One THE AESTHETIC IMPERATIVE - The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel - problemidabbondanza ilsecolodellabellezzadiffusa trionfodeisensi riflessioneedespressione emozionefunzione piùsensibilichemai vendereunesperienza saltanolegerarchie artearredamento bellisidiventa medicooestetista? biologiadelpiacereestetico universalidellabellezza lavarietàlatrionferà
“Aesthetics, or styling, has become an accepted unique selling point—on a global basis,” explains the head of the division’s global aesthetics program. Functionality still matters, of course. But competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many manufacturers can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance, as traditionally defined.Read more at location 154
The twenty-first century isn’t what the old movies imagined. We citizens of the future don’t wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get our food in pills. To the contrary, we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world.Read more at location 194
We want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, several different cuisines, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative façades on our supermarkets, auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell. Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes.Read more at location 196
Our sensory side is as valid a part of our nature as the capacity to speak or reason, and it is essential to both.Read more at location 204
This trend doesn’t mean that a particular style has triumphed or that we’re necessarily living in a period of unprecedented creativity. It doesn’t mean everyone or everything is now beautiful, or that people agree on some absolute standard of taste. The issue is not what style is used but rather that style is used, consciously and conscientiously, even in areas where function used to stand alone.Read more at location 208
Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses. It is the art of creating reactions without words, through the look and feel of people, places, and things.Read more at location 217
Aesthetics conjures meaning in a subliminal, associational way, as our direct sensory experience reminds us of something that is absent, a memory or an idea.Read more at location 226
Aesthetic effects begin with universal reactions, but these effects always operate in a personal and cultural context.Read more at location 233
Psychologists tell us that human beings perceive changes in sensory inputs—movement, new visual elements, louder or softer sounds, novel smells—more than sustained levels.Read more at location 237
Theorist Ellen Dissanayake defines art as “making special,” a behavior designed to be “sensorily and emotionally gratifying and more than strictly necessary.”Read more at location 245
“Good Design is not about the perfect thing anymore, but about helping a lot of different people build their own personal identities,”Read more at location 270
Aesthetics offers pleasure, and it signals meaning. It allows personal expression and social communication. It does not provide consensus, coherence, or truth.Read more at location 288
The once-rigid aesthetic hierarchy has broken down. Individuals do not simply imitate their social betters or seek to differentiate themselves from those below them. Personal taste, not an elite imprimatur, is what matters.Read more at location 318
The French interiors magazine Maison Française touts customization as the “reaction to the homogenization of styles and tastes:Read more at location 322
Some of these subcultural styles begin with an ethnic base—Indian mehndi (temporary henna tattoos), African-American hip-hop styles, New England WASP preppy clothing, Chinese feng shui, the vivid colors of Mexico and the Caribbean, the pervasively influential lines of Japanese art and interiors.Read more at location 331
Others indicate value-related, voluntary associations, “differences with depth,” in the words of cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken.Read more at location 333
Value-laden aesthetics, such as punk or goth, spill over into mainstream culture as people outside their subcultures adopt purely aesthetic elements, usually in a less-extreme form.Read more at location 339
Ours is a pluralist age, in which styles coexist to please the individuals who choose them.Read more at location 343
The “return to beauty” classicists confuse today’s aesthetic pluralism, which overthrows modernist ideology, with the banishment of modernist aesthetics. But modernism is not dead.Read more at location 343
the breakdown of modernist ideology means that it’s no longer necessary to hide aesthetic pleasure behind postmodern irony and camp.Read more at location 349
puritanical doctrines of Adolf Loos—“one crabby Modernist”—whose influential 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” proclaimed decoration degenerate, the amoral indulgence of children and barbarians.Read more at location 354
Apple’s iMac turns the personal computer from a utilitarian, putty-colored box into curvy, translucent eye candy—blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape.Read more at location 359
Few Target customers have heard of Graves, but his playful toaster quickly becomes the chain’s most popular, and most expensive, model.Read more at location 362
PayPal, the online payments service, entices customers with see-through Visa cards in five different colors.Read more at location 368
Design schools are so full of students they can hardly find faculty to staff the courses.Read more at location 371
Business Week was wrong to declare the 1990s the age of design. “The nineties were clearly the age of distribution, and Wal-Mart coming to the fore,” he says. High-style products like the iMac and Beetle didn’t appear until the very end of the decade. “I see 2000 to 2010 as the decade of design.”Read more at location 375
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens an exhibit of sneakers. Guitars are art in Boston; motorcycles are art in New York. Museums in Miami and La Jolla display household objects, from chairs to salad bowls. To the consternation of critics, an exhibit of Armani couture draws swarms of visitors to the Guggenheim in New York.Read more at location 378
The hip-hop movement has nothing to do with rebellion…. As central as fashion is to life here, all it really says is that the person wearing it loves fashion.”Read more at location 395
Contrary to Time, it’s misleading to call the trend “design.” Designers worry as much about function as about form, and they stubbornly resist being treated as mere “stylists.”Read more at location 417
Busy professional couples hire chefs to come in and make dinner, providing not only good food but the textures and smells of home cooking.Read more at location 428
consider the change observed by Pierluigi Zappacosta, a founder of Logitech, the computer peripherals company best known for its mice. Zappacosta has his own place in design history; by hiring Hartmut Esslinger’s design firm, frog, to create Logitech’s product and packaging designs, he injected a playful, distinctive style into the dull world of computer peripherals.Read more at location 430
a better indicator of our aesthetic age than the splashily designed objects on store shelves is the evolution of the environments that surround them, and us.Read more at location 449
With its carefully conceived mix of colors and textures, aromas and music, Starbucks is more indicative of our era than the iMac. It is to the age of aesthetics what McDonald’s was to the age of convenience or Ford was to the age of mass production—theRead more at location 453
Curmudgeons may grouse about the price of its coffee, but Starbucks isn’t just selling beverages. It’s delivering a multisensory aesthetic experience,Read more at location 456
“Every Starbucks store is carefully designed to enhance the quality of everything the customers see, touch, hear, smell, or taste,” writes CEO Howard Schultz.Read more at location 460
Designer bathrooms have become de rigueur in upscale restaurants. Once windowless boxes, new self-storage centers look like antebellum plantation homes or luxury hotels.Read more at location 466
Muzak has dumped its infamous elevator music in favor of recordings by original artists, with programs crafted to produce just the right atmosphere for a customer’s environment.Read more at location 468
Trade show booths today emulate theme parks and World’s Fairs, striving to be “immersive environments” rather than mere product displays.Read more at location 469
People have always decorated their homes. But the aesthetic quality and variety of home interiors have increased dramatically.Read more at location 472
In the early 1990s, when Pottery Barn launched its interiors-oriented catalog, American home owners could not buy a wrought-iron curtain rod without hiring an interior designer.Read more at location 474
Home-improvement shows are booming on television, offering not just do-it-yourself handyman advice but designers’ aesthetic expertise. Seventy million U.S. households get Home & Garden Television, “the CNN of its niche,”Read more at location 483
A new art market has developed: upscale wall décor. Artists and art collectors have long mocked the idea that someone might purchase a work to go with a couch—an insult to serious art.Read more at location 495
Many of the featured artists are well-known modern or contemporary names. Eyestorm, which started as a specialized Web site and branched out into stores, offers limited-edition prints by Damien Hirst at $3,000 each, and a photo of Andy Warhol by Dennis Hopper for $500.Read more at location 499
Crate and Barrel sells framed reproductions of Mark Rothko paintings for $499.Read more at location 501
Customers are “buying for aesthetics, not collecting,” says an Eyestorm executive.Read more at location 502
Starwood Hotels & Resorts has adopted a strategy of “winning by design.” Its upscale W chain gets the most attention, but the big news is in the midmarket.Read more at location 505
Airport terminals are remodeling with skylights, panoramic views, art galleys, custom carpeting or terrazzo floors, and high-end shops.Read more at location 510
Shopping malls, once designed to be functional and convenient, with little attention to atmosphere, are turning to aesthetics to try to hold customers who might otherwise prefer drive-up “lifestyle centers.”Read more at location 518
At the Beverly Center, a twenty-year-old mall in Los Angeles, the new central court features a backlit, three-story “shoji screen” with panels in subtle blues and yellows representing the colors of the CaliforniaRead more at location 524
The most dramatic indicators of the new aesthetic age relate not to product design or environments, but to personal appearance—theRead more at location 529
research group writes that employees’ looks are no longer simply an advantage to their personal careers but “a highly marketable asset for employers.” The importance of “aesthetic skills” has grown along with lifestyle-oriented service businesses,Read more at location 531
A British boutique hotel chain, for instance, hires only attractive employees (with good personalities).Read more at location 534
StyleWorks, a New York–based nonprofit group, uses volunteer hairstylists, makeup artists, and image consultants to provide “a fresh new look for a fresh new start” to women moving from welfare to work.Read more at location 538
Good hair, by contrast, is a political asset. Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi’s permed “Lion King” mane boosted his popularity and helped reinforce his image as an iconoclastic reformer.Read more at location 556
While only the genetically blessed can be extraordinary beauties, more and more of us qualify as what historian Arthur Marwick calls “personable”—generally good-looking if we care to be.Read more at location 566
Those judgments extend to areas where personal appearance was once considered irrelevant, even unseemly, to call attention to. Authors on both sides of the Atlantic are starting to notice, and sometimes complain, that their looks are almost as important as their writing.Read more at location 572
Acclaimed young novelist Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, even underwent a publisher-pleasing makeover, changing her hairstyle and getting rid of her glasses.Read more at location 578
the good news is that the same influences have led to a broader definition of attractiveness.Read more at location 582
The number of nail salons in the United States has nearly doubled in a decade, while the number of manicurists has tripled.Read more at location 586
Since the 1980s, we’ve also experienced what cultural critic Jonathan Rauch dubs the “Buff Revolution.” For the first time in centuries, it has become respectable for people in Anglo-American countries to pay attention to men’s bodies.Read more at location 614
For both men and women, the boundary between health and beauty, medicine and cosmetics, is melting away.Read more at location 622
“The dental profession’s traditional domain, centered around the eradication of disease, now finds itself on the threshold of uncharted territory: the enhancement of appearance,”Read more at location 628
what Grant McCracken calls “the long-standing anthropological conviction that material culture makes culture material, i.e., that the expressions of a lifestyle are more than mere reflections of it;Read more at location 640
challenging the twentieth-century dogmas that declared ornamentation inherently decadent, corrupt, or manipulative, and markets inherently exploitive.Read more at location 643
Academic presses publish works on the history and meaning of dress and of dishes. Art museums are beefing up their design and clothes collections, and scholars are analyzing the culture and history of fashion. Books on the evolution of shopping and store environments, pro and con, are increasingly common.Read more at location 649
Many natural and social scientists, meanwhile, are increasingly interested in the nature of aesthetic universals.Read more at location 656
researchers want to understand the biological origins of aesthetic pleasure.Read more at location 657
Their scholarship challenges the received academic wisdom that tastes are as different as languages,Read more at location 657
As a result, aesthetic elements can spread relatively easily from culture to culture.Read more at location 659
Psychologists have found patterns of symmetry and proportion, consistency and surprise, that cross cultures and ages.Read more at location 662
Even infants, they’ve discovered, distinguish between attractive and unattractive faces.Read more at location 662
good-looking people earn more, report economists, and good looks are at least as important economically for men as for women.Read more at location 663
“Musics cross-culturally are very different from one another,” says Denis Dutton, a professor of aesthetics with a particular interest in the relation between biology and art. “But musics depend on sounds, on pitch, on harmonies, on iterations—getting tired of something, being surprised.Read more at location 664
“Our response to beauty is hard-wired—governed by circuits in the brain shaped by natural selection,” writes psychologist Nancy Etcoff. “We love smooth skin, symmetrical bodies, thick shiny hair, a woman’s curved waist and a man’s sculpted pectorals, because in the course of evolution the people who noticed these signals had more reproductive success.Read more at location 670
The prophets who forecast a sterile, uniform future were wrong, because they imagined a society shaped by impersonal laws of history and technology, divorced from individuality, pleasure, and imagination.Read more at location 683
Note: LA VARIETÀ TRIONFA. CONTRO LA PROFEZIA UNIFORME
