Out of my curiosity and need for clarification, I’ve been considering the concept of aesthetics. The Western world, namely the generation of millennials more rooted in technology than any prior generation, have been salivating over the word “aesthetic.” Recently, embedding it into social interactions and plastering it within captions.
I am guilty of this, but I am also eager to deeply understand the concept of an aesthetic. Along with so many other words in our language, we use without clear reference of what it is we are saying, aesthetic has become a foggy word used in conversation. Or maybe the concept of aesthetics is just as subjective as what we call art?
“Why do you like this?”
“Oh, it’s just really in line with my aesthetic.”
Leave it to mainstream culture to beat a word into a space of vagueness and ambiguity. On my search for how to define aesthetics, I uncovered a book by an author whose books I had read previously.
Leonard Koren, renowned artist and architect, decompresses this rangy concept in his book Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions. As seen in the quote, “aesthetics, in its totality of meanings, is about where your mind goes—analytically, conceptually, imaginatively—when you engage with things designed, artistic, and the like.”
While it is trendy today, less than 300 years old, “aesthetics” was derived from the Greek word meaning perceptual or sensory knowledge called: aesthesis. The first recorded use of “aesthetics” was in 1735 by a 21-year-old German philosopher named Alexander Baumgarten. Baumgarten proposed the concept of aesthetics in an unfinished book which investigated feelings and senses enveloped in the essence of poetry in achieving the end goal—perfection and or beauty.
Contemporary and natural forms of aesthetic exist as appearance, style, taste, philosophy of art, thesis or exegesis, a synonym for artistic and beauty, beautification, cognitive mode and language. A more concrete definition of aesthetic is seen here:
“a philosophical discipline, concerned mainly with art and beauty…”
How something looks, feels or sounds on a superficial level or an arrangement of qualities denotes aesthetic. Likewise, an aesthetic can be seen to serve as an indicator of taste: what is perceived as “good” or “superior” taste. Likely, the friends we spend most of our time with seem to have this same recognition and taste in identifying certain stylistic features of things.
Maybe it’s why we wear the clothes we wear, how we curate our Instagram feed with certain tones and placement of pictures, why we listen to certain artists or feel strongly for a piece of art in a gallery. Over time, we become aware of what we gravitate towards. We become receptive to an overall tone or feeling of something that aligns with our aesthetic or we can become focused on a very particular stylistic characteristic.
To make sense of the world, conceptual properties come into existence as aesthetics in an act of “cultural moment marking.” For example, consider Western culture. We idealize perfection, grandeur and productivity. In contrast, Eastern ideals (notably in Japanese culture), will place importance in the beauty of imperfection, lean, stripped and natural— existing at the edge of nothingness. We see aesthetics become grounded in something more spiritual, psychological and moral as opposed to dwelling solely on the surface.
In my discovery, there are many subjective ways to define aesthetics, and as such I’m not satisfied to end the conversation there. Now I’m seeing why Baumgarten’s book was unfinished; as with the ongoing discussion of what can be considered art, there should be a tandem conversation of how we define and use aesthetics in everyday life. We need to be conscious of what we respond to, what characteristics are pleasing to us, and probe further in conversation next time someone says something fits their aesthetic.