-the-spice-out-of-european-cooking . It's notable that in the case of food, it seems obvious that the elites have more or less completely turned average opinion to their way of thinking for a large chunk of the world.
I think the World Wars theory has a lot of merit. When something is strongly governed by taste, the politics associated with taste matter immensely. Both Post-World War I and Post-World War II there was a lot of wonderful experiments with modernism and postmodernism and so on. Some great, some less so, much not of interest to non-specialists. But traditional art and architecture at the same time became associated with a politics was considered quite distasteful, a politics that was considered the cause of these wars.
Consider one of the most excellent homes in Saint Louis as Exhibit A: https://www.stlmag.com/design/a-decades-long-renovation-returns-a-midwestern-palazzo-to-it/
Or Donald Trump's Penthouse Exhibit B:
https://www.idesignarch.com/wp-content/uploads/Donald-Melania-Trump-Manhattan-Penthouse_1.jpg
Penance must be done, and those are not doing artistic and architectural penance symbolize the return of the barbarian in man.
As someone who likes brutalist (and deconstructionist) architecture quite a lot, and enjoys listening to modern atonal music, I would say *different* (but not *better*) aesthetic truths.
One of the things in my adult life that I would say maps to a religious experience was seeing a concert by the Japanese electronic/noise composer Ryoji Ikeda. You can see some excerpts at https://youtube.com/watch?v=qzvZIV0u7vk . (The experience of being in the front row, with earplugs in, feeling the noise pound on you is a lot more intense than watching someone's mobile phone footage, to be fair.)
I think some people might describe this and other atonal/noise music as ‘sublime’, but that's a little too high falutin' for me. So I'd say that it's enjoyable in a way that running around in a thunderstorm, with the lightning flashing, feeling the air shake as the thunder rolls nearby, fighting as the wind tries to push you around is enjoyable. I think brutalist buildings are enjoyable in a similar way. A way that feels a little more energetic and excited, something more bracing than soothing.
Romantic symphonies can be bracing and antagonistic, too. I'd guess that they're as beloved as they are because they ‘top out’ the ratio of accepting/welcoming to bracing/antagonistic that most people like. I strongly suspect, just from personal experience, that a trained ear has something to do with it. Studying music in an academic context made me like noisy, atonal, difficult music a lot more. Not just high-class stuff, but also decidedly low class stuff like death metal. (Heck, I like Billy Joel and Sweet which are about as low-class and hated by critics as you can get.) The atonality and noise feel more structured. (Then again I also had a wonderful, near rapturous time finding the music in the noises from an MRI machine. Perhaps I'm just good at liking things and/or aesthetics is as much weird artistic pareidolia as it is anything else. I have a low-grade suspicion that people who might rate themselves highly on the knurd-to-always-tripping-a-little axis would also be more likely to enjoy unpopular forms of art.)
There's also probably some societal level of where the ‘ceiling’ of acceptably difficult art is that goes up over time as formerly unpopular techniques become popular, at least if there's any truth to the story of The Rite of Spring's initial reception. A societal version of the ‘trained ear’.
I think the novelty seeking that others have mentioned also plays a strong role. I kind of like the ‘walkie talkie’ building in London not because of any real aesthetic chord but because when I first saw it, I hadn't seen anything like it before. The way it was curved made it look like some building from another world that didn't quite belong in this one bursting out of our reality and inflating itself into a proper building and having not quite finished yet.
(There is also the unfortunate institutional dark side of this where things that are very well known are thought to be 'played out' and met with contempt as mere copies. Hopefully one day this will stop happening.)
Basically, I think the status/signaling arguments are mostly all-wet (all-damp?) with the exception of the dark-side of institutional novelty seeking as mentioned above, and that the people who end up in institutional positions related to the arts have gone through arts education which likely involves both self-selection and acculturation to sincerely liking antagonistic/bracing or unpopular art and wanting to see more of and support it.
Hot peppers, Sichuan peppercorn, and the like might be a decent analogy.
They have a distinct and definite flavor that some people like quite a lot. The more one has eaten them, and the more common they become in society generally, the more intense a fix of that particular flavor someone who desires it might seek out.
Yes, there is some signaling function, people do occasionally feel like they're proving themself if they can eat hotter food than the people around them. But it's only a minor effect.
And there's some correlation between who makes menus and who studied cooking intensely, and people who study cooking intensely are likely more inclined to try out unusual flavors and flavor combinations by temperament and training than average, and so enjoy more unusual things.
I'm finding that I like the Ikeda-- it's got a charge that activates the top of my head.
Do you like Sun Ra's music?
I'm not familiar with it, but I'm curious to give it a try. Do you have an album or a few songs you'd recommend starting with?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=238Dh6N9GLg
I'm not an expert-- I just like Sun Ra when I come across his music, but Lanquidity is respected album and seems to be typical.
Are we just overemphasizing Gothic and Baroque styles? Truly “classical” architecture is not THAT ornate - it mostly relies on simple repeated forms. A Greek temple is just a rectangle with rows of columns. The Colosseum had some ornamentation to be sure - but fundamentally it’s a very practical oval constructed of arches and columns that needed to be that way to hold the thing up Egypt? Lots of fancy paintings and monumental statues, but the “architecture” was mostly simple shapes (the most famous of course being literally just giant triangles clad in smooth white stone). Japanese classic architecture positively values relatively simple shapes and clean interiors.
I think you're overthinking the issue way too much. The answer is mass production, and its corollary, manufacturing flexibility -- neither of which existed back during the Renaissance.
Sure, if you make an elaborate outfit for the Emperor, you might earn a million dollars. But if you manage to re-tool your disposable T-Shirt factory to make each shirt 0.5% cheaper to manufacture, you could earn an extra million *per day*.
Our technology and population density are now at the point where mass production is pretty much the only manufacturing that makes sense. Thus, if you want to be the kind of weirdo who wants to build a new Taj Mahal, or perhaps his own space program, then you need to be a rich weirdo indeed. And the rich weirdoes nowadays tend to go for space programs rather than Taj Mahals (which is not a bad thing at all, IMO).
Also don’t forget Coco Chanel and the sun tan. Prior to the industrial revolution the peasants were brown having toiled in the fields all summer. The rich were pasty white having been inside all year.
With the industrial revolution, the poor disappeared into factories and became as pale as the rich. So one summer Coco Chanel was hanging out in the south of France and said - “To hell with it - I’m not going to hide under a parasol.” And she came back to Paris with a golden glow and the rich said, “Ah yes, the poor toil inside now. We shall frolic outside and display our status with a tan.”
You're essentially asking why art has become mass produced and standardised in an industrial era of economic mass production. As you can imagine, many Marxists have already commented on this at length. I would recommend reading something like Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Production"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction
For a popular TV reformulation of some of the same ideas you might try John Berger's "Ways Of Seeing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
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/
Videogames are mass produced too. The workers who make videogames are doing so in a capitalist setting. The games are programmed by office workers, then put onto a CD at a factory, or maybe downloaded using commodities which have been purchased by the consumer. The existence of representational or non-representational videogames should not surprise us any more than the existence of representational and non-representational photography.
And sure, there's some who make small independent games (just as there are still artisans who lovingly handcraft ornate chairs or whatever). The Marxist point is that these craftsmen fade into insignificance compared to capitalist industry.
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.
I don't think you're understanding the point of Benjamin or Berger here. Their point was not that beauty or elegance cannot exist in an industrial economy.
When the poor look like this:
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MnYwpyaA3OVnnzJCPVz6K1XUF7c=/171x0:854x683/540x540/media/img/mt/2014/09/4296824658_c07ee779ea_b/original.jpg
The rich don’t really have a choice:
https://images.forwardcdn.com/image/1300x/center/images/cropped/b-sisterhood-model-010713-1425665374.jpg
Our elite lack taste.
Let's consider the dichotomy via the lens of the world's increasing 'complexity' as time goes on (see Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation for my usage of 'complexity').
Consider the stereotypical 'simpler' past, where one's day to day life could be deeply mundane, banal, and prosaic. Your life, beliefs, and flow of information closely resembles those of your parents and grandparents. Could we imagine that the artist, as well as the patron and consumer of that art, would be motivated to create the ornate, the elegant, the lavish, all in contrast with the banality of drabness of their environment?
The world can now seem very complicated - dynamic, intricate, complex. Truth is fleeting and reality itself is in near-constant flux. I could imagine how the architect, the designer, and the artist could, inversely, be motivated to create art that is simple - and that those titans of industry who influence their creation would appreciate the same.
I think the world has become more sophisticated or cerebral in past 100 years or so. Society has become more accustomed to and expects abstraction in everyday life. This applies primarily to the more educated elites. We appreciate subtly more. Look how much better TV has gotten! Baroque style is too didactic compared to minimalism. Most monks of any tradition prefer simpler architecture because they spend so much time in abstract contemplation and a loud overbearing style of architecture is considered a distraction.
How would you say TV has gotten better? I watched a lot of TV as a kid in the 90s, and I would not rate what I've seen of 2020's TV as any better than the stuff of 20-25 years ago.
If you look at shows from like the 60s,70s and 80s I think you’ll notice a significant jump in sophistication in storyline and subtlety of dialogue beginning in the 90s.
And movies are clearly worse. It was a switch. That’s all.
You might have a point going back that far. I've barely watched anything from before the 90s. On the other hand, I would take I Love Lucy or All in the Family over modern reality shows any day.
TV got a LOT better with the end of syndication and then the rise of the DVD (which was basically "streaming via postal mail"). Suddenly one could have developing characterization, plots that actually affect the setting, and long interesting story arcs.
The idea that we are smarter than 100 years ago is debatable. The idea that we are smarter than 50 years ago is false.
More cerebral (not quite the same thing as smarter, but related) seems right. There's a lot more interest in world-building (including long-form tv series and movie series) than there used to be.
No. Watching long form TV isn’t as cerebral than reading the books. And book reading has dropped off. It’s clear, anyway, that the news, debate shows, movies, newspapers and culture were more cerebral 50 years ago than now.
I think gaming is a move towards being more cerebral. Or at least doing more complex thinking.
Not for most games, surely. First person shooters. Also what’s the opportunity costs there? What would those gamers have been doing 40 years ago?
Watching sitcoms. <bad> Or running around outside being free range kids. <good>
It's all class warfare. An attempt to exclude and degrade. Tom Wolfe wrote some really perceptive pieces about it. inter alia: "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House".
My basic rule of thumb is that everything the urban elites, do, like, and argue for is valued to the extent that it humiliates, impoverishes, and demoralizes the lower classes.
This is interesting. I was thinking there almost seems to be an element of sadism to it. As if the plebs don't deserve beautiful buildings. But I couldn't pin down the thought any further. I'm going to read those essays, thanks!
Couldn’t we define this discussion as complexity vs simplicity? In olden times your life was simple. You got up, you worked in the mud and then maybe you got to eat, and that’s really about it. You didn’t have much choice in what you did every day and then one day you just died. You needed art in olden times to add complexity. You needed volute columns on your buildings and fancy trills in your fugues. If art is escapism you were escaping your mudworld to an ornate world. Complexity wasn’t aspirational, it was just something you could look at to help you get through your boring ass life.
In now times things are really complex. You wake up and have two hundred emails waiting for you and tps reports and there are 74 different brands of multivitamin, so you gotta worry that the one you bought won’t be as good as all the others and you’ll die from a combo of fomo and choice-overload. You need to escape that complexity and that’s why you might value a rothko over a rembrandt. If you work in the mud you’re lucky and probably have some business where you sell handmade bricks to millionaires in Aspen for 40x the factory brick price. If you make handmade bricks everyday maybe you like rembrandt more than rothko.
Maybe the complexity vs simplicity thing isn’t because tastemakers make it that way, maybe we just flipped that coin in the last 140 years or so because we need a dose of simplicity to get through the daily grind.
Not sure I buy it. The pressures you describe should be applicable even to a low- or mid-level office worker, yet I think those are exactly the people responding at a 2:1 ratio that they don't like modern art. You could perhaps save your theory by positing an inflection point around the CEO level where the complexity becomes too much, but I'm not sure such a point even exists. And I don't think there are many (more than chance) people overwhelmed with the complex demands of modern life who prefer newer art, etc..
I want to put forward a theory for which I have little evidence but had not seen discussed: deliberately forging a new identity. Most of those aesthetics are rooted in one specific culture, often with religious overtones. As organized religion and nationalism declined throughout the 20th Century, culture sought a new identity. The people with the money for new buildings abandoned principles, like ornateness and symmetry, to be something new: somewhat organic but obviously artificial with precision only attainable through the scientific minded e.g. an Apple store.
Since then, it's become subtly associated with wealth, globalism, and multi-culturalism, as both Western and Eastern cultures have adopted this meme, forsaking traditional architecture to forge some idea of a modern world as easily as they abandoned their traditional clothing for blue jeans and t-shirts. Going retro in aesthetics could be like deciding to become deeply religious and going to church: plenty of people do it, but it's shunned in pop culture as being on the "wrong side of history".
I think the signalling taste theory is obviously correct and is supported by a number of different factors (also see every other blog post and tweet Robin Hanson has ever made). Moreover, note that the signalling theory is the only theory which explains why there isn't a socially accepted explanation of the phenomenons mentioned in the piece. Was any other theory (excepting the fun sci-fi conspiracy...and the split theory insofar as the mechanism is just the need to signal status) true and it wasn't already obvious someone would have built an academic career
proving it. Taste questions are relatively easy to test in labs, have little trouble with IRB issues and supplement the massive datasets we have about consumer choices, auction prices not to mention all the historical material assembled by art history departments.
Only the signalling taste theory implies that we can't have common knowledge of the explanation....to advance the correct account is itself to signal you aren't high status while representing an attack on those who are (you would be showing elites to be laughably gullable idiotsand/or engaged in the kind of flaunting we despise).
Importantly, this also explains why high status art isn't merely weird but also often daunting, theory laden or viscerally unappealing to the uninitated. I mean it's notable that the less approachable the work itself is the lower the minimum amount of theory one seems to need for one's appreciation to be deemed classy/good. For instance, just reading Shakespeare for love of the dialog or even the sex jokes draws admiration but if it's watching mass market TV shows you only draw admiration if you can explain how it's ironic in a particular hard to absorb theoretical vocab.
In short, the trick only works if the only people who can claim to have the necessary expertise in that piece of art and associated theoretical framework are those who have convinced themselves it's objectively better. On most of the other theories you would expect to find cases where it turns out that actually certain random pieces of mass market art were exceptional in ways that didn't require theoretical overhead to appreciate. On this theory it makes perfect sense because the only ppl who can claim to have the expertise to evaluate the worth of the art have invested so much into appreciating that art that they won't admit it's nothing special (memetic evo ensures that ithe art is sufficiently unapproachable that anyone who might say it's nothing special won't invest the time to dodge the accusation of ignorance about it)
And this is all stop fact we have evidence that people are quiet good at tricking/plaveboing themselves into believing they like something for its own first-order properties (see various wine substitution experiments) so we should start with a relatively high probability this kind of effect exists in any area where there are similar incentives for signalling wealh/status.
Maybe the builders want use to feel sad? We as the masses might not want to feel sad, but the elites benefit from a sad demoralised populace. Much better to have waves of suicides and depressed people than to have active bright people who want to rebel against a do-nothing leech class of elites. These hideous inhuman ugly modern buildings with some of the fancy ones looking deformed are upsetting and demoralising. That's the exact kind of feeling you want in a fake democracy!
The turn towards a lot of this mind bogglingly terrrrrrible buildings was around the time mass propaganda was invented in the 1930's-1950's when TV, film, and radio met psychology. Rather than you feeling impressed by your government's awesome stuff....if you just feel bad when you go outside, that'll also keep the population under control.
You'll notice outside of the autistic silicon valley rich, many wealthy people still have quite elaborate and ornate homes. Look at shows like 'Cribs' showcasing rapper and celebrity homes....Even if they want to hide some of their wealth on the outside to some degree, that's not the case on the inside of their homes.
One of the benefits of Covid is that I don't have to go outside as much which means I don't have to look at those ugly buildings. The 'brutalist' architecture from the soviets was an inspiration. Drab concrete buildings with flat faces...how could you NOT feel like shit looking at them? I get literally nauseous and upset around these buildings and will always want to go to some Tuscan village or Swiss mountain retreat (I'd imagine, I've never been, but I know what they look like) as an ideal with zero desire to sit in some concrete box apartment surrounded by skyscrapers. Even the rich people go to places like Davos or have their film festival Sundance in a beautiful location with human appropriate buildings.
I'm being a bit specious here and probably feeding more into the Tartarian idea than detracting from it....but as the wise connoisseur of conspiracy theories knows, these are metaphors and are overstated to make a grain of truth much more exciting and meme-like to transmit better.
My impression of the intent of Brutalist architecture wasn't to demoralize the masses, it was to convince them that life is serious and they ought to work hard on what is important.
The effect might well be demoralizing.
There are some interesting side details to this. 1) civil engineers *hate* the fancy parts of new architecture frequently. Turns out that if something looks impossible, it’s often at least very hard. 2) building code, building science, even availability of materials and construction crews familiar with particular techniques are often huge constraints on this sort of thing. LEED gold certification is a big deal for any entity capable of affording a classical style massive building, and in many ways it actively insists on not doing the things that make classical buildings last. Watch just about anything by Joe Lstiburek where he discusses wall and window efficiency and issues, and marvel at how poorly we build buildings these days. 3) good luck getting the permits in a typical city to build something like the Art Deco Detroit Train Station — it’s massively too big for its neighborhood these days and all the “in character for the area” crap isn’t going to be easy for the cool old giant buildings. I don’t have great evidence that this is the case, but I have a feeling that selling a small group of “elite” people like a planning board on the exciting new thing is easier than an Art Deco style fancy building. 4) cost to do a lot of the old style things has skyrocketed, so going cheap or justifying new expensive on environmental grounds is the new way of the world.
I would be interested to see if any people in the ratsphere are going to become "patrons of the arts". I'm sure there are some people with artistic talent in the comments here, and they would benefit from matching with wealthy connoisseurs who are willing to pay for the commission. We could create world-famous art that will resonate with people for centuries to come.
In totally unrelated news, I have made a new Instagram page for my lingerie and swimwear photography, check it out: https://www.instagram.com/see_elegance
I mean, I don't think the modern pictures look *uglier*, to me, so much as they look *less detailed*. That seems like the biggest shift wrt architecture, and the explanation that springs to mind is that - basically - the fine details used to be made by the individual whims of a hundred bored masons, and with industrial processes instead of manual labor, there's a whole lot less brainpower and time involved in designing a given volume. I dunno, maybe that's not how it ever worked, but anyway.
This seems a bit different from most artforms, where a high culture vs. pop culture split basically describes things. Modern art was never meant to appeal to the masses, and it doesn't, but that's a matter of choice and there's artists that make representational art where it's profitable. Though with poetry - abandoning meter may have killed poetry as a popular medium, but to some extent there's also the part where poetry was always an oral medium first. With audio recording becoming more common, maybe the switch to song lyrics was always going to happen.
Here's one take:
I was surprised growing up to hear the word "common" used as a derogatory term by adults. All the examples you provided were considered uncommon in the eras that are were found. Similarly, photography destroyed photorealistic painting since it made photorealism too common.
More than half of my Facebook friends have gone to Paris and been to the Lourve, or even visited Rome and seen the Vatican. Now those places are considered common to visit, probably because travel is one of the things that has become increasingly relatively cheap over the past forty years.
Art with lots of spectacle is common now because it's easy to produce, like sugar water. But at one point, it was hard to make sugar water, and those were delicacies worth fighting wars over.
Sometimes supposedly tasteful-looking things are too common, and then provenance becomes more important. Look at Oscar runway dresses: it's more important who made them than whether they're objectively pleasing to the eye, or even subjectively classy or tasteful.
One-of-a-kind will always be the most valued thing in society, despite what category of things people select in a survey.
"More than half of my Facebook friends have gone to Paris and been to the Louvre".
I've been to the Louvre. Twice. Meh. The only thing there that moved me at all was the Nike of Samothrace.
Now, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie , every time I have been to Paris I always book an entire day to spend all day in them. They may get "old" to me eventually, but they've not yet.
I personally favor the selection bias hypothesis (meaning that building, art and clothing style images survived because people liked and preserved them whereas all of those buildings/art/clothing styles not in the top 3% of beauty were lost). But another hypothesis is that people grow to like certain styles more over time especially with buildings. The Eiffel Tower was famously panned by critics when it was built and the beautiful Brooklyn brownstones people are fighting to preserve were considered ugly when they were built in the 20's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Artists%27_protest
> Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible.
To be fair, I still don't find the Eiffel Tower beautiful. It's a feat of engineering and it's now so quintessentially Parisian, I would oppose its destruction. But I'd have been asking for it to be torn down after the Expo too.
I feel the same about the Centre Pompidou. Absolutely ugly (though, some like it) and still recent enough it could be torn down without altering Paris self image. So we should do it, presto!
The one exception I have is the Louvres Pyramid. I was against it when the project got announced but I find the result aesthetically pleasing. Not sure why. Maybe glass is better than plastic and metal?
The thing I will say about the Louvres Pyramid is that it brings a lot of natural light into the multistory entrance mezzanine layers under it. And that structure was absolutely necessary for the population load that was being placed on the museum.
The natural light may be the reason. I don't know but I'll admit I like it, despite my prior against mixing modern aesthetics with old, historical buildings
I'm not convinced by any cost disease explanations. Yes, producing ornate beauty via hiring dozens of stonemasons or embroiderers is prohibitively expensive, but as Scott points out, ornate beauty can be mass-produced now (okay, I know nothing of construction or architecture but it can't be actually impossible to decorate a building with e.g. laser cutting)
And look at these. OK, it's painting not architecture, but these are beautiful buildings. It's not prohibitively expensive or even currently unfashionable to create something like this. Why isn't there a lot more of this in our urban environments?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-57212364
I think a huge part of what has happened is that the ornate has become associated with femininity, and therefore with low status. This is very obvious in the context of fashion, and almost equally obvious in the context of architecture. In music too; pure pop music has been seen as feminine and denigrated for that reason.
I don't know when the association of the ornate with femininity began - it's clearly not a cultural or historical universal, although it seems to have been exported worldwide by now. French Revolution?
I agree on the cost disease aspect: making ornate things is not terribly difficult these days at a large scale. Casting, laser cutting, printing, computer 3d sculpting, all sorts of things work together to make designing and producing more ornate and decorative details easier. Keep all the glass and windows, but put some nice bits around it.
Especially odd about the labor costs is that decorative, artistic and creative occupations are supposed to be what people really want to do. You'd think that would limit the cost disease, as once money in these fields approached others there would be a strong movement of people into these more appealing jobs. I would think it wouldn't be hard to find lots of people who do these sorts of things, filling the demand for more decorative and interesting construction.
It just seems like there are a few different strands of this cost disease theory that are mutually contradictory with other points people bring up to explain modern culture.
I find these immediately, eye-searingly ugly.
I think the blue ones would look kind of arrestingly cool solo, scattered around a neighborhood, not adjacent. But I'll never "get cartoon-y or joke-y graphic art made big, as it seems like a jest should not be monumental in size, nor permanent, as its playful quality is necessarily transient in time, but I admit I haven't really thought this through and I'm sure there are many exceptions, though probably more serendipitous in nature (the rare witty graffiti). I just tend to think the commercial-inspired graphic things don't work as well being sanctioned and imposed by the authorities. These are by no means the worst, but such things have a smug quality, like: we're having a joke. Forever. There's an ugly, or rather pointless, huge red metal sculpture in front of a (beautiful) house museum near where I am currently living, and it seems like a patronizing announcement, as if by a pompous teacher and we're all high schoolers - "Here is art for you to drive past, bet you don't think it's art! But we'll learn you!" When in fact it is just a very crude sort of thing, and everyone now has internalized "Big red metal thing - must be art." And that's really all there is to it.
Is this a case of Evenly Spaced Rectangular Grids?
A (small) piece of evidence and a thought:
1) I've been tangentially involved in the process by which a moderate-sized evangelical megachurch went about building itself a new sanctuary twice at two different churches in two different states. As I recall, while there was initially some interest in trying to build some intensely beautiful space to glorify God, in both cases the faction that wanted the least expensive way to accomplish the functional goals (in terms of space and multi-use and etc.) ended up winning the argument (as good stewards we need to spend the extra on missions always ended up being the prevailing view).
2) My understanding is that, as other commenters have shared, there has been a substantial turn in the aesthetic world (so art, music, fashion, architecture) post-WW1 against beauty and beauty-like things (niceness, gentleness, etc.) generally. I think in some ways its more interesting to ask why some fields (cooking or film) escaped that trend.
I am not sure that film escaped the trend all together, it just took another 50-60 years to get caught.
1) Was that a genuine argument? I don't associate charity with megachurches.
2) Good observation re film and food. Food photography is almost universally beautiful.
I'd add that I think establishing as a truth and studying this phenomenon is super important for epistemic hygiene.
It may [1] not matter too much that, for speakers of modern English that we make them read Shakespeare at school. But it is really helpful to recognize the pattern that identifies this sort of status signalling dressed up as factual claims, eg, help us realize continental philosophy is bullshit mixed with amature armchair psych/politics pretending to be an academic discipline).
For instance the following features of a practice should be epistemic red flags.
1) Only those who have invested deeply in the enterprise (eg studied Shakespeare in depth or read a bunch of impenetrable books) are able to really appreciate the 'genius'. There aren't byte sized pieces that can be appreciated with what you learn in a few hours.
2) Hermeneutic readings. Plausibly this is just an instance of 1 but nothing ever bottoms out cleanly ensuring there is no place to start criticism from without investing an amount of time few skeptics would.
3) Subject is sucpiciously hagiographic and has few to no really important contributions credited to people who dont do much else. Higgs postulated his particle, Goodman introduced Grue and Zorn proved his lemma but the casual investigator isn't likely to hear about any other contributions from them. OTOH looking at continental philosophy or lots of signalling sort of art one you tend to either be hero worshipped as a genius or not get mentioned at all to casual investigator.
4) Unusual concern with the original works. What this means may vary (physical objects for art...the original words for novels). Contrast with math and sciences where originals are quickly digested and improved upon so no one reads the Principia to learn calculus or anything else.
Relatedly a reluctance to admit that seminal works/authors could contain really dumb mistakes. When wrong it's for complex or systemic reasons never just that they didn't think of it.
5) Skeptics are derided as luddittes or otherwise suspiciously class or wealth adjacent insults rather than being directly confronted as to why they don't accept specific claims or arguments.
6) Which criticisms or concerns are seen as requiring addressing depends heavily on context (who said it and to what end) and can't be predicted from content of criticism. Imagine cutting up discussion of the subject to remove context (was it an art Prof who asked it or a 13 year old...was it a conservative anti-affirmitive action activist or a dedicated proponent of Asian Americans etc).
7). Unreasonable correlation between who society judges positively and negatively and who is taught/read/viewed. Millikan remains in the textbooks for his oil drop experiment despite his eugenic connections.
Also Implausibly much continuity or too little in what is seen as worthy of teaching/consuming.
---
yes a number of these are just general good epistemic hygiene and other flags may be present in some perfectly legitimate subjects but recognizing the features needed to both perform the necessary status signalling and protect it from being dismissed as empty signalling can help.
[1]: Tho if you add up all the millions of person hours suffering through shit and subsequent induced dislike of reading it might.
Why do you need plastic, when you can make the world out of amber?
Recent, related(though I also think the author underrates building costs): https://classicalfuturist.com/article/lets-build-cities-of-marble/
FWIW, a revival of Greco-Roman architecture for the future is a sci fi meme :
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalSpiresAndTogas
https://www.valeriemangin.com/2019/10/23/petit-retour-sur-le-fleau-des-dieux/
This sounds like a fantastic excuse to convince you to review McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary", where he attributes this kind of societal shift to hemispheric dominance in people's brains shifting over time. It has the singular distinction of evoking violent disagreement from me on every premise but coming to conclusions I agree with. I still don't know how that happened.
> They want poems to rhyme so bad. But we won’t give it to them
That's ok. We already have them. We probably have enough poems that I could read new one every day, never repeat them, never read anything that was written after 1980, live a long happy life, and still die without having read a significant part of them. Unlike many other modern fads, bad poetry is extremely easy to ignore.
What part of this is just filtering? Don’t we just hang on to the best old stuff? Maybe they built lots of ugly stuff in the old days too, but we never see it?
I’ve often wondered if art and architecture were ugly because broadly appealing taste is actually just hard. Not sure how you’d show this, but it does seem to be measurably easier to be edgy then good. This would partially explain that rich people preferring novelty / rarity over tasteful because they likely don’t have enough taste themselves to achieve it, or their peers to have enough to appreciate the effort.
Another example is why doesn’t good software get cloned more effectively? I’d guess that part is funding, part is software engineering skill, and part is taste and all are pretty rare. So if skilled product teams can’t copy well, how many artists are out there making sistine chapel level art? Probably very few. Curious your thoughts!
Can't we just go with "Western civilization has peaked and is declining"?
Steven Pinker devoted a chapter ("The Arts") of The Blank Slate to this question. He comes down pretty strongly in support of the idea that the elites do this stuff *because* people don't like it. (As presented above, "Maybe elites are specifically trying to signal not being commoners, by choosing the opposite of commoners’ aesthetic preferences?")
> Modernism certainly proceeded *as if* human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depictions gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy *Art*, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes.
> Why did the artistic elite spearhead a movement that called for such masochism? In part it was touted as a reaction to the complacency of the Victorian era and to the naive bourgeois belief in certain knowledge, inevitable progress, and the justice of the social order. Weird and disturbing art was supposed to remind people that the world was a weird and disturbing place.
> But modernism wanted to do more than just afflict the comfortable. Its glorification of pure form and its disdain for easy beauty and bourgeois pleasure had an explicit rationale and a political and spiritual agenda.
> [......]
> Modernist and postmodernist critics fail to acknowledge another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for status, especially their *own* hunger for status.
> The problem is that whenever people seek rare things, entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial turnover of styles in the arts.
> In twentieth-century art, the search for the new thing became desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation.
> [O]nly a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new workds of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
> In his 1913 book *Art*, the critic Clive Bell [] argued that beauty had no place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences.
> Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty".
> In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters."
I mentioned that last anecdote to the art teacher in my high school, and was surprised to get a fairly enthusiastic response to the effect that yes, there is a raging controversy over whether art should be beautiful, and if not, whether beautiful art should even be allowed. She directed me to a recent story, clipped and posted to her bulletin board, about a city which had arranged for a public art project, seen the proposal somehow come in as a larger-than-life statue of Poseidon in the form of a merman holding the reins of four orcas, canceled the project because *that's just not the sort of thing we do*, and run into the absolutely unprecedented problem of massive public support for the public art project they wanted to cancel.
Found the article. It was actually five orcas.
https://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1001/p03s01-ussc.html
Thanks for the link. That quote from the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art is almost too good to be real: "We've spent a lifetime honing our eyes and developing our knowledge. It's enormously insulting that anyone's opinion is as valued as mine when they haven't spent their lifetime honing their eye and educating themselves." 100% elitism, 0% humility or self-awareness...
What's missing from the article, of course, is a picture of the planned statue. I found one here: https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/arts/a-brief-history-of-wacky-waterfront-projects/
What do people here think? Yay or nay?
Why does any waterfront any need artwork? Don't people visit for the breeze and the view over the water? Why block those?
Why not put the glorious Poseidon in a spacious inland park, for the benefit of the children living nearby? (Placing the god of the sea somewhere inland isn't incongruous if you accept Poseidon's insistence, in the Iliad, that he, Zeus, and Hades share supremacy over land. Only the sky is Zeus's exclusively, Poseidon says.)
I noticed one of the critics was ready to take his art and go home: "Moving in for the kill is Union-Tribune art critic Robert Pincus, who writes: 'If this is the future for art in public places here, then let's have public places without art.'"
I can get behind that sentiment. Austin seemed to think it needed to fund public art every year. Maybe it didn't need to be so frequent? Sometimes we got fun-enough temporary things, like painted pianos outdoors in novel places, for people to play if they like. Or those domes huts made of branches and twigs. Other times we got stuck with the bill for stuff like this, that seemed merely a continuation of the city's habit of having a dozen signs in the space of a few hundred feet for drivers to read when one would do:
https://www.kut.org/austin/2020-12-08/the-moment-has-passed-austins-most-controversial-public-artwork-might-be-coming-down
I'm in general agreement, but ASoIaF, one of the most popular recent works of fiction, doesn't have an omniscient narrator. Martin is philosophically opposed to it, he thinks there's nothing but points of view. He presumably thinks there's some degree of real world, but it's not as though you can trust people to get a lot of the important details right.
Also, he doesn't offer the simple pleasures of a good guys/bad guys division.
Well, because of this he is widely hailed as a visionary subverter of tired tropes. Or was, before it became all but certain that his magnum opus would remain unfinished, and the adaptation turned from a cultural phenomenon to an embarassing farce. Also, while it may lack conventional "good guys", it has utter monsters by the boatload.
In particular, there was a plot twist in the first book which was very surprising.
You're right about monsters, especially the Others. I wonder whether they'll turn out to have a legitimate point of view.
My usual label is the rising marginal cost of originality. If you are the first city planner in the history of the world and very clever, you come up with Cartesian coordinates. If you are the second you don't do Cartesian because that's been done. Perhaps if you are clever you come up with some version of polar coordinates, like the Undercity in WoW.
By the time we get to the six hundredth city planner all the good ideas have been done, all the not bad ideas have been done, so you design Canberra.
And, for any ANU folk here, if you are the three thousandth architect you come up with the Coombs building, such an elegantly bad design that after walking around a bit you no longer know what floor you are on.
Polar coordinates? You mean, like Karlsruhe? https://www.google.com/maps/@49.0137291,8.4047259,1410m/data=!3m1!1e3
Yeah this is a big part of it. I love the TWA terminal at JFK (now a hotel), a swoopy airy building that shows the potential of modern architecture to be inspirational. Why don't they make more buildings like that? Because swoopy and airy was Saarinen's thing and you shouldn't just imitate him, you need to be original!
Not sure I agree there. I'm looking at pictures of the TWA terminal right now and it looks an awful lot like a lot of other airport terminals I've seen. Swoopy and airy are defining characteristics of modern airport terminal architecture.
The TWA looks like a pretty good example of that style, but the style looks like every expensively-constructed airport built recently. And I'm thinking that the reason the TWA looks better than (say) Heathrow Terminal 5 is that the TWA terminal was built on a manageably smaller scale.
While we're on the subject of architecture, anyone seen the waterfall room at Singapore airport? More awe-inspiring than nine out of ten dusty old cathedrals.
I think Steven Pinker had some good insights on that issue in "The Blank Slate". If I remember the argument correctly: modernist architecture/ city planning/ art came into fashion as the conviction spread that there was no such thing as a "human nature" - that, in fact, human tastes and human society were nearly totally malleable, and shaped by their surroundings.
That can take different flavors: the proactive approach is, if you thought that the olden ways were bad and needed to be changed (and after centuries of monarchy, after the excesses of the industrial revolution, and after World War I, there was good reason to believe that), getting rid of the art and architecture of these periods and replacing them with something radically different was a good first step toward molding a new society. This was explicit in communist countries, maybe less so in democratic ones.
The lazy approach is, if people don't have innate preferences, you don't have to worry about making buildings aesthetically pleasing, providing green spaces etc. You can build stuff as cheap and as functional as you can make it, and after a generation no one will miss the pretty old houses and cozy parks. That was probably the thinking behind a lot of post-war planning in Europe - partly out of necessity, because the old stuff was lying in ruins, and rebuilding it close to the original would have been a luxury that would have been hard to justify. The same approach is also present in US housing projects from the 70s onward. And in office buildings around the world, for that matter :-/
Did this reshaping work? Yes and no - we ended up in a place where people still miss the old elaborate styles (because, IMO, they did tap into universal human aesthetic preferences) and pay good money to travel to see the old masterpieces of art and architecture, but where it would still feel weird and anachronistic to just bring them back. It may be time to find a new twist - a new way to please those preferences that doesn't feel 100% rehashed old-school. In architecture, I think new technologies should help a lot - with 3D painters, CNC machines, robots, CAD and AI, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a way to produce eye-pleasing ornaments , murals and building shapes at a reasonable price. But no one is doing it, because the current crop of architects can apparently only think in steel, concrete and glass.
Another reason modern art might be an elite project is because, if the consensus on what is great art is arbitrary elite signalling, then only the elites or near elites can produce the art. A modern Michelangelo producible a David would be ignored.
We can do the intelligent alien, or neutral culture, test already on our public Art. Tourists travel across cultures to see the architecture of Rome - from China and India they travel to see the Trevi fountain, and from Europe and other parts of Asia to see the Taj Mahal or the forbidden city.
I doubt anybody is travelling specifically to see the three dancing figures in San Francisco, although it’s a touristy town.
I want to note that I think the comparison between the royal dress of the Kangxi Emperor and Xi Jinping's nondescript business suit is unfair. Sure, those are the highest-status people in China in each time period. But the Chinese Communist Party's single strongest ideological commitment is that the imperial system was bad. Xi Jinping can't wear imperial robes no matter how much he or anyone else might think it would otherwise be a good idea.
And while there is something to this point:
> This only works if making beautiful things is expensive. For example, the clothing of the Kanxi Emperor (first picture on left) required servants to create the intricate patterns, dyes that had to be harvested from finicky insects and rare plants, etc. Displaying your ornate dyed objects let everyone know you were rich. With the invention of sewing machines, industrial dyes, rhinestones, etc, even poor people could dress like the Kangxi Emperor.
It is overstated. This problem was encountered by pretty much every traditional society, and they almost all implemented the obvious answer of sumptuary laws. Wearing yellow clothing in China could get you in serious trouble. Wearing clothes with dragons on them *would* get you in serious trouble. Feudal Ireland had a careful system in which your social status determined the number of different colors you were permitted to wear simultaneously. Etc. etc. etc.
And while imperial costumes are popular in modern China, and lots of people have them or rent them, they are, predictably, cheap imitations. A true imperial robe would be cheaper now than it was at the time, but it wouldn't exactly be cheap today.
Many aspect of architecture are not visible in a photo- is it accessible, does it have enough toilets, is it impervious to wifi, is it a pleasant temperature, are the materials environmentally concious... (also we so CAN, the Sagrada Familia does exist). Historical clothes-for-the-rich were heavy, uncomfortable, impractical, and impossible to put on without help (for normal people they were generally OK); today even billionaires value being able to dress themselves and drive a car (an expensive one, of course).
Perhaps there is a real problem with perfection in art forms. The most obvious example seems to be painting, where Picasso was a photo-realist level draughtsman, able to do everything with shape and light and shade that the centuries of artists before him had aspired to... so then, in search of something new, he turned in a different direction.
In music there were peaks of perfection in the European tradition, and it seems pointless trying to reproduce them. In jazz, there was a peak of technical innovation in the 1940s-50s with bebop and the jazz that grew out of it, and there would be sharply diminishing returns to trying to play faster and harder than Bird.
In clothing, mechanical cloth technologies take the skill out of ornamentation, so for a clothing artist, there isn't any value in doing that. If the artistry of a piece of clothing lies in its cut, then having sumptuous decoration on the cloth only distracts from the artistry.
I'm not sure if this holds for architecture, though. But I do have another idea about architecture: internationalism. Ornate styles have to be local - you have to pick a specific kind of ornamentation, and that's always going to have some local origin. But plain styles can be international.
In trying to figure out why modern art (architecture, poetry, painting, whatever) is inferior to older forms I think you are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Your basic premise is wrong because instances of modern art that are universally admired (by elites and common folk alike) do exist, they're just not nearly as numerous as the the schlock that mostly covers the modern scene. And my guess, thus it ever was. The only reason that older forms seem superior is that we are only looking at the good stuff from those earlier ages, the dross having long ago been swept away. Making something beautiful is and always has been incredibly hard to do. That's why those who can't nevertheless come up with fancy explanations for why their crap is great. But it never passes the test of time. So really the problem of why the old stuff is good and the new stuff is bad is only a cognitive illusion where folks get fooled by survivor bias. They are not seeing all the terrible stuff from bygone ages because it's all been tossed. Looking back 200 years from now the same illusion will persist because only our best current art will survive.
Yeah? What’s that then?
The John Hancock building in Chicago will look great in ruins like the Parthenon.
I think Scott's series of comparisons of "the best" are a good refutation of the theory of survivorship bias in this case. Anyway, I'm not convinced that the best generally survives. Who's supposed to do this sweeping of the dross, and why are they always able to distinguish what's good from previous centuries, yet never able to do it for their own times? Why are they able to do so in art, yet so incompetent at doing so in the related spheres of philosophy and religion?
Besides which, modern art has dominated Western institutions for 100 years now. When does the test of time begin?
Talking about "the best" should probably always be relative to some particular purpose. We might be able to talk about "the best" Byzantine icon, or "the best" Nazi propaganda, but the great disagreements in art are these continual squabbles over what "the purpose" of Art-with-a-capital-A is. That's just wallowing in Plato's vomit: the notion that every word corresponds to one eternal Form, which is the perfect example which every instance of that word should strive to conform to. That's based on a lot of bad metaphysics which we now know is wrong in every way, and a complete and deliberate ignorance of how language works.
When you talk of "making something beautiful", that's one particular view of the purpose of art (as decorative). Tolstoy's book /What is Art?/ is a brutal excoriation of that view as being shallow and eliminating everything worthwhile from art. He claimed that, before the Enlightenment, no one spoke of "beautiful music" or "beautiful deeds"; beauty was strictly visual. I don't know if that's true. The usual term for "beauty" in the Middle Ages was "pulcher", which basically meant either "pretty" or "sexy".
You'd have to twist the notion of "beauty" pretty severely to include things like The Battle of Maldon, the Iliad, the story of Jesus, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", or the songs of Leonard Cohen.
The best conception of art we have so far is Rudyard Kipling's:
There are nine and sixty ways
Of writing tribal lays
And every single one of them is right!
Right, there is no problem... Ornate, traditionalism, minimalism, primitivism (From Dawn to Decadence; Barzun), spiritual, ideological are all reflections of the belief systems of the communities of people that build collective accomplishments.
What is funny is how many threads here are chasing a singular solution, instead of entertaining the multiplicity of human civilizations over the last 30,000 years.
The word "Modernism" is click-bait: does it mean 20th century? does it mean the industrial era? or does it mean from the Renaissance to today?
Of course occasionally we wreck good buildings too, but on average, humanity attempts to retain the artifacts that resonate across millenniums, even when we don't fully understand the context of such artifacts.
Modernism is an accepted term in architecture, generally it means post war architecture through to the 80s, although it originated before the war. Post modernism is a reaction to that style. (The future, being more modern than we are might rename these terms but that’s where we are now).
I guess the point is that modernism, as a term, is losing its value and relevance as the decades proliferate behind it. Evidence is the wildly different opinions expressed in this gigantic thread. It might just be minimalism that ornate people strongly dislike, from any era. Ditto in reverse: It might just be ornateness that minimalists find grotesque, from any era. Which speaks to people's and society's particular sensitivities.
I've been exploring the question you're asking for the past several years. I haven't got a well-organized answer yet, nor time today to say much. But this isn't an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it's a pattern that has repeated throughout history and around the world, one of naturalist art executed with great skill being deliberately replaced with highly abstract art not requiring as much skill.
- The cave paintings of Chauvet Cave in France ca 30,000 BP (before present) are more natural and technically much more sophisticated than any cave or rock paintings found after 20,000 BP (some of which are quite abstract and stylized).
- The stone "goddess" idols of Europe circa 6000 BP were more realistic than their artistic descendants, the highly abstract, smooth, angular stone "idols" of the Cyclades, ca. 5000 BP, which were strong influences on modern art.
- Minoan and Mycenaean art (circa 2000 BCE) were both much more naturalistic and sophisticated than the highly abstract Greek art of the Geometric and Archaic periods.
- Ancient Egypt produced extremely skilled naturalistic art, and very stylized, abstract, and seemingly less skillful art at the same time. Check out the art of the pharaoh Akhenaten, who briefly introduced very naturalistic, realistic art, and was erased from history after his death. Note that most Egyptian wall paintings are Cubist.
- The representational art of Western Europe, starting with Constantine, and throughout the Middle Ages (with the exception of the Frankish court and some Byzantine art), up until nearly 1300 AD, seems to have been very deliberately bad, and in many times and places it was banned entirely. This was probably due to Christianity and Islam both having a horror of the misleading power of representational art (which fear came straight out of Plato). Note much medieval art was also Cubist.
- 19th century African art, which is what everyone today thinks of as "African art", is nearly all highly abstract and anti-naturalistic (and was also a big influence on modern art). Yet the very few pieces of pre-colonial African art (pre-1500 CE) which we have are more naturalistic and technically sophisticated, including a few (from present-day Nigeria) that were more skillfully made than their European contemporaries. I've even seen a series of statues made in Benin, from IIRC 1400 to 1900 AD, which show the gradual loss of realism and heightening abstraction.
Don't think of this as "progress". We also see change in the opposite direction; e.g., the gradual naturalization of Greek art from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic era. Art around the world has always cycled between the poles of naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism. The former tends to appear in times of wealth, safety, sea trade, and intellectual freedom (e.g., Athens, Venice, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Masters, Elizabethan England); the latter, in times of great crisis. I think this is because abstract art is, seemingly without exception, more spiritual in its motivation.
These two opposing types of art are based on two general opposing philosophies, one which takes the physical world as real versus one which takes the transcendent as real. Many artistic features of each recur consistently. For instance, abstract art is often linear, with clear black borders between solid (unshaded, unmixed) primary colors, cubist in perspective, & uses size and distance to denote spirituo-political rather than physical truths.
The underlying opposition is not so much stylistic, as about the "purpose" of art. "Spiritual" art comes from the point of view that one already possesses absolute Truth, and the purpose of art is only to indoctrinate (as in Plato). Nazi and Stalinist art both used "naturalistic" representational techniques, yet were spiritual in nature: they used art for the same propagandistic purposes as religions do; they always presented images of either the ideal or the demonic; they are generally images of power. Art that is naturalistic "in nature", by contrast, is made by people who are studying nature and trying to understand it, as opposed to people who scorn messy, "imperfect" nature in favor of their beautiful abstract "Truth". Naturalists don't see everything in terms of propaganda, power, and conflict.
The rise of modern art is well-documented. The motivation for its abstraction derived originally from Plato--modern art is supposed to be the artist-as-prophet providing humanity with a more-direct vision of Plato's transcendent forms; the argument for why representational art is bad comes straight from Plato's Meno. (Though many of the early modern artists got their Plato indirectly, through Christianity or Hegel; and Romanticism and the decadents were also major influences.) Those other periods of abstract art I just mentioned which were just then being discovered were also influential, as was medieval art.
But analysis of the rise of modern art has been hindered by the fact that it was an ideological movement which still controls academia and Western art institutions, and it has always been in that movement's interests to revise the past in order to blame its failures on its enemies. For instance, you'll commonly read that modern art began as a response to the horrors of WW1. The truth is quite the opposite: proto-modern artists were demanding a great war from about 1906, and got quite psyched up about WW1 (see eg Ezra Pound's BLAST). They believed Western civilization was systemically corrupt and needed to be utterly destroyed before they could create "true Art". (They used phrases like "a clean sweep" and "a great burning".) Albert Gleizes, one of the founders of Cubism, hoped for the complete destruction of cities and a return to a more pastoral, spiritual, community-oriented medieval lifestyle. The artists now paraded as "modern" to give the illusion that modern art was some sort of peace protest movement--e.g., Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen--weren't modernists at all; just read their poems. Not a single modernist technique among them.
I wish we could upvote responses. This was extremely interesting to me, as I had never paid attention to the historical alternances between "modern"/abstract art and the naturalistic/representative art...
And I feel you're on to something with this being a representation of the grander, spiritual claims of modernists (certainly today) vs. the less philosophically ambitious aims of representative arts.
That said, you rightly point out that the Nazi and Soviet idealism art forms tend to contradict this scheme. They're not representative per se but definitely not abstract either, though their aims (artists as "engineers of the human soul") are as high as it gets.
Thank you-- that makes sense that naturalism and abstraction both come and go.
There are probably (at least?) two flavors of naturalism. One is about the literal world with its irregularities, and the other is an idealized version very like the real world so far as the structure of space is concerned, but with symmetry added and some of the roughness smoothed out.
Very interesting and a more generalized (and more informed) take of my own comment here. On "African" art I would have to say, perhaps too much generalization, Africa has a huge diversity of artistic styles. Also, and a bit more to the theme of my own comment below, even abstracted African art is often representational at root, if rarely as naturalistic as the Benin bronzes. And it tends to have more organic shapes, as opposed to the extremely linear shapes of modernity.
Thanks! Re. 19th-century African art, when I said "abstract and anti-naturalistic" I didn't mean to imply "non-representational". To be more specific (though still very general):
- There's a lot of non-representational 19th-century African art; this is mostly decorative, geometric, linear, and mostly in the mediums worked by women, such as textiles and pottery. When we see it in wood carvings (a male medium), it's usually decorative rather than religious, and an adaptation of designs used in female media.
- Using formal, geometric art for decoration in 19th-century Africa makes a lot of sense.
If you spend your time inside rectilinear houses and office as we do, it's pointless to put up a Piet Mondrian painting in a building that looks like a Piet Mondrian painting. Likewise, if you live outdoors, or in round houses made of still-visible natural materials, decorative realistic art would just look like a shoddy imitation of everything around you. We see this same tendency of decorative art to be abstract and/or geometric in native North American pre-colonial pottery and textiles.
- In Africa, the Americas, and Europe before urbanity--a sweeping generalization, but mostly true, at least by 3000 BC--spiritual or magical art was the domain of men. Also, carving wood was usually the domain of men.
- This spiritual art was usually representational, but abstract. Ladislas Segy wrote a lot about this in /African Sculpture Speaks/, 4th edition (1975), chapters 2 and 9, and especially his ideas about why the similar spiritualistic views of Africans and modern artists converged on similar styles. For instance, on p. 120: "When the question concerns such indefinable matters as what one is, or what a spirit is, the obvious choice of the means for making such a statement is abstract forms, with their indefinable meaning." Segy is guilty of gross over-generalizations about African life, but the generalizations he made of African sculpture were based on his private collection of thousands of wood carvings and bronzes from every part of Africa. No one was more familiar with the variety of styles of 19th-century African wood carvings than he. But, as an idealist himself, he was more interested in similarities than in differences.
- These religious wood carvings are always representational, but nearly always abstract. Abstract in different ways, different styles, but always deliberately distorted, to make it clear that the artist wasn't imitating some living person. They aren't /rectilinear/, but are geometric, comprised of elliptical curves, often having sharp edges rather than organic ones, unnaturally straight sharp lines along noses or cheeks, perfect geometric cones or triangles for breasts, and so on. Segy points out on p. 115 how this resembles Cezanne's principles: he "once wrote to his son that what he wanted was to treat nature in terms of cylinders, spheres, and cones... Cezanne's idea was to decompose the elements of nature into simple forms... A painting was to be a construction with simplified forms taken from nature, not a copy of nature."
- Segy noted the consistent correlation between abstract art and religious fervor (which he admired). p. 11: "The 15th- and 16th-century Portugese crucifixes were made in a rather naturalistic style, indicating a decadence in religious fervor and its expression. This was the type of work given to the Bakongo people to imitate. But the African, being deeply religious, could not tolerate a naturalistic image of a spiritual symbol... so they transformed a decadent style into a highly abstracted on, giving the impression of having been produced by Byzantine or Romanesque artists, who in the 9th or 11th century possessed true religious fervor."
- One exception is that many nail fetish statues were more naturalistic. I don't know why. Servile figures, such as those on headrests or stools, are sometimes more naturalistic. Ancestor statues aren't usually naturalistic, probably because they weren't supposed to represent dead people, but to be new homes for the spirits of those people.
- I didn't mention previously that the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians deliberately made their religious art abstract, and their secular art naturalistic. So for instance the most-naturalistic ancient Egyptian sculptures are of scribes rather than of pharaohs.
- Segy also noted another thing I didn't mention before: the correlation between naturalism and individualism, and abstraction and collectivism. A naturalistic artist studies and depicts individuals, and is especially interested in what makes a subject distinctive. An idealistic, religious artist sees only the similarities as important, and sees differences between people as due to flaws and corruption.
This is becoming a very interesting discussion. While I really appreciate the many examples you cite in abstract/spiritual vs naturalistic/secular , we could draw a slightly different axis here, the one used by Camille Paglia i.e. Apollonian vs Dionysian, say quoted here https://libquotes.com/camille-paglia/quote/lbs0a1o. This would also fit the contrast between enraptured/mystic/bodily/representational religious fervor, and intellectualized/rationalistic/abstract religious fervor. Say, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox vs Protestant, the earlier forms having been made representational to attract "the masses" while the latter having been dis-embodied and intellectualized to fit the elites. Putting things o this axis would resolve the issue I cannot help noticind in Segy's (your quotes) views - that a lot of quite fervent art is representational alright.
The other thing that comes to mind in this context is Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind - where he contrasts totemistic (but traditional) art with modern art. Paraphrasing from memory, totemistic art is _about_ something, the meaning is central and the means accidental (bricolage). In modern art, the means and _technique_ have become central and the meaning has shrunk, sometimes to nothingness.
Finally, coming to modern architecture, and here is my biggest question mark. If you take just about any modernist art, and let's pick the big winner in architecture, Bauhaus: here we have the most abstract and least representational forms of all, and yet they are also the most stubbornly atheist and non-spiritual ones. In my comment here https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria/comments#comment-3023941 I'm expressing some ideas about that, I'd be curious about your opinion on it.
Many others have noted that modernist buildings may simply be cheaper, definitely some truth to this, with modern industrial production techniques, flat, straight, glass, steel and concrete structures w/o details are very easy to manufacture, and carves detail or organic shapes are comparatively expensive. In traditional societies where manual labor was used, organic shapes and details are quite easy to make, while flat and straight things were exceedingly hard to pull off. But I don't think that's the complete answer - the "modern" look often has been built at outrageous costs, the Sydney Opera being a famous example but it's quite common in prestige buildings.
This is great. I think we're gonna have to break these into parallel threads. Please tell me if I'm writing too many words.
On abstract, naturalistic, and representational art:
I don't see fervent art being representational as an issue to resolve. Modern artists contrasted abstract art with representational art; but in the longer view, I contrast abstract, idealized, or highly stylized (iconic) art with naturalistic art. The most-common type of religious art around the world has probably been abstract representational art. The conflict isn't between whether or not to depict things and beings, but whether to focus on the ideal (or typical) vs. the individual, the transcendental vs. the earthly.
Religion is usually functional--it's a way of placating the gods, seeking the assistance of ancestors, divining the future, or securing eternal life. So nobody minds if their statues look like all the other statues--in fact, that's usually required! Abstract, religious art is usually required to look just like all the previous instances of it. A Byzantine icon of Mary and Jesus from 1700 AD is difficult to distinguish from one from 800 AD; Egyptian politico-religious art changed little from 3000 to 1000 BCE; and Franz Boas emphasized on pages 83, 150, and 167 of his book /Primitive Art/ (about native North American art) that departure from traditional styles was extremely rare and heavily criticized.
I think the desire for novelty is Western. I travelled in the north, center, and south of China in the years around 2000, and everywhere I went I found wooden statuettes of the same half-dozen or so animals, which were made in the hundreds of thousands at least, and carefully carved by hand to all be indistinguishable from each other all across China.
This craving for novelty may have arisen from the Romantic (esp. Wagnerian / Nietzschian / Hitlerian) tradition of taking Art-with-a-capital-A as their religion, and the artist as not merely a priest (who could only mediate with a God who was no longer there), but a prophet (who could "see" and interpret the impersonal, silent God of Plato or Hegel). This brings us to your observation that "in modern art, the means and _technique_ have become central and the meaning has shrunk, sometimes to nothingness."
The modernists all cried "Make it new!"; but some, like Wagner, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, & Joyce, took it to mean not making something new (which Platonists believe is impossible), but to re-make the old anew, by re-translating Japanese poetry into English sensibilities, re-telling the story of Odysseus or Germanic sagas, or filling The Waste Land with obscure references to Wagner's references to those Germanic sagas. This was eventually codified by Barthes in "The Death of the Author" (1969), which says not (as most people claim it does) that the author's intentions don't matter (a claim no artist or critic has ever made, but which was falsely attributed to the New Critics to drive them from power), but that nothing new can be created ("authored") nor discovered. This meant that content, which could never be new, didn't matter; style was all.
Others, like Arnold Schoenberg in music, and most visual artists, re-read Plato's argument in the Meno that language and representation can't communicate anything that the recipient doesn't already know, and concluded that they could communicate new truths if they used non-linguistic, non-representational art. (A corollary is that, if you can verbally explain even non-representational art, it isn't Art.) They took their task as being to discover, via something like divine inspiration, never-before-seen Platonic forms, and to reveal them to the public using their art. (This was when the term "plastic arts" came into vogue, and was in practice used mainly to distinguish the visual arts as more holy because they could make contact with reality without the mediation of words or notes, as all words and notes are already known.)
So unlike Renaissance or Byzantine painters, or modernist authors, they weren't content to keep drawing the same scenes over and over, even in new ways. They ditched representation not because of their idealism, but because Plato had "proven" it was inadequate to their new job of being not mere priests, but prophets.
(Er, I didn't mean to imply that Wagner was a modernist. But he was regarded as the greatest composer of all time when modernism arose.)
On the Apollonian vs Dionysian:
I could try mapping Catholics to Dionysius and Protestants to Apollo, owing to the more severe and iconoclastic nature of the Protestants. (Also, cathedrals, mass, incense, etc.) But this isn't consistent. For instance, the Catholic church kept music spare and Spartan as long as it could, enforcing Gregorian chant for perhaps an entire millennium, and opposing the use of melody, rhythm, harmony, and instruments other than the organ. Even today, Protestant hymnals give four vocal parts, while Catholic hymnals give just one--only the choir is trusted with the harmony.
Also, the Orthodox church was even more iconoclastic and abstract, and differed in theology from the Catholic only by a hair's breadth. Islam is also iconoclastic, but I don't see it as either Dionysian or Apollonian.
Also, the Catholic church was mostly anti-naturalistic until the Italian Renaissance. Their art looked representational, but not at all natural. Most artists made no attempt to draw things realistically or skillfully; "my kid could draw that" applies as well to most medieval Catholic representational art as to modern art. (And it wasn't really representational; it was symbolic or allegorical. Catholic art wasn't supposed to be so beautiful or artful that anyone would admire the artwork itself; it was supposed to be like a finger pointing at something else.)
(One example is Catholic maps pre-1300, which, unlike their contemporary Islamic maps, made no attempt to be geographically accurate based on mere observation, but instead tried to infer the True shape of the earth by fitting empirical observations into some sort of regular Platonic geometry, most notably in the standard map of the Earth showing three continents having three-way symmetry with Jerusalem at the center.)
All that great naturalistic Catholic art began in southern Italy in 1300 with Giotto, in a time and place where the Catholic Church didn't have much control (it was much more powerful in France than among the independent city-states of present-day southern Italy); and also around the time when the papacy began spinning out of control, becoming completely corrupt and un-Christian by anyone's definition, being bought and sold, sometimes occupied by literal pirates and murderers, and eventually splintered into multiple competing papacies in 1378. So rigorous Catholic theology had less influence on art in that period.
And both Catholicism and Protestantism are very rational. Catholicism is based on Plato's philosophy, and the medieval scholastics were arguably the height of rationalism in Western civ. But Reformation Protestants wanted to be even more logically rigorous, starting with choosing one single foundation for their faith (the canonical scriptures) rather than the haze of Catholic tradition. (This sort-of made sense: the Catholics originally took the Church traditions as foundational, partly for the great power it gave them, but also because they had lots of competing and contradictory scriptures to choose from. Then they burned all those other scriptures, and by the time of the Reformation people had forgotten them, giving the illusion that the canonical scriptures had simply been passed down from the beginning without being selected by the Church.) Protestants were also more rational (I'm using the word in its philosophical sense) in eliminating the practice of taking verses of scripture in context. They believe instead that, since truth must be absolute, you can quote a single verse in isolation from its time, place, and textual context, and take it as dogma.
So I see Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy as all being dogmatically rational and Apollonian. I think that, except in cases like ancient Greece which self-consciously worship Apollo and Dionysius (e.g., with tragedy for Apollo and comedy for Dionysius), usually Apollonians rule and Dionysians are marginalized, because Apollonians are so much better at organizing and maintaining unity. All political parties are more Apollonian than Dionysian, except maybe the Green Party and the Swedish Pirate Party.
Maybe we could call Nazism Dionysian, due to its blood-thirstiness and glorification of violence? But its festivals were rigidly ordered, in large squares, with men in uniforms and marching in squares. Its organization was Dionysian in that it had no clear or stable hierarchy, but Apollonian in that it was nonetheless authoritarian.
And I could write similar things about Soviet or Maoist communism, yet communism doesn't project a Dionysian image. Maybe all this distinction comes down to in this case is that the Nazis and the communists both murdered tens of millions, but at least the Nazis had fun doing it. I don't think this is a helpful way to look at Nazism or communism.
Nazism, definitely Dionysian but with the tools of a modern society. They plundered pretty much all of historical semiotics they could find. And that sets them apart from hyper-rationalistic (secular-religion kind) communism. Best book in this respect, eye opener wise, "Le matin des magiciens" which I read, ugh, in the 80s... Unlike what Wikipedia says here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morning_of_the_Magicians I didn't take it as a prescriptive manual for life but as an intuition pump on what was going on, say, in the minds of the Nazis. And reading it made me think first time ever of the mystic and irrational cultish roots of the Nazi mindset. Superficially we were all taught they they emerged from the German hyperinflation, then 29 and the Great Depression, as people who promised they could fix the economy fast. That was one aspect for sure but no one points out that the deep attachment people had for them, the fervor people invested and wished to die for, was on a much deeper emotional level, they were masters of manipulation the assignment of mystical meaning to people's lives. In my humble opinion. Which distinguishes them from your average populist, statist, or socialist, nevermind their name as a national socialist party.
Quite a bit of unpacking:
The Nazis and Soviet Communists were both artistically traditionalists, a fact many "modern" traditionalists are happy to overlook.
Paglia strongly differentiates between Dionysian (wild) from "Daemonism" (earth) and demonism (evil). It is the earth (daemonism) she contrasts with Apollonian.
[it is our spell checkers that continuously write demonism.]
Sexual Personae:
"The daemonism of chthonian nature is the West's dirty secret. Modern humanists [circa the 500-year Western enlightenment] made the "tragic sense of life" the touchstone of mature understanding. They defined man's mortality and the transience of time as literature's supreme subjects. In this I again see evasion and even sentimentality. The tragic sense of life is a partial response to experience. It is a reflex of the West's resistance to and misapprehension of nature, compounded by the error of liberalism...
The Western will, setting itself up against nature, dramatized its own inevitable fall as a human universal, which it is not."
Now, we can revisit the fascinating cycles between naturalistic realism and abstract spiritualism:
naturalistic | abstract
|
____________|______________
|
realism | spiritualism
If we think civilizations cycle between phases, we break two ideas into four and see more flexibility than a pendulum swinging between opposites.
And then–
We find the left side, naturalistic realism, is an approach used by urban societies of "wealth & safety."
The right side, abstract spiritualism, is an approach used by urban societies experiencing "crisis" & wild change.
Urban societies build collective accomplishments, i.e. the style of architecture and urban plans correspond to a particular fitness landscape.
The diagram also reveals the diagonal approach of the Nazis and Soviet Communists: Naturalistic Spiritualism (maybe like EA per Scott). Their fitness landscape was the trauma of rapid global industrialization, which created large cities and disease (1918 pandemic), and the appearance of a failing American Democracy, evidenced in the Civil War & the USs 1930s depression.
Also–
Looking at the upper half, we see non-urban, escapist/dispersion experiences such as hippies and cults and their individualistic (at least very smallish) retreats.
Then,
In the lower half, we find non-urban, escapist experiences such as monks, rabbis, and Buddhist's solitude.
Dispersion tendencies led people to into naturalistic realities (think 2012s ZADists in France)... i.e. create small community encampments of a style corresponding to a particular geographic landscape, often with an idea of sustainability, either physically (hippies) or mentally/intellectually (kibbutz).
Wrapping up:
Civilizations tend to come together in urban lifestyles and disperse into countryside lifestyles, depending upon the totality of the environment within which people are operating.
What is notable is that architecture, especially capital 'A' Architecture, is built by collectives of people. This collective itself enables the production of both a lifestyle and the expression of that collective lifestyle in the forms of cities and buildings that are built: ornamental, minimal, awe-inspiring, or power-demonstrating.
The phrase "modern vs. traditional" is clickbait.
And, I clicked, finding some good ideas in the extensive dialogue!
;-)
Lots of good points here though maybe not always conclusive w.r.t. the subject. Camille Paglia definitely maps Orthodox traditions to Dionysian, and interestingly so does, of all people, Alan Watts - I think at some point he writes about how organic orthodox mass feels, with liturgy read in a language no one understands, incense and bread and wine and everyone getting gloriously drunk in the process. For the rest, thanks for pointing out the rationalism within Catholicism, contra the Whig interpretation of history - we could have added anything from the misuderstood angels on a pin's head to the Jesuits and the genesis of capitalism. That said. It's more about the contrat between contemporary movements - and there Protestantism does seem to be the more Apollonian, Catholicism somewhat more Dionysian, and Orthodox churches the most Dionysian.
There are Protestants and Protestants. Megachurches are at least fair-to-middling Dionysian.
How do you associate the Jesuits with capitalism?
I have a hard time calling the Orthodox Dionysian, because to me Dionysian implies liberty and chaos, and the Orthodox hated both those things.
I'd say Pentecostals and charismatics are the most Dionysian, followed by the black Baptists, then the southern Baptists. Odd, bcoz the latter two descend from the Puritans, and are taxonomically very close on the tree to the Unitarian Universalists, who are extreme Apollonian.
I get more mileage out of the rationalist/empiricist epistemology dichotomy than from the Apollonian/Dionysian culture dichotomy, but it handles some important cases badly, like pagan religion, ancient Rome, Romanticism, Nazism, Social Justice. I think I've come to the limits of what I can do with a single dichotomy. I think we need a multi-dimensional model, or a multi-variate model, or more than 2 categories.
Reading what I just wrote, all of the badly-handled cases have elements of ancient paganism. Hmm.
Like, where does Apollonian/Dionysian divide things up differently than rational/empirical? Rational is too similar to Apollonian to treat A/D as an additional dimension; but empirical isn't at all similar to Dionysian. Can we just take the three categories Rational-Appolonian, Empirical, Dionysian? Is Dionysian an epistemology? I think phenomenology might correspond to Dionysian. The Nazis used phenomenology to justify Dionysian behavior, anyway, I think. They used Heidegger, "lived experience", and "authenticity" to denigrate reason and justify violence. The Social Justice movement does the same thing today.
Dionysian is more similar to fideism, I think; which is similar in effect to rationalism. I've tried thinking of the Nazis as fideists, which I interpret as meaning they start with a foundational set of unquestioned assumptions like rationalists do, but they don't seek the logical closure of those assumptions. Dionysian is also similar to mystic, I think.
There should be a variable that distinguishes between Left and Right Hegelianism. Same as "left/right", I suppose, but I've never been quite clear on what that supposedly-important distinction is.
What I wanted to do with my metaphysics survey was to split out all the dichotomies correlated with rational/empirical epistemology, like collective/individual, abstract/naturalistic, certain/uncertain, integer/continuum math, virtue/consequence ethics, magic/marvel, soul/mechanism, realism/nominalism, universal/particular, eternal/temporal, transcendent/material, and find which might be useful additional dimensions. But I think the data was too noisy to do that with just 50 questions.
Dualist / monist is a necessary sub-division of rational.
Pitirim Sorokin used the set of epistemologies {empirical, rational, mystical, critical, skeptical, fideist}. I'm not clear on what fideist or critical means, and I think a skeptic is just (A) an empiricist, whom rationalists mis-characterize as "believing that one can know nothing" because they demand that "knowing" requires absolute certainty, or (B) a rationalist who's disappointed that the world fails to meet his philosophical demands on it, but refuses to admit any alternatives exist. (B) sounds like post-modernism, but the skeptics didn't run around smashing everything to the ground.
In epistemology, I lean towards using the categories {empirical, rational, pragmatic, phenomenological}. In aesthetics and ethics, {formal, idealized, naturalist}, where "idealized" goes with "rational" and "natural" with "empirical". "Formal" is an older aesthetic category, analogous to taboo and rule-based ethics, mostly involving repetition and a kind of visual grammar, manifesting in music as dancing to drums (there are African languages that don't distinguish between "sing" and "dance"), and manifesting in poetry as rhymes, consonance, and compulsive repetition. Sorokin used the categories {ideational (idealist), idealist (mixed ideal/natural), visual or "decadent" (naturalist)}.
BTW, Sorokin was a fanatical Russian Orthodox heretic--IIRC he believed only his particular church congregation, which split off from a group that split off from the Russian Orthodox, were true Christians. But far from being Dionysian, he was all about categorizing everything in human culture and stuffing it all into neat little boxes, and in reimposing strict medievalish Christianity.
Even with all these divisions, I can't handle Eastern philosophies. I think the issue here is that the West tries to build systematic, logically-consistent philosophies. These can be powerful when applied to the problems that the system designers were thinking of, but lead to believing insane things at the fringes. Whereas Eastern philosophers (since the "School of Words", which was China's postmodernist period, which they ended about 2000 years ago by saying "quit it, you're just being silly") rely more on common sense, approach each case individually, and say far fewer batshit-insane things; but are difficult to understand because you can't "understand" them in the Western sense of collating everything into a few logical principles.
BTW, tangential but maybe important: I mentioned in my first reply to this that the Chinese "School of Words" (not an actual school) was Chinese post-modernism, and that (East) Asian philosophy is less systematic and logically consistent than Western. The latter could be a consequence of the former. Due to their lack of insight into grammar (and some peculiar ambiguities of Chinese grammar), they were never able to resolve the deconstructionist logical contradictions pointed out by the School of Words, and dealt with it by not taking logical consistency so seriously.
On architecture:
Architecture and design do often seem to be on a different track. Medieval stonemasons gave us great cathedrals in the 12th century, at the same time that medieval painters were giving us frescoes that looked as if they'd been drawn by children. And, heck, I /like/ Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and Wassily chairs. The Bauhaus stuff was great until Apple got hold of it but forgot it was "form follows function" and not the other way around.
I think the difference is that architecture and design, and especially that of the Bauhaus, was grounded by the function and the cost of the product. They didn't aim to make things beautiful; they aimed to make them do a good job simply and cheaply, and that, somehow, magically, is beautiful.
Minimalist functional things are beautiful. I don't know why. Drill bits are beautiful. So are hex nuts, airplanes, spoons and forks. Many years ago I was at Michigan State University and came across a piece of modernist sculpture in the center of a room. It fascinated me. I had to that point always hated modern art, but I couldn't stop looking at this wooden sculpture, full of weird spirals and ellipses interlocking in indecipherable yet seemingly purposeful ways.
So I asked around to find out who had made it, and discovered it "wasn't art" at all. It was a wooden mock-up of a cyclotron that the Physics department had built years ago, to give the machinists to make sure the parts were all sized correctly. Those spirals and ellipses /were/ purposeful, and somehow that made it beautiful.
As to Bauhaus being atheist, I don't know enough about the people involved to know what that means. Leninists insisted they were atheists, but they were still religious fanatics. I know Wassily Kandinsky was on staff at the Bauhaus, and he was a bona-fide mad Russian Orthodox fanatic. His books "Point and Line to Plane" and "On the Spiritual in Art" are more Platonist than Christian. Paul Klee was on staff there for 10 years, and he opened his 1920 “Creative Confession” with the very Platonist claim that “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.” "Formerly we used to represent things which were visible on earth... Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things." "In the highest circle an ultimate mystery lurks behind the mystery, and the wretched light of the intellect is of no avail." He also speaks of purity, deep insight, "ultimate things", "sloughing off your earthly skin", morality, and other Platonist themes; although his is a kind of anti-rational Romantic Platonism. It sounds very spiritual to me.
"until Apple got hold of it but forgot it was 'form follows function' and not the other way around" two thumbs up, way up... though Apple didn't directly copycat Bauhaus, they wholesale plundered the Braun company's designs ca. 1950-1980, look at this and weep: https://www.flickr.com/photos/34019036@N05/4934602704 . That was 1956.
"Minimalist functional things are beautiful. I don't know why." Cognitive fluency, e.g. here: https://www.verypossible.com/insights/how-cognitive-fluency-affects-user-behavior or earlier, here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8144801_Processing_Fluency_and_Aesthetic_Pleasure_Is_Beauty_in_the_Perceiver%27s_Processing_Experience
Agree on the origins of Bauhaus. It wasn't "Form follows funtion" either, as proclaimed, it was "Form follows production process".
I enthusiastically agree on the beauty of simple objects. For years I had a Facom brand #24 spanner wrench framed in my living room. It was so beautiful.
Interesting info on key Bauhaus artists, I did not know this. Just not sure if these examples are representative of the movement overall.
Right, I was thinking of Braun! See https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-braun-inspiration-2012-9
The Reber..Winkielman article looks interesting. But I think it's wrong in the opposite direction from those art theorists who talk loosely (non-mathematically) of "complexity" as being good, where by "complexity" they actually mean "unpredictability" (randomness). That leads to randomness and noise being praised as objectively good. R..W instead seem to say that simplicity is good. That leads to that guy whose name I can't remember who makes nothing but giant wall paintings of 3 horizontal colored stripes. Ultimately it leads to the black square, which is why we now have 4 generations of "black square" artists (Malevich being only the second of them), and now there's some guy who's made $100 million selling white squares.
In practice, people give high aesthetic evaluations to things that aren't too simple and aren't too complicated, not too repetitive and not too random, but just patterned enough that they can continue studying the thing for a long time before they stop improving the predictive power of their model.
I would rather say beauty is high <computational power or bits of information needed to predict or describe the thing given model M> / <computational power or bits of info needed to construct M>. That could be similar to fluency times complicatedness (a word I'm making up to avoid using "complexity" in 2 different ways).
So, functional objects would score high because they come with a big part of the model for free if you already know what they're supposed to do. But then they should appear more beautiful if we already know what their function is, and I don't think that's correct.
I wrote a blog post on that once, with graphs of outputs from 1D CAs that I stole from Chris Langton, which I can't find now, but here's a copy of it by some guy who reposts my blog posts pretending he wrote them and somehow always comes up first in google searches for my stuff: https://awritingguide.com/2015/07/03/thoughts-on-listening-to-mahlers-fifth-symphony-three-times-in-a-row/comment-page-1 )
There I theorized that dynamic systems are beautiful when their parameters lie in the part of parameter phase space between stasis and randomness (ice and fire, order and chaos), in which a dynamic system has chaotic behavior. "Rules for the game of Life which can produce replicators and large-scale patterns" is an example of such a subspace. This wasn't my idea, but Wolfram's idea (or at least he said it was; sorry, claims by Wolfram requires that proviso).
R..W's statement, "we follow this philosophical tradition and define beauty as a pleasurable subjective experience that is directed toward an object and not mediated by intervening reasoning", is reasonable, but also problematic for me, because I think aesthetic and moral judgement are unified at some level--use the same algorithms on different data--and that would imply moral judgement isn't mediated by intervening reasoning, which might be correct but would be depressing.
Mr Getz do you have a blog or twitter. I'd like to follow your work
I was just looking up pictures of the Benin bronzes and found a recent story about Nigerian artists offering the British Museum some newly made bronzes in exchange for the return of the old placques, as well as throwing in a "life-sized ram made of spark plugs" which seems like a pretty funny commentary on the art world.
I remember meeting a painter who told me she preferred old-style figurative paintings, but abstract expressionism is what sells so that’s what she did.
Modernism embodies the trauma of both World Wars and a rejection of the pas that led to them. It has iconoclastic tendencies like Le Corbusier’s “Plan Voisin” to raze Paris’ historic center and build Stalinist tower blocks there.
At this point I think the signaling theory is the most likely, to paraphrase Dave Barry, the primary qualification for modern art is that no normal person would ever mistake it for art, and thus the mastery of the code is a signifier of class, just as the mastery of Confucian classics in a bygone era, or of of Marxist-Leninist dialectic.
For the sake of completeness, let's add "modern people are all stressed and depressed and build buildings that mirror how they feel". Works for clothes too, the relaxed hippie types don't go around wearing suits.
See also the punk aesthetic, with (deliberately) ripped and damaged cloth and a lot of asymmetry.
I think the reason modern buildings don't imitate classical ones more is a cost thing. One 1994 attempt to construct a large building in a classical style (Castello di Amorosa in Napa Valley) cost the owner ~$73m in 2021 dollars, and the quality of the workmanship still doesn't come close to what you see in the best examples of the 1800s.
Presumably we see more old buildings constructed in this style because income inequality was higher in the past, so construction costs were relatively more affordable. After taking account of taxes and transfer payments, inequality today is probably considerably lower than it was in the early 1900s, to say nothing of earlier periods (https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality#inequality-of-disposable-incomes-over-the-long-run).
I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Inequality did lessen in the mid 20c but it’s back to the gilded age now.
I think there are some important dynamics here which explain why trying to make classical art, architecture, or poetry *now* would be more risky (for the artist) than trying to make modern versions of the same, and which thereby explain why artists are less likely to try to make classical art.
If you tried to make a building now in the style of Milan Cathedral, or tried to make classical poetry, or a painting in the style of Rembrandt you'd run a higher risk of embarassing failure. If you fail to produce something roughly as good, you've simply failed to reproduce a long-existing style. But, even if you succeed at a very good reproduction of the style, and people agree that it looks nice, many would also find this an unimpressive achievement. At best, it would be viewed as a pastiche, which at least in architecture, is usually meant derogatorily (https://www.iconeye.com/design/movements/the-architecture-of-pastiche). (Notably, when pastiche is used approvingly, mostly in other fields, it seems like it's not usually referring to a straightforward replication but to some kind of post-modern play on an existing style) One might wonder why one could not simply produce something *better* than the original Milan Cathedral or Rembrandt, which *would* be recognised as impressive, but this seems exceptionally difficult. The only realistic way to try to achieve that seems to be to attempt some kind of 'play' on the style, where you reproduce it but cleverly add novel elements in some way.
I think this accounts for the important fact that many elites within the relevant cultural domains don't think that classical art, architecture or poetry was bad (so this is not merely about a radical change in elite aesthetics or taste) but they would look view negatively someone now attempting to reproduce these styles, which would be seen as unoriginal and derivative, if not at little cringy.
You're not wrong, but I often fantasize about a really specific sort of retro-modernism which has a chance, I think. Optical scanning technology + AI + computing power could plausibly scan the shape of natural or minimally worked rocks and 3D-puzzle them together to make a stable walls, columns, arches, and other such structures. Then self-propelled cranes could actually execute the building of the structure, which would basically look like a 13th century European castle - also built from stacked stone sourced very nearby or even on site. The materials would be almost free, which means that even ordinary people could live in a literal castle. Is there some AI dealbreaker that would make this not practical, or would the demand for such buildings not materialize?
The official line is that the older styles are "played out"--that they were good, but there is simply nothing more that can be done with melody and harmony, or with plot and character; everything possible has already been done.
This is in line with Barthes' "Death of the author", and is related to a larger counter-Renaissance by the elites in the humanities, who wish to de-humanize the humanities and return to the Platonist metaphysics of the Middle Ages and of Romanticism, according to which the creation of new things is either impossible, or requires a divine act or prophetic revelation (the artist as prophet or God).
In representational arts, including literature, there's a second general argument, which is that representation, including language, is incapable of communicating anything new, for the reasons given in Plato's "Meno" and Derrida's "Of Grammatology".
Platonists are essentialists, which means they believe that things have their properties not due to internal mechanisms, but to spirits. They have no way of incorporating structure, mechanism, or grammar into Platonist ontologies, so the meaning of a picture can only be the sum of the meanings of all the individual things depicted, and the meaning of a paragraph can only be the sum of the meanings of the words in the paragraph. When you see a picture or a word, either you already know it, so it tells you nothing new; or you don't know it, so it tells you nothing. Hence Plato's theory that no one can ever tell or show you anything you don't already know (and all "learning" is remembering from past lives, which is also a proof of reincarnation for Plato). That's why modernist writers always said "Make it new!" but actually meant "Remake it anew!"--give us a new Odysseus, a new Fisher King, etc. It's also why some gave up on narrative to play with word sounds (Gertrude Stein) and philological puns (Finnegan's Wake).
Plato's arguments don't address the problem of grammar, which bewildered Plato because he couldn't conceive of relationships like "A is bigger than B". Somewhere in the second half of Republic, Plato says that he invented his theory of the Forms to account for the "paradox" inherent in the observation that (my example) a rock may appear to be bigger than an ant, yet smaller than a house. Plato says this is obviously impossible, as the rock should be either bigger or smaller, but not both; therefore, the rock cannot be real, and reality must lie somewhere else.
So it was left to Derrida to apply Aristotle's proof of the existence of God (the First Mover) to language. This turns Aristotle's claim that the existence of movement implies a first mover, into a proof that for language to have meaning requires a God to provide the first meanings. There is no God; ergo, no meaning. This proof requires several wrong Platonist assumptions to work. Also, Derrida spreads it out across a hundred or more pages /Of Grammatology/, and didn't state its conclusion as "language can't communicate meaning", but as "there is no outside text", leaving it to others to infer his meaning.
Going back to the opening conspiracy premise... we see the present state of affairs (relatively) clearly and the conspiracy believers cherish their single cause/single affect tidiness of thought as an explanation of what we see.
However 'life' or even 'life as we see it in buildings and dress' is the result of lots of prior causes and lots of effects all interacting positively and negatively. People then make a living explaining 'the single cause' behind some event (mostly academics and pundits), or find solace in identifying 'the single cause' (ordinary people and cranks).
It appears that people in general view symmetry with positive feelings, and regard certain proportions (e.g. the Golden Mean) positively too. But then other people will deliberately subvert those views to boost their status. Lay the development of social classes over the last few centuries, the non-survival of vernacular buildings, and the changes in urbanisation on top of peoples' feelings and you have a many-to-many cause and effect set of relationships. Not a 'single' cause.
I've wondered if this is because of education.
I work as a programmer and there are Serious Problems involved in college and university programming courses. To put it bluntly, students learn from people who don't know how to program; they know the buzzwords, they know the academically accepted techniques, but they've never sat down and spent a few years writing real code with actual other people.
So the result is that students don't learn how to program. They learn this kind of weird ivory-tower shadow version of programming. Then they graduate and get a job and we have to deprogram them; we have to teach them how to not do whatever their classes taught them, and instead how to actually, you know, program things. Many people just never get this training and as a result there's a lot of phenomenally awful programmers out there who still think that every project starts with a UML diagram and trying to cram as many design patterns in as possible.
This is a vicious cycle because very few people who are good at programming want to go into education - it's stressful and the pay is bad - so education ends up filled either with people who learned "how to program" and then turned out to be unable to actually program, or with people who never actually learned how to program, either in its shadow version *or* its real version. And the problem perpetuates itself.
So maybe something similar is going on with architecture, and art in general? People learn from architect-teachers who aren't architects but are actually teachers, and they learn ivory-tower shadow architecture, and then they reach the real world and a lot of them just keep doing the same stuff; they build stuff that people don't actually want, that people-who-don't-know-architecture-and-ended-up-teaching think people want, and eventually they get trained out of it but it takes a while. And some of them end up in high-priced consultant roles ("they must be good, they have a degree!") and never have an incentive to learn.
I have no citation for that whatsoever, but it fits the pattern.
Heh. One of my favorite CS teachers was a Russian who had a very ... *pragmatic* approach to programming. While today I can't even remember the name or subject matter of that class, I learned a lot of general principles that are still influencing me. :-)
> if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling. Science has a safety valve here
String theory and evolutionary psychology are sometimes accused of this, so I wouldn't say this is only a problem of the humanities and "soft sciences"
> As A Change From Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste
I'd say the part that's missing here is "taste as a proxy for wealth". Most expensive clothing and design is still made more expensively, e.g. hand-sewed, with high quality materials, etc. The difference to 500 years ago is that the expensive stuff is harder to spot at a distance, you have to know where to look. This gets sold as taste.
On a side note: has anyone ever asked the poets which kind they'd rather write?
I'm not sure I've got much to add to the previous posts but I'll try.
With regards to clothing, I prefer a modern suit to whatever atrocity that Emperor is wearing. But there's a matter of practicality. An Emperor probably didn't have a day job. Representation was probably 90% of his duties. Thus extravagant costumes were justified. Xi is both Emperor and mandarin. His day job probably doesn't look very different from what a banker, consultant or executive manager does... so his clothes have to be somewhat practical.
It'd be fairer to compare the Emperor to Queen Elizabeth and her hats or high fashion models wearing stuff that cannot possibly be worn in the streets or the office but make for interesting (according to some) displays/impermanent art.
For the building stuff - it's a bit harder but one thing you'll see in Paris if you ever get INSIDE one of those beautiful old palaces repurposed for administrative function is that they're awful. Sure, usually, a couple of (ball) rooms have been kept for public receptions etc. but the offices you have to visit to get your admin tasks done have been tucked into artificial divisions that don't suit, elevators had to be crammed in places they don't belong to etc. It basically ruins the building - cheap 70s office cubicles in a grand XV palace... Going in there always make me feel the French state is pathetic and inefficient, which I doubt was the intent.
A priori, I'd expect modern buildings to be fit for purpose. Also while you get cubicle/brutalist horrors, you also get glass and steel sky scrappers and I personally quite like those (though they wouldn't belong inside Paris or Rome centers or even Manhattan but outside, in dedicated business centers like La Defense or Canary Wharf? Sure!). And I cannot wait for solarpunk to take off for real...
Private mansions. One, rich people playing it safe is not that new. You have the father of the Medici famously building his house to be plain outside but beautiful/ostentatious inside. That was when the Medici still had to pretend Florence was a republic...
But also Bill Gates is the wrong type of rich person. He clearly isn't into showing off his wealth like that, even if he's got an enormous house with tens (hundreds?) of rooms, not all of them standard (a trampoline room? swimming pool with under water music system? 6 kitchens?). He wants to be 'comfortable' but is more concerned about influencing the policies of the world than showing off his wealth. I think Russian oligarchs are a lot more 'classical' in that sense : Just Google-image "inside home Russian oligarchs" ; or check out https://guestofaguest.com/real-estate/inside-the-extravagant-homes-of-russian-oligarchs
Public art. Yeah, no comeback on that one. See others about the problems with modern artists needing to distinguish themselves by doing something different, having higher philosophical pretensions than simply entertaining/delighting viewers etc etc.
As for buildings, there's no reason why a building can't be both extravagant-looking and also practically efficient. I mean, even if they just put some interesting looking patterns on the walls. Something has definitely changed with regards to our vibrancy. I think it's maybe that all these buildings are used for business and business has by default a culture of seriousness.
And If artists wanted to do something different and extravagant today, they would ironically create something magnificent like the Taj Mahal. They would spend their entire life studying poetry in their chambers so they could surpass William Shakespeare. Instead we're seeing a general trend of "meh". Society's artists are for the most part mediocre and opportunistic, and I don't think it's because they're trying too hard. On the other hand, society's reception to art has dulled as well. No one cares as much for poetry anymore. But no one cares much for the new San Fran sculptures either, so it can't be that people want something new.
Wouldn't you say, though, that the Walkie Talkie in London or the Gherkin (though honestly not my taste) or the Burj Khalifa are extravagant? I personally find them awe-inspiring, if nothing else...
And obviously, they're functional. Again, I wouldn't put them in the center of historical cities (London, there, made a mistake, imho) but they're impressive...
Actually they do look quite nice. A little inconsistent though, because like you said they're in a city and surrounded by comparatively boring looking buildings, but point taken.
Are they really functional? If you wanted lots of office space, you could get that much FAR cheaper and more practically (for starters, avoiding the whole elevator conundrum) by building less tall buildings covering a larger area. In case of Walkie Talkie the space at financial district of London is at premium so it's somewhat justifiable, but there's literal empty desert just next to Burj Khalifa. Purely on aesthetic grounds I'm a big fan of it, however.
As you say, most sky scrappers are an answer to expensive real estate. Dubai is definitely a special case where it's easy to argue they could have extended horizontally before going vertical. Still, I think the point stands for most tall buildings in most places.
This has much less to do with elites vs commoners and much more so with the essence of modernity, or modernism. In a really small nutshell, nearly all traditional arts and crafts (including fashion and architecture) attempt to imitate nature in its glory complexity. In a religious context, this is to glorify God's creation, if you will, and in a mythical context, it is to express being part of nature. Modernism rejects all this and sets man apart from nature. And all of modernism is the attempt to look as artificial and unlike nature as possible. Nature is complex, so modernism is minimalist. Nature is soft in materials, modernism hard. Nature is brown and green, modernism is either grey or neon colors. nature os round or wavy, modernism is straight and flat. Basically, modern man embodied in the artist expresses through their artifices their alienation from nature. Either as a proud statement, proud to assert that the product can never be mistaken as something natural, or as a sad attestation of fact, a kind of yearning. Famous architects such as Le Corbusier have said things in that vein quite explicitly. Or look up the conversation between architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. Paraphrasing, Alexander says "why are you building such alienating buildings, people hate them" and Eisenman says "why, if I feel alienated, why shouldn't I?" http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm
I think you're on to something there, but now I will write about what I disagree with.
People have been looking for brighter dyes and paints from very early on. I don't know whether they were trying to separate themselves from nature, or trying to create "nature, the good parts version".
Hi Nancy, not necessarily a contradiction - I was outlining what I believe is a general tendency and for sure there will be some loose ends not fully grasped by my generalization.
Forget A vs B photograph comparisons for a second. How long do you think the average person could spend at Milan Cathedral, or Cardiff Castle, or the Trevi Fountain, before they get bored? Or any major exhibition of Renaissance painting, or any classical music concert, anything like that. Keeping in mind that the competition is whatever other fun thing they could be doing like hanging out in a bar, playing video games, watching a movie, going to a gig, playing a sport, whatever. How long do you think the average non-art-nerd could maintain genuine spontaneous interest and excitement in the presence of these things? I don't believe the answer is zero minutes, but I also don't believe it's very much longer than like ten minutes.
I'm not saying that "modern" stuff is more engaging--I agree it's probably less so--but it's important to realise we're comparing "stuff people basically don't give a shit about but think is kind of pretty" with "stuff people basically don't give a shit about but think is kind of ugly". There's a genuine mystery about how the first thing got outcompeted by the second thing, but it's a much less mysterious mystery when you realise that no one really gives much of a shit either way.
("People want poems that rhyme". Which people? How many people do you think spend their evenings reading Edmund Spenser and wishing there was a modern equivalent they could be reading instead? Also tons of modern poetry rhymes so what even the hell)
There are art forms that people really do give a shit about, and it's harder to play the A vs B game with those. People care about movies, and if you put The Matrix or some other much-beloved movie side by side with some great Elizabethan or Victorian piece of theatre, I don't think the movie would embarrass itself. People care about clothing, and if you don't cheat by focusing on business wear and look at the clothes people actually get excited about wearing, that fancy Chinese dress doesn't actually stand out that much. People care about music, and if they genuinely preferred Beethoven to modern stuff then he'd have a lot more listens on Spotify than he does now. People care about novels, and whether your tastes run more "literary" or more "genre" I bet you can name books written after WWII that you'd happily choose over Jane Eyre or Robinson Crusoe.
Again, not claiming to have explained the thing you're saying needs explaining. But I do think that if the average person felt passion for good sculpture deep in their bones the same way they do for good music or good stories, it would be a lot harder to get away with producing lots of sculpture that has no popular appeal.
As I understand it, poetry has fallen out of Anglophone (American?) culture for reasons which aren't clear to me, but has remained popular in other cultures. I've heard about this for Hispanic cultures and Israel, at least.
Does anyone know what popular poetry is like where there is still popular poetry?
This is a very good point.
"("People want poems that rhyme". Which people? How many people do you think spend their evenings reading Edmund Spenser and wishing there was a modern equivalent they could be reading instead? Also tons of modern poetry rhymes so what even the hell)"
Rap rhymes.
Also, not all traditional poetry used rhyme-- Norse poetry used alliteration: "Bare is back without brother behind it."
Do you know who the top-selling English-language poet of the twentieth century was? Dr Seuss.
(I just made that fact up, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's true.)
People give a shit about popular novels, but not about literary novels. Even runner-ups for the Booker T Washington award--maybe the most-respected award for English literary novels--usually sell just a few thousand copies. So the popular pop / unpopular "high culture" division still holds in fiction. Likewise in movies. There are lots of boring pretentious award-winning art films that most people still don't like.
The difference between literary and popular novels and movies is that popular novels and movies are made to make money, and literary ones are status symbols that lose money. The rule is that art that needs to make money stays attuned to what people want, while art that doesn't need to make money, doesn't.
(Note that Shakespeare and Mozart had to make money.)
I found in my career that an analogous thing holds for research and engineering projects: Those done for profit usually do good work; those funded by the government, or by VCs who don't understand what they're funding, tend to cater to current fads and buzzwords, go way over budget, and get hijacked by the interests of the researchers and workers.
Does something similar hold for architecture? Modern architecture is funded by governments; but so were big architectural projects in previous centuries--weren't they?
I suspect the difference is in how the contracts are awarded and who makes the decisions. If you have an individual, or even a committee, in a government agency choose the design, which I suspect is how things were done in the 19th century, I predict you'd be more likely to get buildings that most people don't hate. But if you hire an art consultant, or a panel of architects, to choose the design--which I'd guess is how things are done now--you'll probably get an artistic death spiral in which artists break free of public opinion.
But there is also a difference in that artists today probably have more scorn for public opinion than artists in the past did. In the past, artists didn't care what the public thought, as the public probably wouldn't even get to see their art, and certainly none of their views on it would be published, or listened to by people who mattered. In the 20th century, many artists were horrified if members of "the public" liked their work. The only real standard of excellence for art in the 20th century is that of not being liked by the public.
I feel divided about this issue, because while I often hate pretentious award-winning movies and novels, I also often hate popular box-office busters and runaway bestsellers. As a writer, I've found that readers legitimately have different needs due to their different age, circumstance, & life history. So I'm open to the possibility that the cultural elites have special needs that the rest of us don't understand. But I suspect those "special needs", when expanded, turn out to be things like "I need not to be mistaken for a member of the herd", or "I'm alienated from society because I'm rich and feel guilty, and am not oppressed by any exploitative controlling narrative that would give me a sense of purpose", or "I want to prevent art from relieving the suffering of the masses and thus allow them to achieve revolutionary consciousness." Or possibly just "I hate the masses."
One thing that would help this analysis would be to replace the 1D old-good/new-bad axis with a 2D compass of ornate/austere and good/bad.
The two Chinese outfits pictured are ornate+good and austere+good. Xi's suit is elegant in it's simplicity, the strong contrast between dark/light with a red highlight works aesthetically. Milan Cathedral is ornate+good. Brcconi University is austere+bad. Keeping these separate will help.
A couple of examples of austere+good architecture would be a classic English redbrick house[1] or that plantation mansion from Django Unchained[2].
With this reframing questions like why do we wear suits and not traditional Chinese robes are a lot easier to answer. You might be able to get a robe for the same price, but the suit is also good looking so you can say "tastes change" without having to worry about why people are accepting uglyness.
But Brcconi University, that is damn ugly. And you have to ask why architects keep giving us stuff like that. The giant glass tower I get, it's space efficient, cost effective, and lots of natural light. It don't think it's pretty, but it has function if not form. Brcconi has neither.
[1] https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/country-house-england-hanbury-hall-sunny-day-green-lawn-statue-red-brick-architecture-43546058.jpg
[2] https://globalfilmlocations.net/2020/12/01/django-unchained-2012-film-locations/
I agree with this. A lot of the comment thread seems to be based on the false assumption that beautiful = really ornate = really expensive, when in reality the first equation isn't true (and with the invention of 3D printing and the like, it's arguable that the second equation isn't true any more, either).
I've been especially interested by the architectural clash between anti-aesthetic YIMBYs, RETVRN TO TRADITION revolutionaries, and the bien-pensant architectural elite. I have planned a book review for your next contest on this topic – you have pipped me to the post!
The debate is often framed as a conflict over the influence of the dastardly French – Le Corbusier etc. But if the changes wrought by these thinkers are so unpopular, why haven't market forces simply swept them away? People have agency over which art they buy, which galleries they visit and over which houses they buy. In the UK, where I'm based, basic market logic supports your intuitions: old houses command a premium. But that preference hasn't been carried through into the housing projects that are built.
I hope to compare two different perspectives. Barnabas Calder's recent book, Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency, ascribes changes in architectural style largely to changes in material conditions. Roger Scruton views the changes of modernity as a conscious and ideological break with the past, whose discontinuities are responsible for its jarring appearance.
I have many ideas and many, many questions about both of these perspectives. Perhaps some of you can help me!
1. Why is the change so widespread? Global ideas differ greatly (Russia, for example, seems to be on a bit of a Trad kick at the moment) and so do global material conditions (the Baumol effect should differ according to prevailing wage conditions). And yet the stereotypical "bland concrete tower block city" is a global phenomenon, and practically no recently-built cities are winning plaudits for their beauty.
2. Why are traditional building materials so expensive? In many parts of the UK, buildings were traditionally built of cheap local materials, like Oxfordshire's ooidal limestone. Yet reading about the restoration of traditional buildings, the costs of materials like limestone, traditional brick and slate is always one of the biggest obstacles. But why? Are they running out? Do they require labour that can't be automated?
3. Recent attempts to build traditionally housing en masse, by builders like Barrett or by ideologues like Prince Charles, have resulted in an uncanny valley effect – they look like fake old houses. Why? Is it just placing old designs in modern streetscapes, with contemporary signage and hard asphalt roads? Have they not weathered in yet?
4. Why is there such a difference in reception between mid-century architecture, such as Brutalism, and its associated interior design, mid-century modern? The interior of Brutalist buildings is constantly aped in commercial settings, from Ikea to Heals, but the exteriors are still fairly unpopular. Why?
I think in response to your 3. part of the issue is building something traditional that meets modern standards for things like insulation is prohibitively expensive. Most of those Barrett homes are still modern timber frame with a facade of stone or brick on the outside, the more offensive ones don't even put the stone somewhere that makes sense from a structural view, it's obviously just a decorative layer.
There's currently a new house being built near where I live entirely out of stone, complete with masons and chisels on site, presumably because it's in a conservation area and had to match the surrounding properties. But it looks like they're building a traditional stone shell then lining it with what is effectively an entire modern house on the inside, which is going to be almost as expensive as building two houses.
This is a good point. One major factor I'm looking at in my essay is the impact of comfort and safety on aesthetics. From the C20, having well-insulated, well-lit, fire-proof buildings became possible. With these highly attractive qualities now available, aesthetic concerns were secondary. As you rightly point out, this ends up massively adding to the cost of buildings that try to be both traditionally aesthetic and comfortable.
Nevertheless, there's an unanswered question I feel. The actual materials themselves are massively costly. Just purchasing a house-worth of limestone or a roof-worth of slate is costly in a way it clearly wasn't to vernacular builders of the past. I wonder what's going on there.
Construction cost isn't the main reason for the change. The main driver of a building’s cost is simply its size. Every square foot of building means a certain amount of structure, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, sprinklers, elevators, etc. Finishes and moldings matter, but less than the bare bones.
Moreover, modernist design is more expensive than you might think. Glass curtain walls cost a lot of money. And simplicity can be deceptive. Remember that traditional architecture developed in times when construction was more labor-intensive. Things like roof overhangs and moldings at joints were built in part because they have genuine, functional purposes, and it is often harder to achieve clean and waterproof details without them. Modernism is more about the aesthetic of simplicity than about actual simplicity.
Some of the traditional materials and construction techniques are more expensive now simply because they're not used that much. The pool of suppliers and subcontractors who provide them is small.
And most buildings in the past weren't built with slate roofs or limestone walls. Wood and brick aren't that expensive, relatively speaking.
Re your point 3.
I like to visit Poundbury when I am in that part of the world. When I first visited (over 10 years ago) all the buildings were new and the surface treatments fresh. I visited this year and there is much more greenery in front of the houses, and the rendering now looks like it needs repainting. But Poundbury still feels creepy. It looks like a place where the Stepford Wives would live.
Wikipedia (includes some pictures):
Poundbury is an experimental new town or urban extension on the outskirts of Dorchester in the county of Dorset, England. It was initiated by prize-winning architect Léon Krier with the keen endorsement of Charles, Prince of Wales, on whose land it is built (Duchy of Cornwall). Its design is based on traditional architecture and New Urbanist philosophy.
I've just had a walk around Poundbury on street view and I think part of the problem is it's a planned development that's trying to look like (and using architecture from) cities that grew up organically. So there are old style buildings right next to newer ones but the wear and tear makes it obvious they were put up at the same time. It also suffers a bit from being a small town that's trying to have the architectural diversity of a large one. I imagine the developers did the thing they do with all new builds now which is to spend 6 months flattening all feature from the underlying ground which makes building cheaper and easier but removes the need for any of the little quirks of building on natural land formations that help make houses feel human.
I think a lot of the uncanny valley of modern housing comes from trying to make the mass produced look like it isn't. So you end up with estates full of houses that are all unique combinations of the same 10 basic parts and it looks wrong. In the same way that having roads curve around non-existent landscape features (because you flattened them all) looks wrong, it's obviously fake.
Indeed. There are a few gentle slopes in Poundbury but as you say anything inconvenient was removed. There are comparatively few house designs although they have differing external finishes. Cars are normally parked around the back in yards not visible from the road, and there is little street furniture (street lights are brackets on houses mostly).
My architect friend reckons that Poundbury is what you get when you transplant a genteel London neighbourhood into a rural setting - but with all of the old decrepit clutter left behind.
The landscaping issue is a great point that had escaped my notice! The need to accommodate large numbers of cars is of course the other crucial factor.
I'm a professional architect, albeit one of the minority who does traditional design work. Will try to answer a few of your questions here and below.
>>But if the changes wrought by these thinkers are so unpopular, why haven't market forces simply swept them away? People have agency over which art they buy, which galleries they visit and over which houses they buy. In the UK, where I'm based, basic market logic supports your intuitions: old houses command a premium. But that preference hasn't been carried through into the housing projects that are built.<<
Because almost all of the architects are modernists, and you need to hire an architect to get a new building built. The complexity of design and construction has increased enormously in the past century, in part because of new technologies and in part because of regulation. The design professionals have the licenses and expertise that you need to navigate the maze, which puts you at their mercy. They can throw you a few bones by making vague references to your preferred aesthetic, but mostly they’ll do what they’ve been taught to do and like.
And since modernism is all they know, even their sincere attempts to do traditional design work tends to generate kitsch. That goes to your comment about Poundbury below.
Jim. Where is the best place online to find traditional architects? Traditional design discussion?
>the architectural clash between anti-aesthetic YIMBYs, RETVRN TO TRADITION revolutionaries, and the bien-pensant architectural elite.
The funny thing is that, in my experience of actually dealing with them, NIMBYs are motivated in part by the sheer ugliness of so much new development. The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
Note that the preservation movement followed close on the heels of widespread modernist building. It's quite possible that modernist architecture has had an enormous, though indirect, negative economic impact on middle class Americans by driving land use restrictions that make housing more expensive.
Hi Jim – thanks for all your useful comments, they're much appreciated. It sounds like there is a real shortage of traditional architects. Do you find yourself in very high demand as a result?
I agree about NIMBYism - have you seen the work of Policy Exchange on this issue? Some very interesting policy papers on using traditional design to encourage development. Historic England's papers on traditional housebuilding are also very illuminating.
On this issue specifically applied to Western elite men's fashion, this is an entertaining thread pinning the blame on Beau Brummell: https://twitter.com/_alexrowland/status/1100074018458218497?s=19
And this is an apparently more measured take: https://twitter.com/champs_elyse/status/1100184401021931520?s=19
I don't get this take from the first thread. Elaborate colors or not, I assume pre-Beau Brummell and post-Beau Brummell men were still working within the confines of an acceptable dress--weirdo dress fashion that did not actually permit "freedom."
I know the writer doesn't say this, but they make it seem like women's fashion by contrast is pure freedom of expression. But women seem to operate within the same limited confines of acceptable dress -- women at the Oscars or whatever wear a wider variety of different colors or whatever, but in the end if you wear legitimately unusual stuff you end(ed) up on Mr. Blackwell's list, not praised and affirmed.
The thread claims men's "fashion" is hoodies and stuff, but that's obviously untrue. Tons of men get expensive haircuts frequently and wear nice clothes from a personal shopper, and they get complimented frequently. (They are typically also handsome or jacked or whatever.)
The schlubs don't get complimented but that's not Beau Brummell's fault?
Ars brevis, blog longus... though very enjoyable and I totally agree. Enjoy Barcelona!
I think for a lot architecture utilitarianism might be the answer to why modern design rules supreme.
What the cost of heating or cooling a building are for instance rings to me as a modern consideration. Routing of pipes and cables comes to mind.
That shirt that Scott linked in the comments: can you put that in the machine or does it have to go to a professional? But aside from utilitarianism, you need to be able to pull off a certain style ofclothing. That shirt imo speaks more to the flamboyancy of the wearer than his wealth.
There might be a link to increased governmental accountability. The most liked projects may be "beautiful" in general, but also act as magnets to social and international discontent during times of austerity, since they are perceived as more expensive. Imagine the reaction of the german public if Greece started work on an extremely ornamented, high profile public building... So we add international debtor pressure / fiscal virtue signalling to the mix of internal pressures by the population.
Possibly an economic factor besides the literal monetary costs is the time it takes. I don't mean just that building an ornate house takes longer than a squarish box, but the time involved in studying and learning *how* to design and execute such a thing is no longer economically viable in the creation path of such things. Architecture in the modern world has to happen fast, you know, to get those humans into the boxes.
Also, extend that to the art world: nobody has the time to learn to make and then mix layers of paint to create something like a Rembrandt; you can buy your Windsor & Newton tubes at the store and slap them on a pre-gessoed canvas. *If* indeed you have the time to paint with physical paints rather than rendering your desired image in Photoshop or whatever. Who is even spending the time to practice instruments when you could just load up Garageband and somebody is already sampled doing so. Or better yet, just DJ and use recordings. There was a really great essay by Ian Svevonius from 20+ years back (can't find it in a quick search engine query ATM) about how DJ culture was basically bourgeoise use of other people's labor and was, as you say, a move from using that as a signal of wealth to a signal of taste, ie DJs are paid the big bux for their taste in choosing the labor of others, not for their own creativity. The management class in music.
I know a guy who's an amateur painter. Boxer, real interesting guy, decided to start painting as a way to relax. He's rather good. He himself states that initially, he was also very skeptical of modern abstract art. But as he started to paint more, and look into the history of art, he started to understand too. And then, he says, his realistic approach started to be boring - so he decided to experiment more. Now note, this guy isn't some highbrow educated person - like, he doesn't even have a high school diploma.
This brings me to another comparable thing - internet memes. You might have noticed that "21st century humor" is popular. Very abstract, completely nonsensical, very loud. And considered extremely stupid and unfunny by most "out of touch" people who are stuck in the 2000s internet culture wise, mostly older people. They don't get it, because they don't follow these trends so much - it's all really a big in-joke. Nothing more.
You see where I'm going with this - all this current hypermodern art is, well, one big "in-joke." It only starts to click when you really get into the matter itself. All art styles are just a reaction to the previous one because artists got bored.
On the other hand, I see they're starting to get bored of it now too, with a return to more traditional forms - like complementary architecture.
Recently it has become feasible to use 3D printing for construction of entire houses (first projects in the Netherlands and Germany). While the first projects that have been completed look very ordinary (standard blocks with rounded edges), this technique would in principle allow to build any shape and degree of ornamentation without any cost penalty. It should also be straightforward to algorithmically generate endless streams of intricate designs, even surpassing what was common during turn of the century. It will be interesting to see whether this is what people really want. Slavish reconstruction of destroyed historic buildings (Berlin palace, Frankfurt inner city) is not uncommon, but it will be interesting whether with new technology a new ornate style develops that is not simply a carbon copy of past designs.
Many of the older works we now see as uncontroversially great were controversial in their time (e.g operas causing riots, every new style of painting being described as awful going back to the renaissance at least). So one explanation is that the category of "good art" is continually broadening, and public opinion just lags elite opinion
Related: The Berlin Stadtschloss ("city palace") was reconstructed in the last 10 years, and has just been officially inaugurated last week. It's mostly a reconstruction of the old style, with lots of ornaments.
There was (and is) a furious debate on whether the reconstruction should be in this ornamental, reconstructive style. As far as I can tell, one side of the debate included most of the architectural/artistic world, who would have favoured something modern and condemned the reconstruction as "fake Baroque palace.. a stage-set of an old capital, with phony, manufactured charm, erasing traces of the bad years of the 20th century."
The other side was the general public, who generally was in favour of lots of ornaments and its beautiful aesthetics. Perhaps untypically, the general public won this fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Palace
Except it didn't, really. Three sides were reconstructed in original, ornamental styles, and the fourth, facing the river, was designed in modern plain blocky-rectangly style ( https://www.smb.museum/nachrichten/detail/eroeffnung-des-humboldt-forums-am-17-dezember-2020/ ) ... and I was struck by how ugly it is, and how pointless the outcome of that redesign was.
there is also a gender thing going on
women are impressed by pretty thing more than men
as the power of women waned in the modern age
men stopped creating things that appeal to feminine sensibilities
"Women have less power today than they did a century ago" is a claim that needs some support, I think.
Hmm. There's one hypothesis that's absent from the article, and that is unlikely to be the one complete explanation for everything (e.g. it doesn't really explain architecture), but which I believe to be a significant contributing factor:
Artists became high status, so high-status people now aim to be artists.
This runs into a problem of artistry requiring, well, artistry, which in turn requires both talent and hard work to acquire skills and then more hard work to produce art. High-status kids are just not used to hard work and are statistically unlikely to have talent, but they still want the status, so they push low-skill, low-effort abstract and conceptual art they're actually capable of creating as a pinnacle of taste (and deride people criticizing it as tasteless rubes).
(E.g., I don't have links at me, but I've read several people making a critique that art schools just don't teach proper technique anymore, in large part precisely because instead of preparing people for a trade, they exist to please their paying customers.)
Formerly artists were skilled laborers for hire by people with money. Nowadays, they are the people with money. In part because making money and status is the only way to make it as an artist, as the market for the merely competent has dried up or hidden in niches. In part because the status is alluring to people who already have money.
(I also don't think there's any particular status difference between high-brow and popular culture. It's just that popular culture still ultimately needs to be, well, popular, which serves as a defense against the worst excesses of academic art community. This also explains those "Spiderman classes" better, I think. They're not existing to please commoners, as commoners don't attend liberal arts universities, they're existing to please rich kids for whom they're the next best thing after actually creating Spiderman.)
I think Skopje is a major counterargument to Scott's claim about people preferring traditional architectural styles. Briefly, the Macedonian government decided to build a bunch of public buildings and monuments in a neo-classical style to remind everyone of their ancient heritage - it looks awful, and everyone inside and outside the country agrees that the buildings are super kitschy and shouldn't have been built.
My interpretation is that people prefer *old* buildings, not *old-style* modern buildings. The 19th century saw a large number of buildings built in revivalist styles, mostly neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque, but most of these buildings are forgotten nowadays (compare the relative popularity of the Stephansdom and the Votivkirche in Vienna - they look the same, they're both located right in the centre of the city, but the Votivkirche barely gets any visitors).
On the other hand, architecture that fused classical and modern influences could become really popular and admired. Take for example Jože Plečnik's work in Ljubljana, or Antoni Gaudí's in Barcelona, as two different examples of such a fusion.
I think Skopje looks pretty, going off Google Images, to be honest! What tourists want to visit may respond to different incentives than what is directly pretty — tourists like to tell themselves they're learning about history, after all, not just flocking to whatever tickles their eye in the moment.
Also, the popularity of e.g. John Williams' cinematic music shows that this isn't really true for music.
I think there is an important difference between old-style buildings and old-style builds that is difficult to say, but it definitely exists.
Are you familiar with Palace of Westminster in London? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster#/media/File:Hdr_parliament.jpg
I am, and I have never been in London. When I was a kid, a relative went to London once, and brought some kitchy tourist memorabilia. I got a ballpoint pen that had an inaccurate scene of Westminster inside a plastic "aquarium" with some kind of gimmick that made Thames look a river. It was coolest thing ever.
Likewise, most the cityscape in Helsinki worth looking at consists neo-classical revivalist architecture, designed by Engel and funded by czar Alexander I, which is amazingly popular amongst both the local elite and the populace. The people in suits would like to build high-rise near the city center, but all proposals to build anything modern and tall enough to disturb the skyline (currently commanded by the main cathedral) have been turned down.
Two hypotheses:
1. Objective standards exist. Macedonian government built low quality neo-classical revivalist architecture. They should have allocated larger budget or hired more talented architects.
2. A full, all-encompassing definition of "soft power" is difficult to come by, but here is one way to recognize its presence: You know someone had *lots* of it when the generations afterwards still like the buildings they built and call them "iconic soul of the city" instead of "kitsch that should be demolished at earliest opportunity". It is anyone's guess whether it is because "soft power" is so powerful it can make people see things differently, or the power manifests in ability to attract the best architects who can build such things.
"It is anyone's guess whether it is because "soft power" is so powerful it can make people see things differently, or the power manifests in ability to attract the best architects who can build such things."
Or else it's a mix of (1) and (2): objective standards exist, and buildings, works of art, etc., which meet those standards tend to become more popular and be imitated. When a particular culture produces large numbers of objects which meet those standards, people are more likely to think well of it, which is more or less what we mean by talking of "soft power".
A counter-counter argument about Skopje. The reason people see it as kitsch isn't how it looks but because of the ideology that the ruling party tried to impose. Modern Macedonians have no cultural, linguistic, genetic, or any other ties to ancient Macedonians (except the name). And the buildings were seen as propaganda and were rejected because even in North Macedonia most people don't believe that North Macedonians = ancient Macedonians. Skopje airport was named after Alexander the Great and it was also considered kitschy, with nothing to do with looks.
So two more data points from England:
Victorian factory interiors are very pretty, with no apparent increased cost or business impact: they had to cast the metal, so they cast it into pretty shapes; and they have to paint it, so they paint it tasteful colours. But this is not in the public sphere, so removes a lot of the considerations. Compare this to modern factory interiors.
Brick houses: similarly, houses in the town I am currently in, you can see the old houses, even if they were cheaply built, would use several shades of brick and alternate the colours somehow to provide a pattern -- adding ornamentation at no cost; modern houses seldom do this.
Court rooms: again I'm speaking for England, but old Court rooms look very imposing and new ones look like random office spaces. The judges and barristers are still wearing the silly wigs and stuff, and I think the desire to have an imposing space is still there -- but it doesn't work somehow.
Office exteriors: people want natural light; so you need big windows. Windows get dirty so you need to be able to clean them. But you can't have opening windows because they're huge. So you need a building exterior that is flat to provide easy access for people to go up and down the outside cleaning the windows. You're pretty limited for interesting designs at this point.
Office interiors: you need disabled access, so everything needs to be flat and wide. You need air conditioning so that limits what you can do with the ceiling because you need removable panels. You want to be able to restructure the building to sell it on or when you have a re-org, so you need interior walls that are essentially disposable -- what can you do?
The bit you might expand on is class, cos I think that class (rather than wealth) signaling is possibly the thing here.
And by 'class' I don't mean wealthy vs poor, workers vs owners. Class (to me) now seems to be delineated by education.
The educated seem keen to differentiate from the uneducated partly by a process of making obviously untrue things doctrine among bien pensants (eg impenetrable but silly critical theories) and partly by foisting ugly buildings on their retinas and saying daft things about their architectural merits.
Personally I love the sense of superiority I feel for really 'getting' that the music of Steve Reich is sexier than the music of Beyonce. And that I could reasonably articulate why it is so, while making someone a bit discomfited that they are missing something that a more 'sophisticated' person just knows.
This may be why I see the Taj Mahal as slightly vulgar, whereas the Musée des civilisations européennes et méditerranéennes, in Marseille, is my favourite building.
Us Brits call things fish 'n chippy when they're obviously accessible. Or 'common'.
So, my theory is that modern art etc is just a form of trolling.
With architecture in particular it seems likely that "how it feels to be inside that building" has become more important than "how the building looks from the outside." Rotundas have awful acoustics.
I recall a theory that modern architecture (and possibly by extension art in general) is a consequence of massive societal PTSD caused by WW1: everything was toned down as a response to lower arousal threshold not to be offensive. Especially Walter Gropius is named as the main culprit of this moment: Bauhaus would therefore look dead inside because the main designers were, literally, dead inside, and social contagion explains everything else.
In addition to that, there's indications Le Corbusier was autistic – and that, as a consequence, his designs cater to autistic rather than neurotypical mind. Would again fit with observation how the Silicon Valley where autism would be the norm is so eager on such designs. Some neuroscientists have even done eye-tracking studies on pictures of classical and modern designs and apparently classical designs, in their ornateness, are too much for autistic mind to manage.
https://www.archdaily.com/947890/what-neuroscience-says-about-modern-architecture-approach
Interestingly, Gropiusstadt was the place where the heroine of Christiane F. (We Children from Zoo Station) grew up, and she credits the awfulness of the place with her own slide towards heroin addiction.
IDK if this book and movie are known in the Anglo-Saxon world, but in Germany and neighboring countries, both are notorious.
It's the shift from 'form as a function' to 'form follows function'.
Things used by people who impersonated institutions (king for the realm, pope for the church, nobles for their area) needed to communicate being more than just a person. In modern times, such an impersonation is communicated by other means; now, everybody consumes media.
This shift freed the creators/designers/architects to maximize for functionality, and that is what we see. Status now is conveyed in possessions serving convenience, or collected as cultural capital, and in entertainments.
A lot of Edinburgh's Georgian buildings were funded by local businessmen or aristocrats and designed by local architects. People who would either walk past their buildings every day or who would have regular interactions with people who did. A lot of it was vanity projects, a way for a well off local to leave their mark on the city and that means designing at with at least the locals in mind. In contrast they've just this year finished building a giant golden turd in the city center designed by London architects and paid for with mostly anonymous foreign money, people who's motivation is praise from other architects and finance executives and who certainly aren't going to be accosted in the streets because they took a literal shit in the middle of a history city.
We should let rich people fund public building projects again, and put their names on it. Sure we'd get a couple of Trump towers but at least you know who's fault it is. When Taylor Wimpey vomits another awful housing estate onto the countryside nobody responsible has enough at stake to care.
Zaha Hadid seems to be a decent person (she is dead, I know), because her design for an office building replacing an urban jungle in Prague looks fairly futuristic and nice.
https://www.designmag.cz/architektura/61848-masarykovo-nadrazi-v-praze-se-zmeni-dle-zahy-hadid.html
No, please not THAT project. Have you ever been to Prague? That... thing they are... depositing next to the old train station is the architectural equivalent of a kick in the nuts, for the whole part of town it will get erected in.
Zaha Hadid was probably a nice enough person, as a human being: but most of her buildings that I have seen close up and personal are bizarrely uninhabitable pieces of alien spacecraft spare parts. There is one in Vienna, on the riverbank, which has sat empty ever since getting built: simply because the shape serves no conceivable purpose. No one wants to live there, no offices want to rent the space. Spoiler alert: buildings with at least a few right angles in their floor plan aren't old fashioned: there are reasons why people didn't build houses in the shape of weird interlocking prisms in the past, just to say "fuck you" to the surrounding countryside.
Outside H.P. Lovecraft novels, that is. And then only on the South Pole.
I have lived in Prague since 1996. I quite like the project, but my impression might be colored by the previous state of that particular place. It was an awful, dilapidated chunk of real estate.
I've only been in Prague since 2008, and the state of that place was indeed not all that great. But this is still a false dichotomy: just because it was an eyesore does not automatically mean that one should build something bizarre there instead.
The centre of Prague is an architectural marvel, mainly due to modernism having had so little opportunity to wreak havoc there.
I suspect it is all a matter of preference. I can live with this particular kind of modernism. What I intensely disliked was the planned "blob" library by Kaplicky and I am glad it wasn't built.
Indeed, preference plays a big role as well. Of all Hadid buildings, this one is actually the least terrible that I am aware of: and it kinda sorta meshes with all the new stuff along the riverbank in Karlín.
That having been said, I personally still consider most of modern architecture, this included, to be downright dreadful and an eyesore. Not to mention ecologically questionable, especially in the longer run (what with the vast amounts of non-recyclable high tech materials used, which will have to be disposed of at some point). But this particular example could also be a lot worse, granted.
It says a lot about that building in Edinburgh that googling "golden turd city centre" brings up the project as first hit - without even mentioning the city in the search.
When I look at those "old vs modern" comparison photos, it makes me wonder if the difference is that the modern era has an uneasy relationship with ornamentation. Traditionally, ornamentation, (certainly in architecture and sculpture, but I suspect in other arts) has relied on a language of symbols that were expected to be legible to the target audience. Whereas today the entire concept of a language of symbols with one-to-one relationships to some abstract reading does not have widespread acceptance (I'll leave it to cultural history experts to confirm or refute that statement). The modern aesthetic is exactly what you would expect to find when you're trying to produce visual appeal but can't earnestly use ornamentation.
I do also suspect the architecture-specific factors Scott mentioned are more important than he's giving them credit for. Technological innovations like steel framing and stronger glass were huge factors in the development of modern architecture, and the aesthetic of technologically-permitted plainness probably spilled over into other arts.
Art Deco and Frank Lloyd Wright come to mind for having broken the classical mold and established precedents for much of contemporary architecture while producing works of real beauty. Jazz sometimes approaches the sophistication of classical music. Many examples of beautiful artistry can be found in the design of cars (particularly pre-1970s, but I think the past decade has seen a return of pleasing design) and computer hardware and software in the post-iPhone era.
I think another way of looking at the change is that, for centuries, artists and their clients agreed on a set of principles that programmatically produced things that everyone agreed were good. For example, in architecture, you had columns, arches, and domes, and if you assembled them in the right proportions, you were pretty much guaranteed to have a nice-looking temple. Great artists would play with around with the principles or even subvert them, but the principles were still the common reference point.
The modern world broke this mold and showed, in one domain after another, that things of beauty can be produced without following the old rules. Where artistry was once about showing off how well you could do what everyone else was doing, or how cleverly you could innovate within the prevailing idiom, it has now become a matter of purely individual expression. Reference points are no longer required.
But the artists who first broke the rules in their respective domains were generally educated or at least culturally steeped in the pre-modern understanding of art. If an architect spent years studying classical notions of aesthetics before deciding to go his own way, his rebellion stood against those classical notions and many concrete examples thereof in his built environment, and he probably felt at least a subconscious compulsion to produce something that achieved the aesthetic effects that his culture believed architecture should achieve, so that he could say to his contemporaries, "You see, we can achieve the desired effect without following their rules!"
But with the link to the past broken, subsequent generations were unmoored. Architecture is no longer expected to produce awe, to serve as a testament to the genius of man or the glory of God, etc. We are back to apishly copying the prevailing mode, as people did before the modern era, except no longer with the goal of impressing others. Now architecture is largely expected to meet a bewildering number of legal requirements and otherwise blend into the background.
Your final two paragraphs, contrasting the founding generation of modern architects with later imitators, remind me of something David Chapman wrote. This excerpt is from 'A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse' essay, part of his Meta-rationality project (https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge). Chapman, similarly, contrasts the first generation of postmodern theorists with their later imitators:
>In the 1970s and 1980s, the best postmodern/poststructural thinkers presented meta-rational views, based on their thorough understanding of systematic rationality. This first generation of postmodern teachers had a complete “classical education” in the humanities; they mastered the Western intellectual tradition before coming to understand its limitations. Deconstructive postmodernism, their critique of stage 4 modernism/systematicity/rationality, is the basis of the contemporary university humanities curriculum....
>In fact, even most teachers of postmodern theory don’t understand it. Unfortunately, the postmodern pioneers chose to write in obfuscatory riddles. Their insights were difficult enough to understand without that. Few followers could extract the insights. Most teachers are second-generation professors who didn’t understand pomo when it was new, and third-generation ones who were mainly taught dumbed-down second-generation “pseudo-pomo.” They were never taught to think, and can’t. What they learned was to imitate the founders’ appalling rhetorical style.
I wouldn't be surprised if we find critics making this contrast between a pioneering generation and the successor generation(s) in almost every non-empirical field that experienced radical innovation in the 20th century.
I think you're right that it's a more general phenomenon. Traditional education was more like training -- everyone was expected to memorize the same texts, develop the same skills, etc. Modernity's rejection of such strictures is supposed to be liberating, and I think it's quite possible that there are infinitely many avenues worth exploring in every domain that were closed off by traditional thinking. The problem is that there is a much larger infinity of insipid crap.
At their best, the traditional strictures served to maintain hard-won, battle-tested principles while inculcating intellectual discipline. This varies by field (obviously, traditional cosmology wasn't worth maintaining), but I think art stands out as a field where most everyone feels we've lost something worthwhile (hence the theme of this post). An infinity of possibilities is wonderful when everyone makes great use of it, but if everyone is just going to slavishly copy prevailing modes, then you want the prevailing mode to be something that reliably produces stuff and ideas that we like.
Maybe just a symbol of progress. Regular people may prefer the asthetics of older architecture and art, but if you're an artist your goal may be to do something new, push new boundries, instead of just retreading what was already done a few hundred years ago.
I feel like Lil Nas outfit at the Met Gala is some evidence for the "As A Result Of The Split Between Art And Mass Culture" hypothesis
https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/lil-nas-x-met-gala-2021-versace
I wonder if the commenters here would be more or less likely to appreciate modern art?
Is it possible that certain types of conceptual, technical, or abstract exposure in general tend to favor development of appreciation for modern style vice traditional, and these exposures happen to be common for the elites in the last 100 years or so?
It may be an ‘does X cause Y’ problem where status is correlated but not causal.
That’s my intuition, at least.
>It might be helpful to go through a list of countries, see which have more modern vs. traditional architecture, and correlate that with their system of government and level of inequality. My impression is that the more democratic and developed a country, the more modern its architecture, which would require a lot of additional explanation.
I think that social homogeneity/heterogeneity is a better way to look at it as opposed to the level of wealth inequality. In the less developed places, you have less diversity in terms of jobs, hobbies and so on, for example in a very poor African nation everybody would be a farmer or a miner or be engaged in some form of physical labour or what have you. In the "more democratic and developed countries" the culture, lifestyles and environments are far more diverse so there is a lot of social fragmentation. In a largely agrarian country, there would be little lifestyle or cultural diversity, whereas in a country like America there would be an awful lot.
I think it mostly has to do with the shift from autocratic aristocratic societies to modern bourgeois democratic ones.
In aristocratic societies, the rule of the hereditary nobility lacks any rational legitimacy. So they constantly have to appeal to other kinds of legitimacy. They do so by constantly wowing and bamboozling the public (i.e. the lower classes) into thinking that the they, the nobles, are special, extraordinary beings, blessed with the grace of the heavens. So that’s the purpose of classical aristocratic art: making oneself appear as a higher, otherworldly being, separated from the ordinary material world of the peasantry, endowed with a supernatural (mostly religious) legitimacy. The ruling aristocrats are the chosen ones of the gods – and they have to look and act like it.
In modern bourgeois democratic societies, the status and power of the ruling class is not (overtly) coercive and hereditary. Their rule seems to be rational, based on legitimate public consent. The politicians are voted into office because they are judged by the public to be the best for the job (in theory), and the rich are richer than others because they are the most productive on the fair and perfect marketplace (in theory). So since modern democratic elites understand their power and status to be legitimated (mostly) by rational public consent, they don’t feel the need to appeal to a higher legitimacy – by constantly wowing the public and convincing them of their superiority. In a democratic setting, doing so might actually prove detrimental, which is why modern elites mostly do the opposite: they try to convince the public that they themselves are ordinary people like everyone else.
I think the bland modern architecture is to do just that as well: it serves to demonstrate the ordinary, unexceptional and therefore egalitarian and democratic merit of the building and its purpose. More classical and pompous architecture might be (more or less rightfully) perceived as aristocratic, elitist and therefore anti-democratic. And I think there is some empirical truth to this. Pompous and ostentatious buildings are still being constructed … but almost exclusively by markedly autocratic regimes. In a democratic setting, spending public funds for rational but boring expenditures, such as public utilities, may gain a politician more public approval than spending it on ostentatious building programs. Thus, a cheap and bland modern building is a seemingly prudent and democratic building; an expansive and sensational building is a seemingly wasteful and autocratic building.
In a democratic setting, elites have to prove they are prudent and ordinary (even though they may not be) in order to secure the rational legitimacy from the governed. In an aristocratic (autocratic) setting, elites have to prove they are utterly extraordinary (even though they most likely are not) to secure their personal glory and thus the perception of supernatural legitimacy.
(Obviously many modern autocrats also heavily try appealing to ordinary appearances in order to fake democratic legitimacy. They want to have it both: the personal grandeur and the man-of-the-people persona – and most likely they are failing at both of them)
What about classical Greece and Renaissance Italy? If anything, republican/democratic politics and commercial economies seem to only fuel more artistic output as politicians and merchants seek public renown by commissioning art. But that link has been largely broken in modern times, as few would care if Bezos commissioned a painting, so instead he goes to space.
As far as I know, both the city states of Classical Greece and the republics of Renaissance Italy were exceedingly aristocratic. Sure, most had mixed constitutions, including also some democratic and monarchical elements, but I think it’s fair to say that the aristocratic element was by far the most dominant. Almost all of those cities were dominated by a hand full of noble houses, constantly busy imposing their own grandeur. That democracy comes at the price of ordinariness and blandness has always been a common critic of democracy from the Greek classics all the way to Nietzsche in the modern era.
In general, I don’t think it makes much sense equating the socioeconomic dynamics of premodern Europe with today’s industrial capitalism, which comes with very different socioeconomic (and thus cultural) dynamics – that’s why I stressed the “modern bourgeois” part of democracy. Modern (mostly) bourgeois democracies are not the same as premodern (mostly) aristocratic republics.
What I find interesting, however, is that the bourgeois class, once it eclipsed the nobility in wealth and power in the long 19th century, for a long time still stuck to the ‘high culture’ style of the old aristocracies, since they still thought it essential to emulate aristocratic appearances in order to secure legitimacy. That may be why in the late-19th/early-20th century, bourgeois republics were erecting neoclassical buildings en masse. It’s also why John Adamas famously argued that the US president should be addressed as Your Highness. Such aristocratic illusions seem to have mostly disappeared from today’s mass democracies.
Modern elites seem more interested in appearing ordinary rather than extraordinary. I guess that’s part of Trumps appeal – he dares to be extraordinary. A shift backwards towards the construction of imposing neoclassical structures could thus also be interpreted as reflecting an autocratic shift in the broader political culture. I’m not saying that’s necessarily true, but I think it’s interesting.
Your argument is starting to sound more plausible, but you've narrowed the relevant dichotomy down to aristocratic vs egalitarian, without the political dimension (autocratic vs democratic) you originally included. It now fits history better, but we have to ask why the existence of aristocracy would matter. Unless we believe it's all down to the genes of particular aristocratic families, it must have to do with the education and socialization of the members of those families.
This dovetails with the thesis I offered above, that there was a change from a paradigm in which artists and their clients generally agreed on the core principles of good art to one in which the rules were abandoned in favor of individual expression. Aristocracy matters because when an insular minority is responsible for all of a society's artistic output, you're more likely to see convergence on a core set of aesthetic principles... right?
Well, our view of history would be incomplete without considering the United States. Egalitarian from the beginning, at least in the North, we also have our fair share of monumental architecture, particularly in structures related to civic institutions, infrastructure (e.g. train stations), and public squares. The rise of industrialization only brought a greater proliferation of grand architecture, from the Carnegie libraries to the skyscrapers of Chicago to the opulent mansions of Newport, RI.
I get what you're saying, that a god-king seeks to inspire awe while a populist politician tries to seem like an everyman, but I think the overall effect of democratization is to give a much larger population the chance to make a name for themselves, so this should generally result in more people wanting to do big, impressive stuff. That is in fact what we saw in US architecture for generations, and we still see it today, only the stakes have risen. Funding a university isn't enough to make a splash anymore; you have to go to space now.
Also what we see in the US is that the state continues seeking to aggrandize itself, it's just not in the service of a single man any more. Hence the monuments and grand buildings of DC, as well as the town halls, courthouses, and war monuments which stand as the most impressive structures in towns across the country.
I think your thesis needs to account for why the change in architectural standards in the US was not associated with a new emergence of egalitarianism here. That thesis might work better in Europe, which didn't really become democratic until after WWII. But we already were egalitarian, and we still built monumental architecture as an expression of various aspects of our egalitarian culture.
I already tried to present a theory on why the US bourgeoisie (and European ones at a similar time) was so obsessed with monumental neoclassical architecture, in my third paragraph. I will try to flesh it out a bit:
The aesthetics of wealth and power at the time were still shaped by the aristocratic visuals of the past. The bourgeoisie had become the dominant social class, but culturally the jumped-up class suffered from a sort of inferiority complex, trying to outdo the grandeur of the ancien regimes by (over)reliance on the architectural language of classical republicanism. The American bourgeoisie in particular was especially motivated not only to outdo the old aristocracies but the competing European bourgeoisie as well. The New World was not to be a savage hinterland but culturally abreast with the capitals of the Old World.
After WWII, the US was sprinkled with grandiose neoclassical structures it could construct and spread easily, while much of Europe lay in ruins. The US was the indisputable superpower, both politically and culturally, so there appears to have been no need anymore to emulate the (architectural) styles of old, aristocratic Europe. The modern US bourgeoisie had achieved a level of security and legitimacy that no longer required the outdated aesthetics of classical grandeur. As a consequence, architecture became more practical and less representative. Where it was representative, it was to be markedly different from the classical Old World – appealing to frugality, egality and practicality. The cultural subtext being: We don’t need false pomp and grandeur; our rule is legitimated by rational consensus alone.
It should also be remarked that the early US was not as democratic as is often implied. Only one of its three federal branches of government was to be elected by a direct democratic vote. The president was to be elected by more or less independent, upper-class electors, and the Senate directly by the governments of the states. And even the democratic vote was limited to white, male, fairly old property owners – thus excluding the vast majority of the population. Sure, for its time this was still remarkably democratic, and the US after all never had a ‘hereditary’ aristocracy. BUT the American elite did very much consider itself to be a ‘natural’ aristocracy – chosen due to their individual, natural abilities. So, even without a hereditary nobility, the US upper classes (both in the south and the north) have for a long time been influenced by a distinct aristocratic culture. This culture came more and more under pressure by the democratic advances of the 20th century.
I see that your username identifies you as a Marxist, so you're probably inclined to think in terms of class. That can be a useful tool sometimes, but it shouldn't be the only tool in your kit.
It could be as simple as that Americans who founded towns wanted them to look nice, and everyone shared a design language at the time which was heavily influenced by classical architecture (and neoclassicism was also popular in Europe, so the idea that Americans specifically chose this idiom for its republican connotations may be a bit of a red herring).
Regardless of class affiliation, if you wanted a civic building or town square, you would hire architects and urban designers who were all steeped in a common set of ideas. Everyone agreed on the end goal: to make something formal and impressive, something that had basically the same effect as its analogue in every other town in the known world. And the things they built then have a similar effect on us today, so it seems that people really had worked out over the centuries how to do impressive monumental architecture.
There was nothing essentially democratic or antidemocratic about this. A town was supposed to have a civic plaza whether it was in Ohio or Bohemia. What was different about the US is we didn't have the lord's castle on the hill -- all the monumental structures were property of the state and thus, in theory, the people. But despite the difference in sociopolitical context, the monumental architecture was built anyway, and not just during some distinct period of acute national insecurity, but for probably 150 years, through waves of immigration and tumultuous socioeconomic changes.
You should at least consider the possibility that it had as much to do with facts on the ground -- common prejudices, training and education, reference points, constraints, etc -- as with the timeless logic of class distinctions. The problem of how to build structures with certain effects on their audience is not specific to any sociopolitical context, so whether we're talking about American bourgeoisie or European aristocrats or a committee of proletarian urban planners, if their goal is to build a civic plaza with some impressive buildings and statues, they'll end up drawing from similar wells. Think of it in terms of convergent evolution.
I think you're still not properly isolating your variables. The notion that Americans moved on from neoclassical architecture because our ruling class was finally secure in its position may make sense when you only look at our history, but then why did Europe undergo a similar transition away from traditional idioms? What about the Soviet housing projects? As Alexander suggested, the change seems secular, not specific to any particular context. There are too many confounding variables to explain it in terms of US political economy.
Of course my attempt of a ‘Marxist’ explanation isn’t the only valid one. But I think that it does contribute a useful and important element (maybe even the most important element) to explain the issue at hand. I don’t think that aesthetic and architectural norms and preferences develop randomly in a cultural vacuum, disconnected and independently from the socioeconomic structure that very literally produces them. Instead, I belief that the enormous socioeconomic changes human civilization has experienced during the last couple of centuries must have had a large impact on cultural and aesthetical norms as well. Therefore, I don’t think it’s much of stretch to argue that the bourgeois class, once it came into power, heavily (and quite consciously) relied on monumental architecture inspired by classical (mostly aristocratic) republicanism, in order to boost its yet fragile political legitimacy.
I also find it somewhat unfair of you to criticize me for focusing to much on the US. The reason I focused on the US in my previous comment was because you specifically asked me to do so – which is legitimate since the US is in many ways a special and interesting case. My first two comments, however, did not focus on the US, but instead laid out my case more generally.
Regarding the changes following WWII, again I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to argue that during the first half of the 20th century, the aristocratic nobility was mostly wiped out (both figuratively and somewhat literally), the labor movement gained a lot of political influence, bourgeois society thus ended up heavily democratized, and that therefore the monumental architecture of the past came to be associated with authoritarianism, pretention and public waste. Given this more democratic and less aristocratic social climate (aristocratic both in the European hereditary and in the American ‘natural’ sense), it’s small wonder that the more practical (and I guess more cost-effective) Bauhaus-style come into fashion and began to shape modernity. Since autocrats the world over still relied heavily on the monumental architecture of the past, it furthermore became a signifier of anti-democratic grandstanding and unimaginative kitsch.
Have you ever heard of St Joseph, Missouri? I like to use Google Maps to explore the world, and I particularly enjoy checking out random towns across the US. The architecture and streetscapes are often quite pleasing, and some of them have surprisingly illustrious histories. When I stumbled on St Joseph, I could not believe how impressive the municipal courthouse was. Take a look at it below. Built in 1873, it's just a courthouse in some random town you've never heard of. But it's almost grand enough to be a national capitol, if you ask me.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.768198,-94.8547294,3a,75y,345.67h,105.69t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sKWroDOACvs-f_BvAd4mZ2w!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DKWroDOACvs-f_BvAd4mZ2w%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D16.980717%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192
Well it’s certainly charming, but I’m not sure what you are trying to say. Are “grand” capitols a sign of the democratic spirit of its citizenry? One of the most “grand” capitols I can think of is Romania’s ‘Palace of the Parliament’. Needless to say, its construction was ordered by Romania’s dictator, without consulting the Romanian people who (allegedly) despised it. Many of the most spectacular public buildings in the present and past were and are constructed by autocrats, lacking rational democratic legitimacy.
Of course, I don’t have a problem with citizens coming together, democratically deciding to build and fund grand public buildings – they should be perfectly free to do so. I’m just saying that a lot of grand public buildings that exist, were not created this way, and that the people, if they were given a choice, might oftentimes prefer the public funds to be spent for more practical purposes.
Sorry, if I am interpreting too much into your comment.
I was just providing anecdotal evidence for my assertion that even amid the democratic egalitarianism of the US, monumental architecture was ubiquitous until the aesthetic transition.
We can automate ornament, but we can't automate the process of each bit of ornament being made by humans who are gradually tweaking it to make it more satisfying.
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Older brick factories and warehouses would always (?) have a little bit of unnecessary ornament. they didn't have gargoyles, but they'd have brick arches over the windows or somesuch. They weren't just boxes.
Interestingly, I have a very strong preference for the business suit over the emperor's garb. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I think it's the cohesion of the business suit which makes me like it more, not specifically the austerity. It's an ensemble: the simple dark of 80% of the suit helps draw the eye to the cuffs and neck where bright colors and contrast flash, and the austerity gives way to a little more detail and design.
It's like a classic wedding party: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/5a/fe/a0/5afea0dbad00337732cc5907d9c84738.jpg
The bridesmaids and groomsmen (and to a lesser degree the groom) are all deliberately more austerely dressed than the bride (and to a lesser degree the groom.) There's exactly one person who's supposed to be the centerpiece of the show, and so there's one person allowed to wear something ornate and of a unique, contrasting color to everyone else.
And I think that's a useful thing to design an outfit to do. You WANT people to be looking at your face, or tracking your hands as you gesture. It's kind of rude and awkward if they're staring at the ornate, beautiful whorls on your left knee instead. Good art includes good framing, and good framing draws the eye to where the artist wants it while being non-distracting.
On the other hand, the robe is basically unframed. Where are your eyes drawn? The dragon on the chest probably SHOULD be the focal point, but there's equally vivid, intricate, colorful, etc. details all over the robe. The eyes aren't particularly drawn to the dragon, because there's nothing visually different about it. To me, it looks kind of like a bunch of overly proud tailors were assigned different parts of the same outfit, and each was determined to show off their best skill and make a centerpiece out of their part of it.
Ah, just saw a 'modern' example of a far more ornate outfit that doesn't suffer from this problem: https://media.vogue.co.uk/photos/613fd7d30337a843eb12cba8/master/w_1600,c_limit/GettyImages-1340129801.jpeg
Obviously not mainstream, and really a reimagining of the older style, but it's an illustration of how ornateness can still work well and have good framing (even though the emperor's robes really don't.)
Perhaps neurology or specifically neuronal plasticity is part of the explanation. To some extent, perhaps to a great extent, our preferences for certain shapes, lines, patterns, colors, and sounds have had to do with what we have been exposed to from birth until adulthood. Over the centuries these early life experiences have changed drastically. To get one silly off the cuff poorly thought out example: our modern lives are so filled with chaos, screens, rapidly changing things in a visual field, perhaps this predisposes us to Prefer square unelaborated buildings.
As Scott mentioned in the OP, "we" actually prefer classical architecture by a margin of 70-30.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Fountainhead. In one of the earliest scenes (it might even be in the first few paragraphs), the protagonist (who is basically Frank Lloyd Wright with Ayn Rand's moral sensibilities) shits all over the Parthenon for not being innovative -- the celebrated classical elements being holdovers from wooden temples. "Copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood" is the way Rand describes late-19th/early 20th pre-modern architecture.
That had an impact on me. I used to hate modern architecture, but after that I started to appreciate it for being innovative and having its own type of aesthetic value, which is different from the more ornate styles, but not necessarily worse. As a corollary, I've come to disdain new buildings that try to copy older styles, not because they are ugly, but because they are lazy and backwards looking.
Yeah that book gave me a lifelong love of skyscrapers!
But as I got older I think it's more subtle. It's not "Columns are evil and the actual Parthenon/Tudor Style/whatever" is bad or ugly.
It's that things belong where they make sense: a real medieval castle vs a fake one, or a pastiche of medieval and Greek and Tudor, or fake columns on a skyscraper, or an opulent facade on a normal house (think Italian facades in parts of Brooklyn!)
(If you remember, the "modernistic" exhibition later in the book that looks like squeezed out toothpaste also gets no love, nor do plain old boxes everywhere!)
I personally don't love Wright because it's so dark inside some of those houses!
I agree. Rand wrapped the whole thing up in her rigid morality, but you don’t have to be an Objectivist to believe that art should aspire to more than imitation.
Apparently Wright houses also leak.
I looked up Wright's writing, and he sounds a lot like Ellsworth Toohey. It's one of the great hidden jokes.
I don't think it's quite true that more democratic countries have more modern architecture. Lots of modernist buildings are built in China.
That leads me to a question -- has modern architecture always been unpopular with the masses, or this a relatively new phenomenon?
I have the impression that when societies are generally optimistic about the future (e.g. China today), they embrace art and culture that makes a break with the past and charts a new course to something that is assumed to be better. Meanwhile, societies that are generally pessimistic about the future (e.g. the US today( embrace art and culture that hearkens back to a lost "golden age".
If there is any truth to that, I expect modernism would have started to lose popularity sometime around the 1970s or so, maybe experiencing a brief resurgence in the 1990s.
The obvious counterexample is The Renaissance, which revived Greek and Roman styles. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm also not sure how long it lasted before new styles took over.
Some thoughts on this:
-We consume a lot more information now, maybe we like quieter aestethics now to give our brain a rest? The more goes on inside, the cleaner our environment needs to be, visually and auditorially? Maybe our brain needs a certain amount of stimulus, and a lot of busy figures and prints and details provides a lot more stimulus.
-Some aspect of modern art is also the skill of appreciating it. That is why back in the day if art was not realistic and you did not like it right away you would dismiss it. But now there apparently is a skill to it, so if you dismiss it you admit your ignorance of being able to appreciate high art. And sometimes this is pushed to an extreme where nobody really likes something, but few want to admit, and a turd in a plastic bag is suddenly worth millions.
And maybe the reason for that is that intellectual pursuit is much more highly valued now? Whereas piety was more highly valued back in the day.
-As for general visual art, and possibly large building projects, they were a much greater cost back then. As a percentage of incomes (paint and materials) and GDP. So if something was produced, it better be something of obvious great skill. Add in that hierarchies were much more rigid, and gate keeping was much easier.
-This adds in to my last point, for something to catch on to the point where it becomes worth doing, it needs a certain critical mass of adopters. In a society where 80% is farmer and is poor, and where information travels very slowly, it is simply not possible to get this critical mass for anything that is beyond obviously easy to interpret and enjoy as a very skilled work of art.
I think a lot of ideas and tastes are also locked into network effects. So if you got a small well connected elite, they keep each other locked into the same taste. Whereas in a more fractured modern society where more people can consume, different sub cultures can more easily form?
-Obviously whenever finding the reason for some social trend, there isn't one answer, there are often multiple forces that work together to keep something locked in place. And multiple forces at once that are required to break this network effect.
An important piece of context is just how much resources went into producing monumental art. Some estimates say 20% of GDP put into cathedrals in high middle ages France (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/04/the-cost-of-parisian-gothic-cathedrals.html). I'm pretty sure we could do better with just 5% of modern GDP, we just choose not to spend it that way.
Part of it is related to Baumol cost disease, in that we can get a lot of nice things today for that money that were inaccessible in the middle ages, while the cost of producing art has arguably gone up in absolute terms because the salary of a skilled artist is much higher. Part of it is just different values - we value art much less compared to our general standard of living, and I think it's a good thing.
If you want to look for an historical precedent, the Roman republic/empire may be one. Their art and monuments were much less impressive with respect to other ancient mediterranean civilizations, especially once you factor in the larger Roman population and economy. On the other hand, they built a lot of useful things like roads, bridges, and aqueducts. Plus, like us they spent a lot in popular entertainment (gladiatorial games, chariot races...). On the whole, we remember them as a great civilization, enough that we try to forget their fondness for enslaving people and torturing them to death if they rebelled.
Scott, here's a cartoon that encapsulates the essence of your question:
https://youtu.be/EfTVjqlOz4M
This is in the beginning of "The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath" -- an iconic Russian New year's eve movie whose premise is a man accidentally ending up in the same apartment, same lock and key, same furniture even, same address, same building.... Just in a different city.
The cartoon has no words in it but it speaks exactly to the issue your outlined in architecture.
> One possibility is that, even though normal people prefer traditional architecture, modern architecture is actually better, and good architects know this. This is not really the way I think of aesthetics, but I guess it’s possible.
Maybe it's not just aesthetics, but modern design is just more functional and practical. More than likely, it's the confluence of "functional, practical, cost effective", all of which incentivize modern design.
It's also possible that "the grass is always greener on the other side", ie. if people lived in classical buildings, they'd actually prefer modern design.
I think there is just a general aesthetic trend away from elaborate ostentatiousness and toward something more minimalistic and elegant, once some maximum of reasonable ostentatiousness has been reached.
I think it’s kind of illustrative, actually, to look at computers. Remember Windows XP, where the buttons all looked glossy and shaded and brightly colored? Modern Windows UI is flat, solidly colored panels. Today, the Windows XP look looks inescapably tacky and old-fashioned. You can see the same trend with websites, and even with corporate logos, which are all gradually evolving in a more flat and minimalistic direction. This is despite Windows XP being much younger than modernism in architecture!
I’d suggest the mechanism here is something more along the lines of a general drive away from what seems old-fashioned at a given time. Computers and the internet are new; the initial evolution in their history was toward showing off greater technological capabilities (look, more colors! Look, shading!). Then, when that potential had been exhausted and there weren’t really ways to keep making things look even fancier that way anymore, instead that look became dated and tacky-looking, and sleeker, more streamlined designs came to be considered more modern in comparison.
The general populace, meanwhile, doesn’t have as much of a sense that something looks tacky or old, compared to the people in the field working on designing the new.
For modern popular architecture, go to Disneyland or Animal Kingdom or Epcot. They are inspired and inspiring spaces.
I think the split between art and culture theory is right. What replaced ornate architecture? Why, Disney World, of course.
I don’t think we should necessarily assume that new art and architecture can’t be ornate in new and innovative ways. It wouldn’t at all surprise me if we see a move in that direction, since it seems like we may have recently passed peak minimalist.
I wonder how much of this is survival bias? Do people like classic art/music/architecture because only the best examples are still around? Will people like contemporary styles once the mediocre examples have been filtered out by the passage of time?
I would say no. I live in the periphery of Europe where we have many mediocre examples of 17th and 18th century buildings (it's not that the only ones left are the best examples), and I like them much more than the modern buildings we have. Of course, our modern architecture is also mediocre I suppose, but then they should look equally bad. I like even the early 20th century factory worker's cheap housing districts more than the modern housing districts for the cosy middle class. I know it's because I haven't learned architecture and have undeveloped taste.
While there have already been many plausible and complementary explanations, including economic drivers with respect to architecture, Stephen Hicks' article on "Why Art Became Ugly" is a useful thesis regarding the aggressive ugliness of modern art,
"The big break with the past occurred toward the end of the nineteenth
century. Until the end of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness,
meaning, and passion. Its goals were the significant, originality, beauty, the sublime.
The artist was a skilled master of his craft. Such masters were able to create original
representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining vision and
skill, artists were exalted beings capable of creating objects that in turn had an
awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who
experience them.
The break with that tradition came when the first modernists of the late 1800s
set themselves systematically to the project of isolating all the elements of art and
eliminating them or flying in the face of them. . . .
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual
world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded,
exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity,
optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared.
The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for
beauty. So the question became: What is the truth of art?
The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand that we
recognize the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying,
horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible."
Read on to be reminded of the stunningly aggressive ugliness and offensiveness of modern art.
https://philpapers.org/archive/HICWAB.pdf
I feel like all the commenters blaming egalitarianism and Soviet influence for ugly buildings have never visited the Moscow metro. (Arbatskaya being the usual poster child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbatskaya_(Arbatsko%E2%80%93Pokrovskaya_line)#/media/File:Metro_MSK_Line3_Arbatskaya_(img1).jpg ).
Whether to reject pre-revolutionary aesthetics or to democratise them was a very real and explicit debate in the post-war Soviet Union. Though as long as resources are scarce, any earnest central planner may be forgiven for building two tenements instead of a single gilded tenement with chandeliers.
I don't know if this makes any sense, but I was recently in Amsterdam and I visited the city palace museum and I was struck by how high context all the ornate-ness is. So each wall had a sculpture/motif/other artwork and it was meant to tell a story of sorts. The audio guide was helpful in explaining the story, and without it, I'm not sure I would have gotten when I looked at it. Many of the stories centered on the republican dutch narrative, which makes sense given the place. https://www.google.com/search?q=amsterdam+city+palace&sxsrf=AOaemvKerUO080ku851sMUJV6N7JJUvhHA:1632493482880&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiXqJSR6JfzAhXBtp4KHT5aD7EQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1440&bih=677&dpr=2#imgrc=W4_JQAGb29FJhM
By contrast most of the modern buildings are low context, the modernist form may be a bit blah but at the end of the day it looks nice-ish and doesnt take much to understand. For example, here is a picture of my federal office: https://www.google.com/search?q=coast+guard+headquarters&sxsrf=AOaemvJPyBqH-8ypnU114Liby3iBSzsbFQ:1632492194924&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjjx4Gr45fzAhVMip4KHeqeA7EQ_AUoA3oECAEQBQ&biw=1440&bih=677&dpr=2
The only context necessary is multiple levels and lots of green.
There are still a couple places that are building intricate buildings but they are mostly religious: Hindu Temples in India, Buddhist temples in Thailand, Islamic buildings in the middle east. Here are some hindu examples: Akshardham temple in New Delhi https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/02/akshardham-temple.html.
the Sheikh Zaid Grand Mosque in abu dhabi, hassan ii mosque in morroco were built in the 1990s/2000s.
These temples/mosques strike me as high context. As the world gets more diverse/globalized high context becomes a problem because it makes it harder to relate. It is easier to all speak english and wear a suit because it reduces transaction costs. Public buildings all the more need to be low context so that they don't create problems. Religious buildings by contrast can and should be high context because their whole point is the context: religion. The decline in religious buildings being high context are probably a sign of secularism as much as they are protestantism.
I do think labor costs are related here, the higher context, the higher amount of time it takes to be read someone in. If labor costs increase it becomes too expensive to read them in so to speak.
A non-labor story of this is just the explosion in information. So I just looked at that picture of the Amsterdam city palace again and it is littered with greek motifs that the audience is expected to know. I think this can be thought of as what did an educated person in 1760 read? well they all basically read the same things. What does an educated person today read? well they each read something different. So you need lower context for that reason. Given information is increasing exponentially now doesn't it make sense to have lower context? https://www.google.com/search?q=increase+in+information&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi6w86T6JfzAhURc60KHQQ4AxwQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=increase+in+information&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoHCCMQ7wMQJzoECAAQQzoECAAQAzoFCAAQgAQ6CwgAEIAEELEDEIMBOggIABCABBCxAzoHCAAQsQMQQzoKCCMQ7wMQ6gIQJzoGCAAQBRAeOgYIABAIEB46BAgAEBhQ2s0RWKLsEWCp7hFoA3AAeACAAb8BiAHSE5IBBDIxLjWYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ7ABCsABAQ&sclient=img&ei=sN9NYbqrAZHmtQWE8IzgAQ&bih=677&biw=1440#imgrc=1mnduPR7Hb_jFM
A tour guide at a cathedral I visited said that the intricate sculptures and paintings were a way of teaching the Bible and local history to a non-literate population.
ya that is a big part of how i am thinking about it. If everyone is literate why not just point to the books instead of pointing to the statues/pictures/architecture?
This is an interesting theory, although it is completely at odds with the "modernist architecture is about signalling how sophisticated and educated you are" theory.
I don't yet have an opinion on either the frequently mentioned signalling theory or on Stephen Jonesyoung's theory. (Both assume some psychological insight into architectural elites which I don't possess.)
However, I disagree that they are necessarily complete at odds. Speculatively: abandoning some of the tangible components of one's own cultural tradition might have two simultaneous motivations. One would be a display of sophistication (i.e. signalling). The other would be a practical approach to the increasing frequency and intensity of interactions with cultural outsiders (i.e. lowering transaction costs to increase the benefits of globalization). Can't they go together, or am I missing something?
Time flies, but I somehow remembered this old EconLog post on this subject. Their view is that this is definitely a species of status signaling:
<i>I’m currently reading a truly interesting book, which some of EconLog’s readers may be already familiar with: “The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939” by John Carey. Carey argues, in his own words, “that modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century education reform.” He thus describes How intellectuals endeavoured to develop an increasingly less intelligible sort of artistic production, to distinguish and separate themselves from “the masses.”</i>
I like this part:
<i>One of the ways in which “common men” are depicted in “uncommon books,” Carey points out, is as partakers of bad food. Simple and “industrialized” food habits speak badly of those who hold them. In particular, a customary enemy of the high culture intellectual happens to be tinned food.
...
We saw E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast eats tinned food, a practice that is meant to tell us something significant about Leonard, and not to his advantage. The Norwegian Knut Hamsun waged intermittent war in his novels against tinned food, false teeth and other modern nonsense. T.S. Eliot’s typist in “The Waste Land” ‘lays out food in tins’ (…) Tinned salmon is repeatedly a feature of lower-class cuisine in Graham Greene.</i>
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/08/food_snobbery_a.html
"But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling."
This was very much my experience in liberal arts academia. So much time was spent on internal conflicts that I often felt conversations had fallen into the Pit of Self-Reference and were no longer meaningful to anyone outside the specific discipline. I found myself being flung out of these circular arguments into "just do some damn empirical research" conclusions a lot.
I feel like "garishness" is a big factor in all of this. The Taj Mahal looks cool. But if every building in your city looks as bright and complex as the Taj Mahal, then it's a bit over the top. Now that it's no longer expensive to produce bright/colourful/complex art/architecture/clothing etc because of industrialisation, we can't all go out and make it that way because it would look super garish and loud and a lot of people would hate that. What looks great for one building doesn't look so great for an entire city.
Now, the ideal would be to have a bit of both. Mostly modern architecture, but with a few "special" buildings thrown in with a classical style. But who wants to be that one building that goes against the grain? Far easier to just play it safe.
Philip Glass is an interesting (counter-?)example, since he was scorned by the classical music establishment for most of his career precisely because is music is too broadly appealing. To start, he formed his own small band of players to play his music, was then gradually accepted by experimental theater, modern dance, mid-career pop singers, corporate record labels, late night comedy shows, avant-garde filmmakers, mainstream filmmakers, and only recently, decades after he started, has he been regularly getting performances and commissions from the major orchestras and soloists that are arbiters of taste in the classical music world.
And there's still a lot of Philip Glass resistance, too, especially in the music conservatory world. I know of at least one composer who was literally inspired to become a composer because they heard Philip Glass' music as a child, and yet they don't write music anything like Philip Glass', probably at least partly because doing so would make it harder to get teaching jobs and convince classical musicians play their music, probably also because they were steered in a different direction by their teachers.
I guess Glass is an example of how someone who appeals to commoners can wrest grudging acceptance from the elites through sheer persistence and stubbornness. Are there any examples of this in other fine arts fields? I'd be curious to hear from people familiar with other areas.
Another interesting thing about Glass in the context of this discussion is that while his music appeals more broadly than most other contemporary classical music, it also conspicuously lacks the intricacy and ornateness of the old masters.
A favorite story - the guy who got in a cab in NYC, saw the name tag of the driver and says "Hay you have the same name as the famous composer Philip Glass".
Glass was part of a movement reacting against the "crazy, creepy music" of the serialists. For more on the history of the "downtown music" reaction against high-status "uptown music" (academic, Columbia) and its distance from bourgeois "midtown music" (conservatory, Juilliard), see Kyle Gann's music reviews for the Village Voice, gathered in the book "Music Downtown". Amusingly, Kyle Gann now has a teaching gig at Barnard, so downtown has invaded uptown. Kyle Gann is an old white dude, though, so not long for the world.
I'll check out the Gann book, thanks for the rec!
A couple of specific thoughts.
One: When ornament can be mass-produced, it loses its purpose as a signifier of wealth or specialness. This is partly addressed in your comments on signaling wealth to taste, but I'd go a bit further to the specific observations made about people like Donald Trump, who still choose a highly ornamented design aesthetic. Most people don't view it as a status symbol, but rather an anti-status symbol; "he's rich, but has no taste" is a common opinion.
Traditionally opulent design now reads as gauche to many people - this is probably due to a mix of changing tastes, some really questionable design trends in the 80s and 90s, and the availability of mass media to tell us in detail how generally shitty some wealthy people are. With no mystique and no specialness other than that provided by wealth, it all seems like excess in the name of nothing.
Two: I'm curious what you think about the specifics of the art economy at the time that much of these classic works were done - for example, a lot of great Italian classical art and architecture exists explicitly because of the Medicis. This is a scenario in which wealthy patrons and the government are actually the same, which allows public works to be an explicit expression of wealth. There are comparably fewer situations today, I think?
One modern example is the J. Irwin Miller (and family) effect on Columbus, Indiana. A wealthy patron of specifically public goods; a library, city hall, etc. The modernism on display there is pioneering work for multiple artists and leads the way for a lot of derivative work. Is it possible that we're "stuck" in modernism/postmodernism because we need more wealthy patrons of public works to invest in daring design?
„ If you were going to write this today, why wouldn't you meet up with a garage band somewhere and put it to music?“
Let me present: Thärichens Tentett and „We’ll go no more a-roving“ https://youtu.be/pM3KiicQl4U
I'll stick with the Richard Dyer-Bennet version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJqigdfR0e0