I still feel some desire to finish up my “first pass ‘help me organize my thoughts’ review”. I went through the post, organizing various claims and concepts. I came away with the main takeaway “Wowzers there is so much going on in this post. I think this could have been broken up into a full sequence, each post of which was saying something pretty important.”
There seem to be four major claims/themes here:
Aesthetics matter, being style-blind or style-rejecting puts you at a disadvantage
It particularly is disadvantageous to cede “the entire concept of aesthetics” to your political opponents.
Aesthetics impact your beliefs, in ways that are sneaky and it’d be good to be able to look at carefully
There’s some tension between creators and expanders. “Scaling up” an aesthetic is a new thing (only a few centuries old) and we haven’t yet figured out a way to do that that creators tend to be happy with.
I basically agree with each claim, although each of them depends on some vague assumptions that are hard to check empirically.
...
Meanwhile, here’s my overall summary of this post’s claims:
Overview of Aesthetics and Style Blindness
Aesthetics (such as use of color) don’t necessarily intrinsically mean anything, but they often do mean something in a particular cultural context.
“Subcultural sublimation” – Our physical environment is built by corporations that employ designers, who in turn take inspiration from creative subcultures.
Tastemakers are a small proportion of the population, but have a disproportionate impact on what our visual world ends up looking like.
Commercial design ultimately borrows from creatives who are politically opposed to business and resent this commercial appropriation.
There exists a spectrum from ‘style-blind’ to ‘style-sensitive’ to ‘style-experts’.
Politics and Style
Artists tend to be on the political left; arts and media occupations are among the most heavily weighted towards Democrats over Republicans.
[Is this true (in America?). If so, is it true in other countries?]
Abandoning “aesthetics as a whole” to your political opponents is probably a bad strategy (particularly relevant to libertarians)
Aesthetics relates to intellectual pursuits, like seeing ideas as cringy. Being able to tell why you see ideas as cringy is important.
There are some common defensive postures people take:
Reaction – become anti-aesthetic, be seen as tacky
Claim to be aloof from politics
Cooptation – Claim that you are the one actually embodying the ideal your political opponents are striving for (and then borrow the existing aesthetics)
You can also stake out new aesthetic territory (see: Ayn Rand)
Why are things beautiful or ugly? Can we doublecrux on aesthetics?
Arts and Imitation
Artistic trends have a life cycle, of creation, expansion, and destruction, or more specifically, the artist, the marketer, and the critic.
this isn’t limited to art
Commerce and Invention are ancient, but scaling up is new, and gives disproportionate power to “expanders” who can take an aesthetic innovation, and capture most of the value of it.
This results in creators feeling defrauded by expanders
Expanders present themselves as creators, but are not.
Scaling up is probably net-good – it lets more people have nicer things – but there is some necessary project in the vicinity of “making amends between creators and expanders” that would be required for creative work not to have the dynamic where scaling up is seen as selling out.
I still feel some desire to finish up my “first pass ‘help me organize my thoughts’ review”. I went through the post, organizing various claims and concepts. I came away with the main takeaway “Wowzers there is so much going on in this post. I think this could have been broken up into a full sequence, each post of which was saying something pretty important.”
There seem to be four major claims/themes here:
Aesthetics matter, being style-blind or style-rejecting puts you at a disadvantage
It particularly is disadvantageous to cede “the entire concept of aesthetics” to your political opponents.
Aesthetics impact your beliefs, in ways that are sneaky and it’d be good to be able to look at carefully
There’s some tension between creators and expanders. “Scaling up” an aesthetic is a new thing (only a few centuries old) and we haven’t yet figured out a way to do that that creators tend to be happy with.
I basically agree with each claim, although each of them depends on some vague assumptions that are hard to check empirically.
...
Meanwhile, here’s my overall summary of this post’s claims:
Overview of Aesthetics and Style Blindness
Aesthetics (such as use of color) don’t necessarily intrinsically mean anything, but they often do mean something in a particular cultural context.
“Subcultural sublimation” – Our physical environment is built by corporations that employ designers, who in turn take inspiration from creative subcultures.
Tastemakers are a small proportion of the population, but have a disproportionate impact on what our visual world ends up looking like.
Commercial design ultimately borrows from creatives who are politically opposed to business and resent this commercial appropriation.
There exists a spectrum from ‘style-blind’ to ‘style-sensitive’ to ‘style-experts’.
Politics and Style
Artists tend to be on the political left; arts and media occupations are among the most heavily weighted towards Democrats over Republicans.
[Is this true (in America?). If so, is it true in other countries?]
Abandoning “aesthetics as a whole” to your political opponents is probably a bad strategy (particularly relevant to libertarians)
Aesthetics relates to intellectual pursuits, like seeing ideas as cringy. Being able to tell why you see ideas as cringy is important.
There are some common defensive postures people take:
Reaction – become anti-aesthetic, be seen as tacky
Claim to be aloof from politics
Cooptation – Claim that you are the one actually embodying the ideal your political opponents are striving for (and then borrow the existing aesthetics)
You can also stake out new aesthetic territory (see: Ayn Rand)
Why are things beautiful or ugly? Can we doublecrux on aesthetics?
Arts and Imitation
Artistic trends have a life cycle, of creation, expansion, and destruction, or more specifically, the artist, the marketer, and the critic.
this isn’t limited to art
Commerce and Invention are ancient, but scaling up is new, and gives disproportionate power to “expanders” who can take an aesthetic innovation, and capture most of the value of it.
This results in creators feeling defrauded by expanders
Expanders present themselves as creators, but are not.
Scaling up is probably net-good – it lets more people have nicer things – but there is some necessary project in the vicinity of “making amends between creators and expanders” that would be required for creative work not to have the dynamic where scaling up is seen as selling out.