Conversations around aestheticism often diverge into two different perspectives. On the one hand, you have consumer capitalism running rampant, where achieving an “aesthetic” lies in a perfectly curated Pinterest board and whether or not you can afford the increasingly fast turnover rate of whatever weekly trend is popping up on Instagram and TikTok feeds.
On the other hand, people who oppose this lifestyle are often quick to denounce the superficiality of consumerism. Touting opinions on the fleeting joy that comes with buying objects and expressing oneself through fashion, these people often act holier-than-thou for refusing to partake in such shallow interests. What gets lost here is that aesthetics goes beyond purchasing power. It is not something that can be bought—it’s a way of life. Or, rather, it’s a way of seeing the world more carefully.
In his essay, “The Concept of Experience,” writer and cultural critic Mark Grief explores how people search for meaning in life, and how this search is often wrongly guided by whatever current societal values influence how we come to perceive and enjoy our own lives. Grief asks the reader to consider aestheticism more deeply, beyond the simplistic and lofty associations we often attach to it.
Grief writes that art makes you “feel or taste everything; you lust for it, let it overwhelm you, amplify it to titillate or satisfy or disgust you; you mentally twist the canvas to wring it dry…The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just that same way.”
Aestheticism means that you learn to see the rest of the world like how you see the beauty in a canvas. “Let anyone’s ordinary face fascinate you as if it were a bust of Caesar,” Grief writes. “Let the lights of a city draw your eyes like Egyptian gold or the crown jewels; let a cigarette case you find on the road evoke the whole life of its imagined owner.”
In this sense, the importance of aestheticism does not lie in whether you can afford a silk, sustainable $200 dress from Reformation, nor does it lie in a $200 Shein haul. It is simply priceless.
In a system driven by consumer greed—one that I, admittedly, contribute to—aesthetics is often conflated with what you buy and what you externally look like. Less often do we think about how art and music inform how we see and experience the world and how we make meaning out of these experiences.
My favourite artist, Mary Pratt, paints common household items in rich and vibrant colours. Her work plays with how the light in a room hits a jar of jam or bounces off of the saran wrap holding a dead fish. Pratt’s art permanently changed how I saw food and pantry items in my own kitchen. The ordinary became the extraordinary, the typical became magical.
In her essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Audrey Lorde writes about using our bodies as creative forces. She states that the power of the erotic is connected: “in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.”
Both Grief and Lorde write about the senses as something that makes life meaningful. The ability to dance, to hear music, to feel and to see beauty all around, is a special experience we take for granted every day.
Consumerism and the incessant purchasing of products in search of the “holy grail” is, in my opinion, our generation’s way of coping to fill a void in our lives. This doesn’t mean we should stop looking at fashion as a form of self-expression. Rather, it means that our decisions as consumers should be informed, not by the anxiety of the trend cycle, but by what we truly find to be beautiful and interesting. This would hopefully lead to more thoughtful, and ideally, less consumption.
But, more importantly, true aesthetic satisfaction cannot be bought at all.