On Creating Things Aesthetic - Tapa blanda

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Leonard Koren, who trained as an artist and architect, was a founding member of The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective. In 1976 he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics. Koren has subsequently written numerous books about art, design, and aesthetics. among them are Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (the classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete), What Artists Do, and Musings of a Curious Aesthete.

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Postscript:

In the so-called practical domains such as commerce, applied science and plumbing, dramatic progress seems to occur over relatively short timespans. Look at our human ability to perform mathematical computations. We have leapt from the abacus to the super computer in less than two centuries. In the field of transportation technology we have gone from the horse and buggy to rocket-powered space travel in less than half that time. Progress in the aesthetic domains, however, is of an entirely different order. Not so many decades back Pablo Picasso painted images of bulls that looked very much like the bison painted on the walls of the Altamira caves in Spain over ten-thousand years ago. Picasso’s bulls were lauded, but how innovative were they really? Another example: The Pantheon, an almost two-thousand-year-old building standing in the middle of present-day Rome. Do today’s architects really create public spaces with qualities of light and euphoria-inducing grandeur in a manner surpassing that of the Pantheon’s? And what about Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, both created three millennia ago. [NOTE 8] Why are the insights into the human psyche that these stories illuminate still constantly replayed in today’s literature and cinema? Imagine, however, traveling from Boston to Seattle in a horse and buggy. Or calculating the effects of climate change on the fauna and flora of Central Park with an abacus. Such antiquated technologies have little place in our lives today. Yet countless aesthetic creations of the distant and far distant past are seamlessly woven into the fabric of our contemporary realities. How, or why, is this so? What if things aesthetic key deeply into our psychological make-up—which hasn’t changed very much, if at all, through the ages? In other words, what if the primordial world of the Altamira cave painters, the place-making paradigms used by the Ancient Roman architects, and the emotional dramas of Homer’s heroes still rattle around in our subconscious? Or, what if we’re simply herd animals that aesthetically express ourselves in a limited number of ways that happen to have remained fairly constant throughout our specie’s existence? New aesthetic ideals arise. And when they do they seem hugely momentous. Yet when these aesthetic leaps are viewed from a temporal distance, that is, from a significant historical remove, the output of any group of creators working at any specific time seems uncannily similar. . . . What if the truth is that everyone in the herd—including us creators of things aesthetic—simply wants to be like everyone else, just a little different (and perhaps a bit better)? But what if residing in these “little differences” and “bit betters” is really all that we humans truly need, value or desire?